"Spinal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... depart for home to resume my sleep, and was congratulating myself on my escape, when Bennett called me over to one side of the room, and in a low, but very firm voice, metaphorically ran up and down my spinal column with a rake. He asked me if I didn't know there were other despatchers in that office besides myself; men who knew more in a minute about the business than I did in a month; and didn't I ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... promptitude as the strychneae of Asia,* (* The nux vomica, the upas tieute, and the bean of St. Ignatius, Strychnos Ignatia.) but without producing vomiting when they are received into the stomach, and without denoting the approach of death by the violent excitement of the spinal marrow. Scarcely a fowl is eaten on the banks of the Orinoco which has not been killed with a poisoned arrow; and the missionaries allege that the flesh of animals is never so good as when this method is employed. Father ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... implicit faculty of apprehension is prior to experience, which only becomes possible by means of this faculty. The elements of this faculty unconsciously fulfil and pursue their office in the child, aided by the reflex motions which are cerebro-spinal and peripheral, as they have been produced and organized in the species by evolution; but they, as well as these reflex physiological motions, are prior to ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... off a chair, on which I was standing to get a book, laid me on my back for a time. I fretted over it at first, but when I got about again, I found that I was a man maimed for life. I don't know what the injury was—some obscure lesion of the spinal marrow or brain, I believe—some flaw about the size of a pin's head—the doctors have never made out. But every time that I plunged into work, I broke down; for a long time I thought I should struggle through; but at last I became aware ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... include such parts or organs in the department of morphology: thus if we could trace in the limbs of the Vertebrata, as we can in their ribs, traces of an apparent change from being processes of the vertebrae, it would be said that in each species of the Vertebrata the limbs were "metamorphosed spinal processes," and that in all the species throughout the class the limbs ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... The weird odors of it still fill my nostrils; the sinister portrait of it is still before my eyes. It is the Chinatown of London—Limehouse. Down in the dregs of the town—with West India Dock Road for its spinal column—it lies, redolent of ways that are dark and tricks that are vain. Not only the heathen Chinee so peculiar shuffles through its dim-lit alleys, but the scum of the earth, of many colors and of many climes. The Arab and the Hindu, the Malayan ...
— The Agony Column • Earl Derr Biggers
... so far that the girl had told Lowell about the letter she had mailed and that Bill had held up. Something akin to a chill moved along Bill's spinal column at the thought. But of course such a thing could not be. The girl couldn't afford to talk about anything like that letter, which was certain to drag her ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... inlaying, in a sort of basso-relievo, the beaked prow of his canoe. Now, I consider that the phrenologists have omitted an important thing in not pushing their investigations from the cerebellum through the spinal canal. For I believe that much of a man's character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... great classes of vertebrate animals, when marshalled according to their rank and standing, naturally range, should be also that in which they occur in order of time. The brain, which bears an average proportion to the spinal cord of not more than two to one, comes first—it is the brain of the fish; that which bears to the spinal cord an average proportion of two and a half to one succeeded it—it is the brain of the reptile; ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... purpose, which is the chief if not the only characteristic of this St. John. Technically the work is admirable. The singular care with which the limbs are modelled, especially the feet and hands, is noteworthy: while the muscular system, the prominent spinal cord, and the pectoral bones are rendered with an exactitude which leads one to suppose Donatello reproduced all the peculiarities of his model. It has been said that Michelozzo helped Donatello on the ground that certain details reappear on the Aragazzi ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... had to caution him not to tell my wife. Poor Mathilde! I have been unconscionably long a-dying. And now he turns round again and bids me order my coffin. But I fear, despite his latest bulletin, I shall go on some time yet increasing my knowledge of spinal disease. I read all the books about it, as well as experiment practically. What clinical lectures I will give in heaven, demonstrating ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... and each of these is subdivided by a series of horizontal plates, which appear to be analogous to the plates of the batteries used in automobiles. The whole is supplied with an enormous amount of nervous matter, four great branches of which are as large as the animal's spinal cord, and these spread out in a multitude of thread-like filaments round the prismatic columns, and finally pass into all the cells. "A complete knowledge of all the mysteries which have been gradually unfolded from the days of Galvani to those of Faraday, and of many others which are still inscrutable ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... which, at that time, were plentiful in the coast sections of the more southern of the slave-holding States. They were called "racers" because of their long legs, slender bodies, and great capacity for running; and "Razor Backs" on account of the prominence of the spinal column. The origin of this particular species of the porcine tribe is unknown, but there is a tradition to the effect that their progenitors were a part of the drove that came to the coast of Florida with De Soto when he started ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... of our knowledge of those portions of the peripheral nervous system which would naturally be supposed to have to do with such functional peculiarities as the dancer exhibits. So far as I have been able to learn, no investigator has carefully examined the brain and spinal cord in comparison with those of the common mouse, and only those who have failed to find any structural basis for the facts of behavior in the organs of the ear have attempted to account for the dancer's whirling and deafness by assuming that the cerebellum ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... peering into the shadows. He was not afraid, as he recalled his sensations afterwards; but a strange little thrill seemed to be racing up and down his spinal column. ...
