LETTER XIV.
THE ARTERIES.
If you have thoroughly understood the story I last told you, my child, it will have revealed to you the whole mystery of the circulation of the blood, and you are at the present moment wiser than all the learned men of antiquity and the middle ages, for they had none of them the faintest surmise of the truth.
It may, perhaps, seem odd to you that men should have existed for upwards of five thousand years without making inquiry into a matter which so closely concerned them, and which was so easy to find out. Is it not almost incredible that so many hearts should have beaten for so long a period without any of their owners having felt a wish to know exactly why? Yet so it is. The action of the heart and the flow of the blood have not been understood for much more than two hundred years, and the man whose name is attached to this great discovery richly deserves that we should say a few words about him.
He was called Harvey. He was an Englishman; physician to King Charles I., who was beheaded in 1648; and when he first ventured publicly to teach that the blood was constantly circulating from one end of the human body to the other, perpetually returning and retracing its steps, a great scandal was created in the world. He was called a fool,—an impertinent innovator,—a madman. His words shattered old doctrines, and he only received for his reward all the petty annoyances which men are apt to lavish so freely upon any one who tells them something new; because—do you see?—it is so disagreeable to be disturbed in one's habits and preconceived ideas.
Harvey is not the only one in the history of mankind who has committed the sin of being right in defiance of the opinions of his age. It is true posterity takes account afterwards of the labors of genius, and inscribes a fresh name upon her list. But one must pay for this glory in one's lifetime. One cannot have everything at once.
This is an old story, my child, but always new nevertheless; and for my own part it is, I own, one of my pleasures to amuse myself by reflecting how much cause for laughter three-fourths of the great men of the present day are providing for the little girls who shall be alive two centuries hence. Time is a great avenger, and puts many things and men in their proper places.
Let us pause here a moment while we are speaking of Harvey. I should be curious to know what any one of the courtiers of Charles I., bedecked in feathers, ribbons and laces, would have said to the valet who would have placed the excellent Harvey, with his insane invention, above his most gracious majesty, the lord and king of all Great Britain! And yet what is his most gracious majesty to you to-day? What do you owe to him? in what does he interest you? While you can never hear the name of Harvey pronounced without remembering that you are under many obligations to him! A thousand years hence, when society shall have made the great progress which may reasonably be expected, the name of Harvey will be familiar to every one who owns a heart, while that of Charles I. will be only a vanished shadow; a souvenir lost in the maze of history.
Our debt of remembrance paid, let us return to the heart—the little closed bag which labors so prettily. We must now inquire the real names of whatever has figured in our story.
The two great compartments are called ventricles, the two small pouches auricles, and they are also distinguished as being on the right or left side;—right ventricle, left ventricle, right auricle, left auricle.
The inner doors on which depends all the action of the machine, are called valvelets. By-and-bye, when the pump and the steam-engine are explained to you, you will meet again with these treacherous doors, which never allow what has once entered to go back again; but then we shall call them valves.
The air-reservoir, I need scarcely tell you, is the lung, to which the blood goes to put itself in contact with the air.
The subterranean watercourse, of which I hope we have talked long enough, is the small intestine, in which the chyle collects; and the tubes which run into it are, of course, the chyliferous vessels, the only channels by which anything reaches the heart which has not previously gone out from it.
The tubes of distribution, which run out from the machine in all directions, are called with us arteries; the return tubes, which bring back the water to the machine, are called veins.
Finally, we have not exactly the filters employed to clear the water from the impurities contracted as it goes along, for no such thing exists in us. There are in our case the refuse-chambers of which I have already spoken, in connexion with the liver, where the blood disembarrasses itself of any useless materials, and from which it comes out with clean pockets, so to speak, reverting to the comparison of which we have already availed ourselves.
As you see, then, everything comes round again; and the bright idea which our professors hit upon in order to satisfy the caprice of the banker is exactly carried out in your own body, only a thousand times more perfectly than could have been done by them all, even with all their science added to all his money.
I mentioned that the shrewdest of the party boasted about making an artificial heart. But, let me tell you, there is one thing I would have defied him to imitate, by any expedient he could devise, and that is the inimitable construction of the arteries and veins, and the incomprehensible delicacy of their innumerable ramifications.
Let us talk a little about these marvellous tubes, and begin with the arteries, which have the most important part to play.
