A Handbook of Health

by Woods Hutchinson

The blood reaches every portion of our body in precisely this same manner, only taking a different branch of the great pure-blood delivery pipe, the aorta, according to the part of the body which it is to reach, and coming back by a different vein-pipe.

Why the Arteries are more deeply Placed than the Veins. In the limbs and over the surface of the body generally, the arteries are more deeply placed than the veins, so as to protect them from injury, because the blood in the arteries is driven at much higher pressure than in the veins and spurts out with dangerous rapidity, if they are cut. Some of the veins, indeed, run quite a little distance away from any artery and quite close to the surface of the body, so that you can see them as bluish streaks showing through the skin, particularly upon the front and inner side of the arms.

The Capillaries. Of course, the blood pipes into which the food is sucked through the walls of the food tube, and those in the lung, through which the oxygen is breathed, as well as those in the thumb through which food is taken to the muscle-cells, have the tiniest and thinnest walls imaginable. For once, the name given them by the wise men—capillaries (from the Latin capilla, a little hair)—fits them beautifully, except that the hairs in this case are hollow, and about one-twentieth of the size of the finest hair you can see with the naked eye. So tiny are they that they compare with the big veins near the heart into which they finally empty much as the smallest and slenderest twigs of an elm do with its trunk. What they lack in size, however, they more than make up in numbers; and a network of them as fine and close as the most delicate gauze goes completely around the food tube between its mucous lining and muscular coat.

Though thickest and most abundant on the inner and outer surfaces of the body, every particle of the body substance is shot through and through with a network of these tiny tubes. So close and fine is this network in the skin, for instance, that, as you can readily prove, it is impossible to thrust the point of the finest needle through the skin without piercing one of them and "drawing blood," as we say, or making it bleed. From this network of tiny, thin-walled tubes, the body-cells draw their food from the blood.

DIAGRAM OF ARTERY, CAPILLARIES, AND VEIN

The Meaning of Good Color. It is the red blood in this spongy network of tiny vessels that gives a pink coloring to our lips and the flush of health to our cheeks. Whenever for any reason the blood is less richly supplied with food or oxygen, or more loaded with "smoke" and other body dirt than it should be, we lose this good color and become pale or sallow. If we will remember that our hearts, our livers, our brains, and our stomachs, are at the same time often equally "pale" and sallow—that is, badly supplied with blood—as our complexions, we can readily understand why it is that we are likely to have poor appetites, poor memories, bad tastes in our mouths, and are easily tired whenever, as we say, our "blood is out of order." The blood is the life. Starve or poison that, and you starve or poison every bit of living stuff in the body.

THE HEART

Structure and Action of the Heart. Now what is it that keeps the blood whirling round and round the body in this wonderful way? It is done by a central pump (or more correctly, a little explosive engine), with thick muscular walls, called the heart, which every one knows how to find by putting the hand upon the left side of the chest and feeling it beat. The heart is really a bulb, or pouch, which has ballooned out from the central feed pipe of the blood supply system, somewhat in the same way that the stomach has ballooned out from the food tube.

The walls of this pouch, or bulb, are formed of a thick layer of very elastic and powerful muscles almost as thick as the palm of your hand. When the great vein trunk has poured blood into this pouch until it is swollen full and tight, these muscles in its walls shut down sharply and squirt or squeeze the blood in the heart-pouch into the great artery-pipe, the aorta. In fact, you can get a very fair, but rough, idea of the way in which the heart acts by putting your half-closed hand down into a bowl of water and then suddenly squeezing it till it is shut tight, driving the water out of the hollow of your hand in a jet, or squirt.