— The Circus Boys In Dixie Land • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... of organization and fulness of development, is, at one early period, only 'a simple fold of nervous matter, with difficulty distinguishable into three parts, while a little tail-like prolongation towards the hinder parts, and which had been the first to appear, is the only representation of a spinal marrow. Now, in this state, it perfectly resembles the brain of an adult fish, thus assuming in transitu the form that in the fish is permanent. In a short time, however, the structure is become more complex, the parts more distinct, the spinal marrow better marked; it is now ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... then. I've been helping the Randalls settle. Harry 'phoned me early this morning and wanted to know if I didn't desire to be useful; said he would exchange compliments sometime." A significant pause, then a reminiscent sigh. "Every vertebra in my spinal column aches with ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... Miss Mitford wrote a letter home and among other things she said: "I called today at a Mr. Barrett's. The eldest daughter is about twenty-five. She has some spinal affection, but she is a charming, sweet young woman who reads Greek as I do French. She has published some translations from AEschylus and some striking poems. She is a delightful creature, shy, timid ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... cat-like—amid half stifled, threatening growls, with menacing eyes turned from time to time toward the tamer. What the tamer then did was the most extraordinary performance which Rounders had ever seen, and sent thrills of admiration down his spinal column. ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... confused and arid expositions of official professors. Now I led my auditors into the inmost laboratories of Nature, and revealed, in plant and animal, the fine affinities that regulated her processes of nutrition. Now I traced some delicate nervous filament from the spinal column of the amphioxus to the cerebral hemisphere of the mammifer. Now I disclosed the ramifying canals in the vast system of circulation, mounting from the spongy network of the mollusk and the sluggish lymphatic of ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... tender tint; very straight and tight in front, and adorned behind, along the spine, with large, strange, iridescent buttons. The revival of taste, of the sense of beauty, in England, interests me deeply; what is there in a simple row of spinal buttons to make one dream—to donnor a rever, as they say here? I think that a great aesthetic renascence is at hand, and that a great light will be kindled in England, for all the world to see. There are spirits there that I should like to commune with; I ...
— A Bundle of Letters • Henry James
... senses by the extraordinary events, that, had he cried out, "Come to my arms, my long-lost brother!" or were a strawberry-mark actually found, I could not have been surprised. As it was, his frenzied tugs at the lapel of my coat threatened its immediate destruction, and my spinal column ached under his demoniac slaps on the back, before I ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... glass agates have you got?" and so on—when Tom, looking very mischievous, suddenly lifted up dolly by the toe of her shoe, and asked, "Why, Nelly, what's the matter with this doll; has she got the spinal complaint?" ...
