Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 1 of 2).djvu/477

 understood, that the innate heat and vital spirit have not been wholly lost.

From this it clearly appears that the blood is the generative part, the fountain of life, the first to live, the last to die, and the primary seat of the soul; the element in which, as in a fountain head, the heat first and most abounds and flourishes ; from whose influxive heat all the other parts of the body are cherished, and obtain their life ;. for the heat, the companion of the blood, flows through and cherishes and preserves the whole body, as I formerly demonstrated in my work on the motion of the blood.

And since blood is found in every particle of the body, so that you can nowhere prick with a needle, nor make the slight- est scratch, but blood will instantly appear, it seems as if, with- out this fluid, the parts could neither have heat nor life. So that the blood, being in ever so trifling a degree concentrated and fixed, Hippocrates called the state airo\rt^ig rwv ^Ae|3a>> stasis of the veins, as in lipothymia, alarm, exposure to severe cold, and on the accession of a febrile paroxysm, the whole body is observed to become cold and torpid, and, over- spread with pallor and livor, to languish. But the blood, re- called by stimulants, by exercise, by certain emotions of the mind, such as joy or anger, suddenly all is hot, and flushed, and vigorous, and beautiful again.

Therefore it is that the red and sanguine parts, such as the flesh, are alone spoken of as hot, and the white and bloodless parts, on the contrary, such as the tendons and ligaments, are designated as cold. And as red-blooded animals excel exsanguine crea- tures, so also, in our estimate of the parts, are those which are more liberally furnished with native heat and blood, held more excellent than all the others. The liver, spleen, kidneys, lungs, and heart itself, parts which are especially entitled viscera, if you will but squeeze out all the blood they contain, become pale and fall within the category of cold parts. The heart it- self, I say, receives influxive heat and life along with the blood that reaches it, through the coronary arteries ; and only so long as the blood has access to it. Neither can the liver per- form its office without the influence of the blood and heat it re- ceives through the coeliac artery ; for there is no influx of heat without ah afflux of blood by the arteries, and this is the