This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1921 Excerpt: ... hairs, and very tortuous, moist passages, which filter the air in large degree. What the nasal filter misses, the "ciliated cells" of the air-passages, each with its fringe of hair-like processes, ever-lashing upwards, may arrest and return; and there are also the white cells from the blood, trying to keep the air ...
Read More
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1921 Excerpt: ... hairs, and very tortuous, moist passages, which filter the air in large degree. What the nasal filter misses, the "ciliated cells" of the air-passages, each with its fringe of hair-like processes, ever-lashing upwards, may arrest and return; and there are also the white cells from the blood, trying to keep the air passages and the lungs free for the breath of life. (Touch with a swab the back of the throat of any of our city dwellers, and you will find under the microscope phagocytes containing particles of soot against which they are seeking to protect him.) These devices, evolved from antiquity against the accustomed and age-long contaminations of the atmosphere, are only too easily "rushed" by the, "mass-attacks" of our modern urban smog. In millions of years, perhaps, Life might evolve adequate defences even against this comparatively new menace, but the present case is that we Britons have become a grey-lunged race. At the end of last century, strolling through the pathological museum of the University of Edinburgh as a medical student, I came across four lungs in jars, side by side. One was the pearly white, uncontaminated lung of a new-born infant, the second the similarly untainted lung of an adult Eskimo, the third the black lung of a coal-miner of that period, the fourth the grey lung of a city dweller. It seems that coal dust protects the lungs against disease--or, at least, some students of pathological statistics say so, though I should not be surprised if a fallacy were found somewhere; but certain it is that coal-smoke, which has a very different chemical composition, spoils the lungs as ventilators, and must lower their resistance to the invading microbes of disease. We Britons are four-fifths an urban people, ...
Read Less