— Neighbor Nelly Socks - Being the Sixth and Last Book of the Series • Sarah L. Barrow
... uttering. He was very near-sighted, and appeared, notwithstanding his eye-glass, never to see anyone; and when he sat down his whole frame seemed to accommodate itself to the shape of the chair. His figure seemed to shrink into folds, as if his spinal column were made of rubber; his legs, crossed one over the other, looked like two rolled ribbons, and his long arms, resting on the arms of the chair, allowed to droop his pale hands with interminable fingers. His hair and moustache, ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... worms, as he called them at first—the blood worms, or coelomati, as he describes them in his "Anthropogeny"—a purely hypothetical stage, on which a true body-cavity and blood were formed; the eighth stage are the chorda-animals with the beginning of a spinal rod, corresponding to the larva of the ascidiae. At the ninth stage, called the skull-less animals (acrania), and corresponding to the still living lancelet, we enter the series of the vertebrates. The importance of the eighth and ninth stages for the theory, we have already pointed out ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... might just as well have been killed as poor Tolliver was, for he'll never be any use again, the doctors say. Some injury to the spinal column, and with it a curious affection of the throat and tongue. He can neither swallow nor speak. Nourishment has to be administered by tube, and the ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... center of buoyancy &c; metacenter^. V. be central &c adj.; converge &c 290. render central, centralize, concentrate; bring to a focus. Adj. central, centrical^; middle &c 68; azygous, axial, focal, umbilical, concentric; middlemost; rachidian^; spinal, vertebral. Adv. middle; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... that can be ascertained therefore, it appears that the young lady in question received a severe injury to the spinal cord, in consequence of which she became paralyzed in the lower extremities, in which members contractions also took place. It is probable also that the great sympathetic nerve and brain were involved in ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... those bright eyes in an effort to magnetize her—to soothe her. He let her come quite close to him before stirring; then with a gentle movement, he passed his hand over her whole body, from the head to the tail, scratching the flexible vertebrae, [Footnote: Vertebrae: the bones of the spinal column.] which divided the yellow back of the panther. The animal slightly moved her tail voluptuously, and her eyes grew soft and gentle; and when for the third time the Frenchman had accomplished this interested flattery, she gave vent to those purrings like as ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... the order "Right!" "Left!" until the sergeant was satisfied. Next each foot had to be lifted and put down quickly at the word of command; then it was needful that the legs should he widely separated in a jump and closed up with vigor; then the spinal columns swayed forward and back and all the joints and muscles had something to do. This was no laughing matter to any one, though it was funny enough from the ordinary standpoint of civil life. This medicine was taken day after day, and ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... locomotion. Men and women went darting about like the big yellow gnats that we see at sundown on the western coast of our island when the bay is hazy. The whole history of that century in both Am-ri-ka and Yoo-rup might well be written around the fact of transit, for transit was the spinal cord of the whole social, civil, and political order. Man-life then seemed to oscillate more rapidly than ever before, as if in sympathy with the vibration ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... tests are negative. Spinal taps show no concussion, and there is no evidence of trauma of any kind other than psychic. Yet, the delta rhythms persist. In the one case where we have an EEG taken before the—incidents, let's call them—the pattern is entirely different. The scientist had ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... Proserpine is one of the few that keep the good wine for the last. Here, however, as in the rest of his poems, we find beautiful passages rather than beauty informing the whole poem. Swinburne's poems have no spinal cord. One feels this even in that most beautiful of his lyrics, the first chorus in Atalanta in Calydon. But how many poets are there who could have sustained for long the miracle of "When the hounds of spring are on winter ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... occasion was too solemn for talking, but merely led the way to where the koodoo had fallen. There he lay, beautiful and quite still; and there, high up, about half-way down his neck, was a neat round hole. The bullet had severed the spinal marrow, passing through the vertebrae and away on the ...
— A Tale of Three Lions • H. Rider Haggard
... been knocked out in all his boxing-career, that the kick of a horse on his chin would not knock him out, that his head was solid bone, and that the shortness of his jaw and thickness of his neck absolutely prevented sufficient leverage between the point of the jaw and the spinal cord for the administration of the shock to the medulla oblongata that causes the necessary ten-seconds' unconsciousness ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... bath an' frales the wamus off me with a club. Talk of puttin' a crimp in folks! Gents when Jeff's wrath is assuaged I'm all on one side like the leanin' tower of Pisa. Jeff actooally confers a skew-gee to my spinal column. ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... turkey were polished off in the middle of the day; with every one declaring that it had been a great treat. Larry kept the two drumsticks as well as the wings of the gobbler. Possibly he might many a time feel a queer little sensation creeping up and down his spinal column as memory carried him back again to that slough, where the treacherous black mud was slowly but surely sucking ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... a bone. It is made up of a row of smaller bones—or knobs—and in the middle of it is a sort of rope of nerves called the spinal cord. Nerves, you know, are the things we feel with. Well, this spinal cord is rolled up for safe keeping in a soft wrapping, called membrane. When you fell out of the swing, you struck against one of these knobs, and bruised the membrane inside, and the nerve inflamed, and gave ...
