On the Natural Faculties.

On the Natural Faculties.
By Galen
Translated by: A.J. Brock
Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press 1916


Digital Hippocrates Collection Table of Contents



ON THE NATURAL FACULTIES Book I
   PART 1
   PART 2
   PART 3
   PART 4
   PART 5
   PART 6
   PART 7
   PART 8
   PART 9
   PART 10
   PART 11
   PART 12
   PART 13
   PART 14
   PART 15
   PART 16
   PART 17

BOOK TWO
   PART 1
   PART 2
   PART 3
   PART 4
   PART 5
   PART 6
   PART 7
   PART 8
   PART 9

BOOK THREE
   PART 1
   PART 2
   PART 3
   PART 4
   PART 5
   PART 6
   PART 7
   PART 8
   PART 9
   PART 10
   PART 11
   PART 12
   PART 13
   PART 14
   PART 15


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BOOK THREE

 [p. 245]as though it had grown round and become united with the food.
cf. p. 282, note 1.
At the same time I found the pylorus persistently closed and accurately shut, like the os uteri on the foetus.

In the cases, however, where digestion had been completed the pylorus had opened, and the stomach was undergoing peristaltic movements, similar to those of the intestines.


PART 5

Thus all these facts agree that the stomach, uterus, and bladders possess certain inborn faculties which are retentive of their own proper qualities and eliminative of those that are foreign. For it has been already shown
Book II., chaps. ii. and viii.
that the bladder by the liver draws bile into itself, while it is also quite obvious that it eliminates this daily into the stomach. Now, of course, if the eliminative were to succeed the attractive faculty and there were not a retentive faculty between the two, there would be found, on every occasion that animals were dissected, an equal quantity of bile in the gall-bladder. This however, we do not find. For the bladder is sometimes observed to be very full, sometimes quite empty, while at other times you find in it various intermediate degrees of fulness, just as is the case with the other bladder- that which receives the urine; for even without resorting to anatomy we may observe that the urinary bladder continues to collect urine up to the time that it becomes uncomfortable through the increasing quantity of urine or the irritation caused by its acidity- the presumption