Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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It Is
The Absence Of A Nervous Stimulant That Renders The Solitary Use Of A
Nutritive Substance (As Starch, Gum, Or Sugar) Less Favourable To
Assimilation, And To The Reparation Of The Losses Which The Human Body
Undergoes.
Opium, which is not nutritive, is employed with success in
Asia, in times of great scarcity; it acts as a tonic.
But when the
matter which fills the stomach can be regarded neither as an aliment,
that is, as proper to be assimilated, nor as a tonic stimulating the
nerves, the cessation of hunger is probably owing only to the
secretion of the gastric juice. We here touch upon a problem of
physiology which has not been sufficiently investigated. Hunger is
appeased, the painful feeling of inanition ceases, when the stomach is
filled. It is said that this viscus stands in need of ballast; and
every language furnishes figurative expressions which convey the idea
that a mechanical distension of the stomach causes an agreeable
sensation. Recent works of physiology still speak of the painful
contraction which the stomach experiences during hunger, the friction
of its sides against one another, and the action of the gastric juice
on the texture of the digestive apparatus. The observations of Bichat,
and more particularly the fine experiments of Majendie, are in
contradiction to these superannuated hypotheses. After twenty-four,
forty-eight, or even sixty hours of abstinence, no contraction of the
stomach is observed; it is only on the fourth or fifth day that this
organ appears to change in a small degree its dimensions.
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