— What Katy Did • Susan Coolidge
... instructions to ask if she was well enough to receive Lord and Lady Montbarry and Miss Lockwood on the morrow. In a week's time, the two households were on the friendliest terms. Mrs. Carbury, confined to the sofa by a spinal malady, had been hitherto dependent on her niece for one of the few pleasures she could enjoy, the pleasure of having the best new novels read to her as they came out. Discovering this, Arthur volunteered to relieve Miss Haldane, at intervals, in the office of reader. He was clever at mechanical ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... used all peaceable endeavours, the collected part of the semen, raised and inflamed, became adust, converted to choler, turned head upon the spinal duct, and ascended to the brain. The very same principle that influences a bully to break the windows of a woman who has jilted him naturally stirs up a great prince to raise mighty armies and dream of nothing ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... pounds. It strikes like a triple lash upon the naked back of the sufferer. It does not plough or tear up the flesh like the knout, but the skin of course breaks under the heavy blows inflicted upon the spinal column and the sides. Phthisis is a common complaint with those who have been subjected to the punishment of the plete, the strokes frequently detaching the viscera from their living walls. In order to give more force to the blow, the executioner ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... have wanted that—and it's still neatly articulated to the end of my spinal column!" She gave a low, reminiscent chuckle. "There was a Chinese general, once, whom it was my privilege to annoy, and he went so far as to put quite a flattering price on it. He lost his own! Shall ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... removed the child from the sack, he found it greatly deformed, in very sooth. The poor little wretch had a wart on his left eye, his head placed directly on his shoulders, his spinal column was crooked, his breast bone prominent, and his legs bowed; but he appeared to be lively; and although it was impossible to say in what language he lisped, his cry indicated considerable force and health. Claude's compassion increased at the sight of this ugliness; and he made ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... bizarre legend that mountain sheep rams jump off cliffs and alight upon their horns? I think not. People now know enough about anatomy, and the mental traits of wild sheep, to know that nothing of that kind ever occurred save by a dreadful accident, followed by the death of the sheep. No spinal column was ever made by Nature or developed by man that could endure without breaking a headforemost fall from the top of a cliff to the slide-rock ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... Warruk knew that to lose his foothold meant a speedy end for him; his claws dug deeper through the tough hide and his jaws drew together with the slow, irresistible force of a vise. At last it came, a dull, faint report. The great reptile's head fell forward and the body lashed frantically; the spinal column had been severed and that marked the beginning ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... point of the lance of battle. [The spinal cord, the Sushumna nadi of Indian Psychology.] I am the God who creates in the head of man the fire of the thought. Who is it throws light into the meeting on the mountain? [The meeting of the mortal and the immortal on Mount Meru, the pineal ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... adopted abroad, and volumes have been devoted to it. Neurasthenia has been divided into cerebral, spinal, and otherwise, according as the fears and sensations of the patient are referred to one or another part of his body. While the term neurasthenia is becoming daily more familiar to the general public, it is being, on the whole, used, ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... that the truth must be hidden from him till he recovered. Then, swift as the thrust of a knife, another thought followed. . . . Suppose—suppose Roger never recovered? . . . What was it Sandy had said? An injury to the spine. Did people recover from spinal injury? Or did they linger on, wielding those terrible rights which weakness for ever holds over ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... Trustee, "we have two cases of congenital hip disease and three of spinal tuberculosis—that is one of them in the second crib." Her eyes moved on from Sandy to Rosita. "And the fifth patient has such a dreadful case of rheumatism. Sad, isn't it, in so young a child? Yes, the Senior Surgeon ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... bones of the head are composed of the densest material, affording effectual protection to the brain underneath: a wise provision for the animal's preservation; for were his skull brittle, his habit of crawling on the ground would render it very liable to be fractured. The spinal cord runs down the entire length of the body; this being wounded, the animal is disabled or killed instanter. Strike therefore his tail, and not his head; for at his tail the spinal cord is but thinly covered with ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... experimental science? Why, there is not a function of a single organ in the body which has not been determined wholly and solely by experiment? How did Harvey determine the nature of the circulation, except by experiment? How did Sir Charles Bell determine the functions of the roots of the spinal nerves, save by experiment? How do we know the use of a nerve at all, except by experiment? Nay, how do you know even that your eye is your seeing apparatus, unless you make the experiment of shutting it; or that your ear is your hearing apparatus, unless you close ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... creations, due entirely to society for, according to Nature's plan, feeble or aborted beings ought to perish. The curvature or distortion of the spinal column creates in these outwardly deformed subjects as it were a storage-battery, where the nerve currents accumulate more abundantly than under normal conditions,—where they develop, and whence they are emitted, so to say, in lightning flashes, to energize the ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... about 3 ft. 3 in. long. Make the frame for the head by bending a light tough stick in a circle about 7 in. in diameter. Bind it tightly with a strong thread and through its center run the spine. Then tack on the arm stick 3 in. under the circle so that the spinal column crosses the arm stick exactly in the center. Wrap tightly with strong thread and tack on the two sticks that are to serve for the legs and body. The leg sticks should be fastened to the arm stick about 6 in. on either side of the spinal column, and crossed ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... be bent or twisted in any way and she does not feel it. The limbs are there, apparently without blood or muscles or bones. This affection, which is not connected with anything known to science, spread to the arms and hands, and we then supposed it to be a disease of the spinal cord. Doctors and remedies only made matters worse until at last my poor daughter could not be moved without dislocating either the shoulders, the arms, or the knees. I kept an admirable surgeon almost constantly ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... "Babiche" in the North is the tie that binds, and "sinew" is the thread, babiche being merely cured rawhide from moose or caribou, the sinew the longitudinal strands taken from either side of the spinal ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... the doctor, seriously, shaking his head. "Nobody knows Mercy like her mother. That's not to be expected. She's a poor, unfortunate, cramp-minded child. I've done what I can for her back— she has spinal trouble; but I can do little for Mercy's twisted and warped mind. She tells me she has cramps in her back and legs and I tell her she has worse cramps in her mind. Bright! Why, child, she knows more ...
— Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill • Alice B. Emerson
... has had a stroke and has lost all power over his limbs. It was at once put to bed in a box and nursed most carefully; except for being unable to walk, it is apparently quite well." It must have been a kind of apoplectic seizure that attacked the spinal cord in some spot or other, and paralyzed one side of the body. The dog recovered slowly, but never got the complete use of its legs again. It accompanied us, however, on ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... covering her black locks with flour. The guests, like the children they were, chased each other all over the house, up and down the stairs; the men hid under tables, only to have a sly hand break a cascaron on the back of their heads, and to receive a deluge down the spinal column. The bride chased her dignified groom out into the yard, and a dozen followed. ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... Street had nothing to offer a creature of Anne Fletcher's kind. It had everything to take, and it seemed bent on taking everything. It was bad enough in the beginning, when she had given herself up, body and soul, to the spinal lady; but to go and marry the brother, without first disposing of the spinal lady in a comfortable home for spines, why, what must the man be like who could let her ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... detail a doctrine of pangenesis, not wholly unlike that of Darwin. In order to explain the phenomena of inheritance he supposes that vessels reach the seed, carrying with them samples from all parts of the body. He believes that channels pass from all the organs to the brain and then to the spinal marrow (or to the marrow direct), thence to the kidneys and on to the genital organs; he believes, too, that he knows the actual location of one such channel, for he observes, wrongly, that incision behind the ears, by interrupting the ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... of the Mediterranean, excavations of the Vence Cave (Alpes-Maritimes) brought to light a number of dead arranged in a circle as if about to take a meal in common. The bodies were crouching in the position of men sitting on their heels; the spinal column was bent forward and the head nearly touched the knees. In the centre of this strange group were noticed some fragments of pottery and the remains of a large bird, a buzzard probably. Perhaps its death ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... mastered as to be, or to have been, superficial. Lamarck was one of those men of whom I believe it has been said that they have brain upon the brain. He had his theory that an animal could not feel unless it had a nervous system, and at least a spinal marrow—and that it could not think at all without a brain—all his facts, therefore, have to be made to square with this. With Buffon and Dr. Darwin we feel safe that however wrong they may sometimes ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... appear to have been the common osteo-arthritis, which involved not only the men, but many of the pet animals kept in the temples. In a much higher proportion apparently than in modern days, the spinal column was involved. It is interesting to note that the "determinative" of old age in hieroglyphic writing is the picture of a man afflicted with arthritis deformans. Evidences of tuberculosis, rickets and syphilis, according to these authors, ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... their peculiar ideas and habits on other people. Sometimes we call them expansionists—fond of colonizing territory that doesn't belong to them. They wanted to get through the cells to the lymph-passages, thence on to the brain and spinal marrow. Know what that ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... he turned aside to become the knight-errant of the poor. Walking along Whitechapel road he saw multitudes of shopmen and shopwomen whose stint was eighty hours a week, who toiled mid poisoned air until the brain reeled, the limbs trembled, and worn out physically and mentally they succumbed to spinal disease or premature age, leaving behind only enfeebled progeny, until the city's streets became graves of the human physique. In that hour London seemed to him like a prison or hospital; nor was ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... of lath, and groaned, and said, 'Pa you have killed me, but I forgive you,' and then rolled around, and frothed at the mouth, cause I had a piece of soap in my mouth to make foam. Well, Pa, was all broke up. He said, 'Great God, what have I done? I have broke his spinal column. O, my poor boy, do not die?' I kept chewing the soap and foaming at the mouth, and I drew my legs up and kicked them out, and clutched my hair, and rolled my eyes, and then kicked Pa in the stummick ...
— Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa - 1883 • George W. Peck
... dead leaves which lay, even in summer, half a foot deep upon the ground. The "fox-fire," rotting logs glowing with a faint luminosity, startled her several times, and the hooting-owl's shuddering bass—hoo! hoo! hoo-oo-ah-h! (like the awful keys of the organ which "touch the spinal cord of the universe")—sent all her blood to her heart. Under ordinary circumstances, she surely would not have started at the rustling made by the timid hare in the thicket near by. There was no reason why she should shiver so when a misstep caused her to scratch her ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... the waves, and shed trouble as a duck sheds water. JACK and his complainings never troubled her; she merely laughed when he groaned, and offered to rub his back. But he, fearing the ponderosity of her hand, rarely submitted; his spinal column being delicate, he dared ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., Issue 31, October 29, 1870 • Various
... had been told of a little girl who had to lie on her back for a year on account of some spinal trouble, and who had almost nothing to amuse her, so if anyone had scrap-books or toys and would send them to her ...
— The Story of the Big Front Door • Mary Finley Leonard
... inseparable relation existing between the physical and moral nature of man. The persistent priapism which oftentimes results from riding with a wet seat and the inordinate morbid sensibility of the sexual organs that may result from the same cause or from spinal irritation are not to be allayed by any homily on morality or on the sanctifying attempts at keeping the animal passions under subjection, any more than will prayers or offerings to all the gods of Olympus restore the eunuchized, either ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... in disease follow in an inverse order the developmental processes taking place in the embryo. Hence the recent physiological division of the nervous system by Dr. Hughlings Jackson into highest, middle, and lowest centers, and the evolution of the cerebro-spinal functions from the most automatic to the least automatic, from the most simple to the most complex, from the most organized to the least organized. In the recognition of this division we have the promise of a steadier and more scientific advance, both ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 520, December 19, 1885 • Various
... cut the backbone free with the knife, trim off the strip of fat for the lard pile, chop the backbone itself into pieces three to four inches long, until the chine is reached—the part betwixt the shoulder blades with the high spinal processes. Leave the chine intact for smoking, along with the ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... true—that was the joy of it. The men of Meissonier's time, like the old Dutchmen, worked from their knuckle joints. These new painters, in their new technique—new to some—old really, as that of Velasquez and Frans Hals—swing their brushes from their spinal columns down their forearms (Knight's biceps measure seventeen inches) and out through their finger-tips, with something of the rhythm and force of an old-time blacksmith welding a tire. Broad chests, big boilers, strong arms, straight legs, and stiff backbones have much to do with ...
— The Man In The High-Water Boots - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... "All the first matter should be removed except for the spinal chord and the vertebrae. You'd ...
