Physiological Researches on Life and Death

by Xavier Bichat

On the contrary the organic life is a single system, in which every thing is connected and concatenated; where the functions on one side cannot be interrupted, and those on the other subsist. A diseased liver influences the state of the stomach; if the colon on one side cease to act, that upon the other side cannot continue in action: the same attack, which arrests the circulation in the right side of the heart, will annihilate it also in the left side of the heart. Hence it follows, the internal organs on one side being supposed to suspend their functions, that those on the other must remain inactive, and death ensue.

This assertion, however, is a general one; it is only applicable to the sum of the organic life, and not to its isolated phenomena. Some of them in fact are double, and their place may be supplied—the kidneys and lungs are of this description.

I shall not enquire into the cause of this remarkable difference, which in man, and those animals which approach him the nearest, distinguishes the organs of the two lives. I shall only observe, that it enters essentially into the nature of their phenomena, and that the perfection of the animal functions is so connected with the general symmetry observed in their respective organs, that every thing which troubles such symmetry, will more or less impair the functions.

It is from thence, no doubt, that proceeds this other difference of the two lives, namely, that nature very rarely varies the usual conformation of the organs of the animal life. Grimaud has made this observation, but has not shewn the principle on which it depends.

It is a fact, which cannot have escaped any one the least accustomed to dissection, that the spleen, the liver, the stomach, the kidneys, the salivary glands, and others of the internal life, are frequently various in form, size, position, and direction. Such in the vascular system are these varieties, that scarcely will any two subjects be found exactly alike under the scalpel of the anatomist: the organs of absorption, the lymphatic glands in particular, are rarely the same either in number or volume, neither do the mucous glands in any way affect a fixed and analogous situation.

And not only is each particular system subject to frequent aberrations, but the whole of the organs of the internal life are sometimes found in the inverse of the natural order. Of this I have lately seen an instance.

Let us now consider the organs of the animal life, the senses, the brain, the voluntary muscles, and the larynx: here every thing is exact, precise, and rigourously determined. In these there is scarcely ever seen a variety of conformation; if there do exist any, the functions are troubled, disturbed, or destroyed: they remain unaltered in the organic life, whatever may be the disposition of the parts.

The difference with respect to action, in the organs of the two lives, depends, undoubtedly, upon the symmetry of the one, whose functions the least change of conformation would have disturbed, and on the irregularity of the other, with which these different changes very well agree.

The functions of every organ of the animal life are immediately connected with the resemblance of the organ to its fellow on the opposite side if double, or if single to its similarity of conformation in its two halves: from hence the influence of organic changes upon the derangement of the functions may be well conceived.

But this assertion will become more sensible, when I shall have pointed out the relations which exist between the symmetry and the irregularity of the organs, and the harmony and the discordance of their functions.