I will only corroborate here a remark already made in the same work,
upon the extreme frequency of pulmonary congestions in the last moments
of life. As the lungs alone receive the whole blood of the body,
when their forces are weakened, the blood stagnates and accumulates
in them; so that according to the state of their forces in the last
moments, and the disease, these organs will be more or less heavy,
and more or less full of blood. We hardly find them twice in the same
state. All subjects that die in pain have these congestions. Thus
compare the lungs of dead bodies in our dissecting rooms, with those
of animals killed in slaughter-houses; they are entirely different.
The organization is almost always concealed in the first by the fluids
that crowd them. We cannot study this organization well except in
subjects that have died of hemorrhage or syncope. In most others, it
is impossible to distinguish any thing. Hence no doubt the reason that
we know as yet so little of the intimate structure of this important
viscus, as the description I shall give of it will, I hope, prove. I
have shown elsewhere how we can at will accumulate a greater or less
quantity of blood in the lungs of an animal, by the way in which we
kill him.
No other organ in the economy exhibits these extreme varieties of
congestion at the moment of death, in so evident a manner at least,
because no one is a centre of circulation, like the lungs; the liver
even is not an exception, as I have observed. In this respect, those
who open dead bodies, and examine the state of the lungs, should
carefully distinguish the congestion that arises from the disease,
from that which may be perhaps the effect of the interruption of the
circulation in the last moments. I suppose two affections of the chest
exactly similar in their nature, duration and the two subjects they
attack; that syncope terminates the life of one of them; that that of
the other is closed after long distress, in which there is what is
called the rattles; the lungs of the second will certainly weigh much
more than those of the first.
It is very probable that during life, the lungs are in very different
degrees of congestion. We know that most chronic diseases of this organ
occasion, when the patients take rather violent exercise, a sense of
suffocation, oppression, &c. which appear to be owing only to the
superabundance of blood, which, not being able to pass through this
viscus as fast as it is sent there, is stopt, and checks the entrance
and exit of the air.
It is only the diseases of the lungs and heart that are accompanied
constantly with these oppressions, and sense of suffocation. This is
seen in this last organ in aneurisms, sometimes in ossifications, &c.