Pulsation in the Veins

Abstract

THE writer of a very long and exhaustive article on “The Heart,” occupying forty-one pages in Rees's “Cyclopædia,” quotes, among other authorities, Bichat, who says “that the blood, when it has arrived at the veins, is no longer influenced by the heart's action; consequently these vessels have no pulsation” ... “that the blood's return in the veins is involved in an obscurity;” and he propounds as a “contrast” “the fact of general pulsation in the arteries, the absence of this in the veins.” The writer of the article states that “many authors, particularly Haller, considering that this [the venous] system has no agent of propulsion, have ascribed to the veins some peculiar structure” of which the evidence is insufficient; also “that there is no analogy to the course of the blood in the arteries where the action of the heart produces the whole effect,” and adds: “There is much obscurity on the subject, as well as in the course of the blood in the general veins; and every judicious mind cannot fail to observe that there is a great vacuum to be filled up.”