Did you ever see a doctor try the pulse of his patient? Take hold of your own wrist and search a little above the thumb. You will soon find the place and feel something beating against your finger. There is an artery which passes there, and the little beating you feel is the rebound of the pulsations, of your heart. Every time that the left ventricle, by contracting itself, chases the blood into the arteries, these, of which the tissue is very elastic, become distended all at once, and then contract again, repeating the process whenever a fresh gush of blood arrives, so that their movement is exactly regulated by the movement of the heart. It is true the two movements are in a contrary direction; that is to say, the artery becomes distended, while the heart contracts, and contracts when the heart enlarges itself; but that makes no difference to the doctor. What he wants to know is, with what force and rapidity the heart of the patient beats, and I will explain why. It is an interesting point in the history of circulation.
When you were very little—very little indeed, my dear child—your heart beat from 130 to 140 times in a minute. Afterwards the beats sank to 100 per minute; then to fewer still. At present I cannot tell you the precise number: perhaps, about ninety. When you are a grown-up young lady, it will beat about eighty times in the minute; when you are a mother, about seventy-three times; when a grandmother (if such a blessing be granted you), only from fifty to sixty times, perhaps even fewer. People tell of an old man of eighty-four whose heart beat only twenty-nine times in the sixty seconds.
Observe that in all my calculations I have taken special care to prefix the word about to the numbers mentioned. And this because, in point of fact, the heart is a capricious creature, which has no exact rules to go by. It changes its pace on every occasion—fear, joy, every emotion which agitates the soul, quickens or retards its movements; and derangements of health may be detected by its pulsations, which are infinitely varied in character. In fever, for instance, which is nothing but a race of the blood at full speed, the hearts of grown-up people beat as quickly as those of little children; sometimes, indeed, more quickly still. In certain maladies it goes with great sudden leaps, like a galloping horse; in others it trots in little jerks; while in some cases it moves slowly and wearily, and its throbs are so weak that one can scarcely feel them.
These pulsations, then, afford important revelations to the doctor. The heart is for him a gossiping confidant, who lets out the secrets of illnesses, however closely they may fancy themselves hidden in the remote depths of the body. When the doctor lays his finger on the patient's pulse, it is precisely the same thing to him as if he had laid it on his heart, only with this difference, that the one is much less difficult to do, and much sooner done than the other.
The artery of the wrist is in fact a small heart, not only because it follows all the movements of the large one, but because it carries forward the work which the other begins, and assists also in propelling the blood to the furthest extremities of the limbs, driving it on in its turn at each of its own contractions. Imagine a fire-engine, whose pipes should take up and drive forwards along their whole length the water which is thrown upon the fire, and you will have some idea of the marvellous machine which is at work in our behalf within us. Nor are you to suppose that the wrist-artery is a specially privileged one, because it has been chosen to hold intercourse with physicians. All the others are equally serviceable; and if they cannot all be used for "feeling the pulse," it is because they are generally more deeply buried in the flesh, where it is not easy to reach them.
Observe your mother when she is packing a trunk, and you will see that whatever she is most afraid maybe spoiled, she is most careful to put in the middle, so that it may be least exposed to accidents. And this is what a kind Providence has done with the arteries, which have the utmost cause to dread accidents; whilst the veins, which are much better able to bear rough usage, are allowed to wander about freely just under the skin. But when the bones happen to take up a great deal of room, and come near the skin themselves, as is the case in the wrist, the artery is forced, whether he likes it or not, to venture to the surface, and then we are able to put our fingers upon him.
And there are others in the same sort of situation; the artery of the foot for instance. But only just think how far from agreeable it would be to have to take off your shoe and present your foot to the doctor!
The artery which passes to the temple, just by the ear, is another affair. That would answer the purpose very well in fact, and I even advise you to make use of it when you want to feel your own pulse. It is more easily found than the other even, and its pulsations are still more easily perceptible. Nevertheless, when all is said and done, it is better for the doctor to take his patient by the hand than by the head. Merely as a matter of good manners.
I will now make you acquainted with the principal arteries, and the manner in which they distribute the blood through the body.
The whole of the blood driven out by the left ventricle at each of its contractions, passes into one large canal called the aorta. The aorta as it goes away at first ascends; then bends back in a curve; and from this curve, which is called the arch of the aorta (from its shape) diverge right and left, certain branch-pipes which carry the blood into the two arms and on each side of the head; and which are, in fact, the beginning, or upper end, of those whose pulsations we feel with our fingers in the two wrists and at the temples.
