Page:The third Huxley lecture.pdf/41

37 may be doubted whether active congestion could alone give rise to it, though it is by no means inconceivable that the excessive supply of the nutrient fluid might in time exhaust the tissues by over-stimulation, and so bring about more or less of that impairment of vital energy which we have seen reason to regard as the essential cause of the blood-corpuscles lagging behind the liquor sanguinis.

Or it may be that the nerves produce this weakening effect upon the tissues by immediate action upon them. From that point of view, the proof afforded by the pigment cells of the influence of the nerves over processes going on within cells seemed to me peculiarly interesting. And we can conceive of nervous impulse impairing their energies either by over-stimulation followed by exhaustion, or by immediate prostration of their powers as by an electric shock.

That the latter idea is not altogether out of the question seems to follow from a kind of experience familiar to surgeons. I will mention one instance of this which produced a great impression upon me. A healthy man, in the middle period of life, had been operated on by lateral lithotomy. All went perfectly well till about ten days had elapsed, when the renal secretion, which had passed through the wound since the operation, flowed for the first time through the natural channel. In those days, when lateral lithotomy was the routine treatment of calculus, it was well understood that the mucous membrane becomes in a