We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
THE CINEMA IN TEACHING
X RAY CINEMATOGRAPHY
BY
Prof. Aristide Busi
Director of the Institute of Medical Radiology at the University of Rome.
A NYONE entering a
The Study of the
Human Body. £~ \. dissecting room
for the first time and seeing a human body dismembered piece by piece, with the organs and viscera laid bare and isolated, cannot help feeling, in addition to a sense of pity and wonder, a desire to understand how that heart which lies red and flaccid on the marble was pulsating only a few days before, and how those lungs that lie shrivelled at the side were swelling in the fulness of life.
But who could ever divine, looking at the bloodless, rigid face of an unknown man, the complex, conscious play of those muscles that formerly expressed the slightest emotion of his mind ? When has death ever succeeded in giving us the whole truth on life ?
Anyone, passing from the anatomical examination to an Institute of Physiology, that he may learn, for instance, with what movements of preparation and propulsion food, passing from the mouth to the pharynx, is directed into the aesophagus, what checks and releases occur to it on its way to the stomach, how the latter becomes animated and seizes hold of it and works on it, or that he may learn how a heart beats, will find that there are two different ways of studying the same thing.
Systems of Other Times.
One of these is very complicated, and consists of certain writings traced on smoked paper by needles which oscillate in response to the movements transmitted to them, by means of special devices, from one or other
of the internal organs of the body. But these writings are in a language that is clear only to the initiated.
The other is atrocious. We see the living heart at last, but through the split-open breast of an animal, which thus pays for the terrible privilege of having a viscera which is identical with ours, which functions like ours and beats like ours for love or pain. I still remember, in the second year of my medical studies at the university, my first lesson on the physiology of the heart. I can see the little dog tied down, with his breast cut open, and at the bottom of the bleeding gap something that was moving rapidly. I see the crowd of my companions standing round in silent wonder. I see the professor, who shows us the movements and explains them, and at the end suddenly cuts the heart from its peduncle and lifts it up, still palpitating, while the imploring eyes of the little dog slowly film over.
X-Rays. The Divine Being, to
whom the laments of so much suffering flesh had risen for years and years from the living things that were sacrificed to our scientific needs, real or presumed, decided at last, in 1 896, that the time had come to setisfy our desire to see within the living body, without death or pain to any living being, so He sent us the miraculous gift of the X-rays, through a professor of a little German university, C. W. Rontgen.
The walls of the living body fell, so to speak, before these rays, and we saw, in the