— Man Made • Albert R. Teichner
... are trying to trade their worthless coronets for American cash. But the fact that many a man boasting of his American sovereignty will dicker with a titled young duke, instead of using the forecastle of a No. 9 foot to drive his spinal column up through his plug-hat like a presidential lightning-rod; will actually purchase for his daughter some disgusting little title upon which rests the fateful bar-sinister of a woman's shame, and is encumbered by a ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... instead of in the front, which is here modified to form a sucker. But the gills, by which this little creature breathes, expel the water by which they are bathed through a single hole at the side of the head, as in the frog tadpole; while in the possession of a brain, a spinal cord, and a soft backbone, ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... stopped not till she had devoured nearly half a bushel of dry meal. The singularly placid and benevolent look that beamed from the meal-besmeared face when I discovered her was something to be remembered. For the first time also her spinal column came near assuming ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... to the right of the spinal column, I cut a huge demilune out of his new spring overcoat, bringing it round as far under his left side (which was the right side of the navvy) as I dared. Passing thence swiftly to the back of the seat, and reaching between the splines, I sawed through the ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... above that backbone and a bony arch below it, forming two cavities,—no matter whether these arches be of hard bone, or of cartilage, or even of a softer substance; every Vertebrate has the brain, the spinal marrow or spinal cord, and the organs of the senses in the upper cavity, and the organs of digestion, respiration, circulation, and reproduction in the lower one; every Vertebrate has four locomotive appendages built of the same ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... generation." This Bible sentence falls upon the dissipated and sexually diseased man in the fullest sense of the word, unhappily also upon the innocent woman. "Attacks of apoplexy with young men and also women, several manifestations of spinal debility and softening of the brains, all manner of nervous diseases, affections of the eyes, cariosity, inflammation of the intestines, sterility and atrophy, frequently proceed from nothing else than chronic and neglected, and, often for special reasons, concealed ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... his strength Frank struck him a blow, so quick and strong that the first intimation of danger to the fish was the sharp spear crashing through the strong bony scales, through flesh and vertebrae, into the spinal cord, just behind the head. So instantaneous was the death of the great sturgeon under this fatal stroke that there was not even the usual spasmodic spring. Like as a log might have lain there on ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young
... bones, having the same relations; that they can name the muscles of the dog by the names of the muscles of the man, and the nerves of the dog by those of the nerves of the man, and that, such structures and organs of sense as we find in the man such also we find in the dog; they analyse the brain and spinal cord, and they find that the nomenclature which fits the one answers for the other. They carry their microscopic inquiries in the case of the dog as far as they can, and they find that his body is resolvable into the same elements as those of the man. ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... seemed to know everybody and everybody's circumstances—to have ranged them and theirs distinctly and in order, in the wide, empty halls of her memory, which could be filled in no other way. For, as Agatha gradually learned, this spinal disease, withering up the form from infancy, had been accompanied with such long intervals of acute physical pain as to prevent all study beyond the commonest acquirements of her sex. It was not with her, as with some, that the intellect alone had proved ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... toward the girl. "Now look," he admonished her. "Do you see this thing?" and he extended what appeared to be a bundle of tentacles from the posterior part of his head. "There is an aperture just back of the rykor's mouth and directly over the upper end of his spinal column. Into this aperture I insert my tentacles and seize the spinal cord. Immediately I control every muscle of the rykor's body—it becomes my own, just as you direct the movement of the muscles ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... application of it by Stromeyer, Dieffenbach, Little, and countless successors, it has been used for very many cases for which it is totally inapplicable, e.g. for the division of the muscles of the back in spinal curvature. Still there remain several deformities for the relief of which subcutaneous tenotomy is a most important remedy; chief among these ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... soon attained a leading position. From 1816 he published various papers in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, which formed the basis of his Pathological and Practical Researches on Diseases of the Brain and Spinal Cord, and of his Researches on the Diseases of the Intestinal Canal, Liver and other Viscera of the Abdomen, both published in 1828. He also found time for philosophical speculations, and in 1830 he published his Inquiries concerning the Intellectual Powers ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... had an inspirited and vigorous superior part, as constituted of these men of eminent talents and attainments, and this small class of persons in a measure assimilated to them in thinking and taste; but it was in a condition resembling that of a human frame in which, (through an injury in the spinal marrow,) some of the most important functions of vitality have terminated at some precise limit downward, leaving the inferior extremities devoid of sensation and ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... Helen, "how much more awful it would have been if you had swallowed him, Heavy, instead of his wriggling down your spinal column." ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... of hydrocephalus (or water on the brain), where there is an abnormal secretion of cerebro-spinal fluid acting to increase the pressure on the brain, the simple expedient of withdrawing the fluid by lumbar puncture brings about normal mental life. As the fluid again collects, the mental life becomes cloudy, and the character alters (irritability, depressed mood, changed purpose, lowered will); ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... trouble with the sentence forty nations are trying to stutter out now, is that there is no predicate, no verb, no spinal column of belief. ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... blow with a hammer or poleaxe on the head, a little above the eyes. By this means, when the blow is skilfully given, the beast is brought down at one blow, and, to prevent recovery, a cane is generally inserted, by which the spinal cord is perforated, which instantly deprives the ox of all sensation of pain. In Spain, and some other countries on the continent, it is also usual to deprive oxen of life by the operation of pithing or dividing the spinal cord in the neck, close to the back part of the ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... but men and animals, as sodomy, pederasty, etc.), Nymphomania (causing women to assail every man they meet, and supplicate and excite him to gratify their lustful passions, or who resort to means of sexual pollutions, which is impossible to describe without shuddering), together with spinal diseases and many disorders of the most distressing and disgusting character, {208} filling the bones with rottenness, and eating away the flesh by gangrenous ulcers, until the patient dies, a horrible mass of putridity ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... no taking it off and putting it on again with anything like dignity. At any rate, then, here goes a how. But, another difficulty presented itself; my loose frock was so voluminous that I doubted whether any spinal curvature would ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... toward the head in each case agrees. In the American mound three rivers (also objects of worship with the ancients) were evidently identified. The number three was a sacred number in all ancient mythologies. The sinuous winding and articulations of the vertebral spinal arrangement are anatomically perfect in the Argyleshire mound. The gentlemen present with Mr. Phene during his investigation state that beneath the cairn forming the head of the animal was found a megalithic chamber, in which was a quantity of charcoal ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... forth, with a pair of saddle-bags, into the enchanted East. You may cross the Black Forest, and see Germany widespread before you, like a map, dotted with old cities, walled and spired, that dream all day on their own reflections in the Rhine or Danube. You may pass the spinal cord of Europe and go down from Alpine glaciers to where Italy extends her marble moles and glasses her marble palaces in the midland sea. You may sleep in flying trains or wayside taverns. You may be awakened at dawn by the scream of the express or the small pipe of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in public halls, Of and through the States, as during life[4]—each man and woman my neighbour, The Louisianian, the Georgian, as near to me, and I as near to him and her, The Mississippian and Arkansian yet with me—and I yet with any of them; Yet upon the plains west of the spinal river—yet in my house of adobie, Yet returning eastward—yet in the Sea-Side State, or in Maryland, Yet Canadian cheerily braving the winter—the snow and ice welcome to me, or mounting the Northern Pacific, ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... to express not only the medullary part of the brain, spinal marrow, nerves, organs of sense and muscles, but also at the same time that living principle, or spirit of animation, which resides throughout the body, without being cognizable to our senses ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... lacks,—he Must see me, Cotopaxi!" "Ay! ay!" the fire-peak thunders, "And he must view my wonders! I'm but a lonely crater, Till I have him for spectator!" The mountain hearts are yearning, The lava-torches burning, The rivers bend to meet him, The forests bow to greet him, It thrills the spinal column Of fossil fishes solemn, And glaciers crawl the faster To the feet ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... orderly, Sergeant Gidel, who was nearing his end, and whose cruel hiccough we had been unable to alleviate for a week past. This man knew his business, he knew the meaning of probe, of fever, of hardened abdomen. He knew too that he had a bullet in the spinal cord. He never asked us for anything, and as we dared not tell him lies, we were overcome by a kind of shame in his presence. He stayed barely two days in the room, looking with dim eyes at the engravings on the walls, and the Empire bureau on which ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... that dress. Aunt Elizabeth?" And Aunt Elizabeth replied that she certainly was, and she went after she had exchanged greetings with the family and kissed Peggy's tear-stained little face. Charles Edward's wife actually straightened her spinal column, she was so amazed at the sight of me in my rose-colored array. Charles Edward, to do him justice, stared at me with a bewildered air, as if he were trying to reconcile his senses with his traditions. ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... Barbara, "it's that silly old woman, Adrian's mother. Either of the others would have said something definite. Ah!" she smote her knee with her small hand, "I hate people with spinal marrow and ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... Each hemisphere contains one organ pertaining to each faculty of the mind. The size of each organ is estimated, not by feeling for bumps or depressions, but by measuring the length of the fibres of the brain from their common center in the medulla oblongata, at the head of the spinal column, and at a point equi-distant from the ears in the interior of the head. From this common centre the fibres of the brain range horizontally and upward in all directions like the branches of a tree. Development of brain ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... due to distension of the penis with blood. How is this distension brought about? It results from stimulation of the erection centre. Until recently, it was supposed that this centre was situated in the lumbar enlargement of the spinal cord; but now, owing to the researches of L. R. Mueller, it is believed to form part of the sympathetic plexuses of the pelvis. Stimulation of the centre leads to distension of the penis with blood, and thus to erection of that organ. The stimulation of the centre can be effected in either ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... bath. Meantime, the M'zabite or negro, as he dislocates your legs, cracks your spinal column or dances over you on his knees, drones forth a kind of native psalmody, which, melting into the steamy atmosphere of the place, seems to be the litany of happiness and of the pure in heart. Clean in body and soul as you never were before, skinned, depilated, dissected, you emerge ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various |
