Page:The Harveian oration delivered at the Royal College of Physicians June 26, 1889 (IA b22361285).pdf/24

 obstructed hepatic circulation—these, among other instances, crowd upon us to show that pathology as well as physiology has used the fact that the blood circulates.

It must ever be regarded as most surprising that Cullen could not explain the two congestions to which I have referred. Harvey’s views, we must assume, so startled the medical world that it required more than a century and a half to bring pathologists to consider them properly.

We are now, however, in a position to deal with the subject, not only in its simple form, but to examine it in its relation to the nervous system, and surprising results have been obtained in this direction of late years.

I would especially allude to the experiments of Bernard and others, on the influence of the neiwes on the capillary circulation—the vaso-motor power —affecting as it does both our pathology and therapeutics. Experiments made in order to examine further into this remarkable discovery have demonstrated that the nervous arrangement constituting the governing power includes cerebro-spinal as well as sympathetic branches, for which end nerve fibres pass from the medulla oblongata,