The supply to the upper part of the body being secured, the aorta begins to descend. But now imagine of what importance it must be, that this head-artery—the foster-father of the whole body—should be sheltered from every accident. The aorta once divided, death is inevitable; you might as well have your head cut off at once; and thus it has been fixed in the best—that is to say, the safest—place. Of course you know what is meant by the backbone or spine, called also the vertebral column, in consequence of its being made like a sort of column composed of a series of small bones fastened together, which are named vertebræ. Touch it and feel how solid it is, and how few dangers there can be for anything placed behind it. Well, that is the rampart which has been given to the Aorta. As this descends, it slips behind the heart and takes up its place in front of the vertebral column which it follows all the way down the back, just to the top of the loins. There it is, so to speak, almost unassailable; in fact hardly any cases are known of the Aorta being wounded; to get at it, it would be necessary to bestow one of those blows which used to be given in the time of the Crusades, which cut the body in two. There was an end of the Aorta, as of every thing else then; it was unfortunately not worth talking about any longer!
The next time you see a fish on the table, ask to be shown the large central bone. It is the fish's vertebral column, and it will give you an idea of your own, for it is constructed on the same plan. You will perceive a blackish thread running all along it—that is the aorta.
As it descends, the aorta sends off on its passage a great number of arteries which carry the blood into all parts of the body. Arrived at the loins it forms a fork; dividing into two great branches, which continue their descent, one on each side the body, down to the very extremities of the two feet.
As you perceive, dear child, this is not very difficult to remember. A large fork, whose two points are at the tips of the feet, the handle of which curves at the top like the crook of a crozier; from this curve come four branches, which pass into the two arms and to the two sides of the head—and this is the whole story. But of course, it would be another affair were I to enter into the detail of all the ramifications. Here it is that all engineers, past, present, and future, are baffled, defeated and outdone! Choose any place you please upon your body, and run the finest needle you can find into it what will issue from the puncture?
"Thanks for the proposal," you say; "I have no occasion to try the experiment, to discover that blood will come out."
You say that very readily, young lady; but have you ever asked yourself, what is implied by your being so sure before hand that you can bring blood from any part of your body if you choose to prick it, though never so slightly? It implies that there is not on your whole frame a spot the size of a needle's point, which has not its own little canal filled with blood; for if there were such a one, there at any rate the needle would pass in without tearing the canal, and causing the blood to flow out. And now count the number of places from the top to the bottom of your dear little self, on which one could put the point of a needle, and even when you have counted them all, do not fancy you have arrived at the number of the tiny tubes of blood. Compared to these, your needle is a coarse stake, and tears not one but a thousand of these little tubes in its passage.
That seems to you rather a strong expression, does it not? But let me make good my boldness. A needle's point is very fine, I admit; but a person who could not see it without spectacles must have very poor sight. Whereas the last subdivisions of the blood-tubes are so attenuated, that the best eyes in the world, your own included, cannot distinguish them. You are astonished at this, and yet it is nothing compared to what follows.
No doubt you have heard of the microscope,—that wonderful instrument by which you may see objects a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million times, if necessary, larger than they really are. With the microscope, therefore, as a matter of course, we can see a good many of those tiny canals which elude our unaided sight. But, alas! we discover at the same time that these are by no means the last subdivisions. The canals invisible to our naked eyes subdivide themselves again into others, and these into others again, and so it goes on, till at last—the man at the microscope can see no more, but the subdivisions still continue.
You were ready to exclaim, at my talking of thousands of canals being torn by a needle in passing through; but had I even said millions, it may be doubted whether I should have spoken the whole truth.
Besides, when you consider the office of the blood, you can easily understand that if there were a single atom of the body left unvisited by him, that atom could never be nourished. Do I say nourished? I have made here a supposition altogether inadmissible; it could have no existence at all, since it is the blood only which produces it.
These imperceptible canals of blood have been called capillaries, from the Latin word, capillus, which means a hair; because the old learned men, who had no suspicion of the wonders hereafter to be revealed by the microscope, could think of no better way of expressing their delicacy, than by comparing them to hairs. Very likely they thought even this a great compliment, but your delicate fair hairs, fine as they are, are absolute cables—and coarse cables too, believe me, compared to the capillary vessels which extend to every portion of your body.
Observe further, that each of these arterial capillaries is necessarily composed (being the continuation of the large ones) of three coats enclosed one within the other, which can be perfectly distinguished in arteries of a tolerable size; add to this that within these coats there is blood, and in the blood some thirty substances we know of, not to speak of those we do not know; and then you will begin to form some notion of the marvels collected together in each poor little morsel of your body, however minute a one you may picture to yourself.