Human bone

“ I find that the bones are human bones, and are, in my opinion, all parts of the same person. They form a skeleton which is complete with the exception of the skull, the third finger of the left hand, the knee-caps, and the leg-bones—I mean the bones between the knees and the ankles. ”

“ In the study of this branch of anatomy he was interested mainly in the points of comparison between the human skeleton and the skeletons of other vertebrates. It was generally held that the intermaxillary bone, which is found in the upper jaw of some animals, is wanting in man, and this was regarded as a proof of the doctrine that the physical nature of man is vitally distinguished from that of other living creatures. ”

“ The Human frame consists of a skeleton (fig. 73) formed of hard and unyielding bone, having joints to admit of motion in certain directions; this skeleton performs certain great and important offices, it forms strong boundaries or protecting cases for most of the vital parts, so as to shield them from external violence, such as the brain and spinal cord, the lungs, heart, &c., it also furnishes a series of levers to be acted on by the muscles, for the purposes of motion, and a firm support for the soft parts of the system. The skeleton is divided into the head, trunk, and extremities ”

“ Throughout the middle ages, there was a firm belief in the existence in the human body of an indestructible bone which was thought to be the necessary nucleus of the resurrection body. With the revival of dissection and the study of anatomy in the sixteenth century, many anatomists searched for it eagerly but it was never found. ”

“ We teach the children to say "about two hundred," because there is not always the same number of bones in the body. In some parts two or three bones unite and form one bone. For example: the breastbone of a child is made up of eight pieces ”

“ The bones of my trunk are
my spine,
my ribs,
my breastbone,
my two shoulder blades,
and my two collar bones.
4. My upper arm has one bone; my fore-arm has two bones; my wrist has eight bones; from my wrist to my knuckles are five bones; my thumb has two bones; each finger has three bones, making nineteen bones in my hand.
5. My thigh has one bone; my lower leg has two bones; my knee-pan is the cap which covers and protects my knee; in my foot, near my heel, are seven bones; in the middle of my foot are five bones; my great toe has two bones; each of my other toes has three bones ”

“ Bone.—Bone is a hard unyielding structure, and which in the vertebrata forms the skeleton of the adult. It is the framework for the support of the soft tissues of the body, and forms various cavities for the reception of important organs, as the brain, spinal cord, eyes, heart and lungs, and acts as levers for the action of the muscles and joints. The partial elasticity of bone is seen in the ribs, and the rebound when the skull is dropped on the ground. Bone consists of earthy and animal matters intimately combined ”

“ Thus bones are not dry, lifeless substances, but are the very type of activity and change. In life they are richly supplied with blood from the nutrient artery and from the periosteum, by an endless network of nourishing canals throughout their whole structure. Bone has, therefore, like all other living structures, a self-formative power, and draws from the blood the materials for its own nutrition. ”

“ Part of a human body strikes the awning spars and hangs—watch-keepers are borne to the deck by the weight of water—the steersman falls limply over the wheel with blood pouring from a gash on his forehead. ”

“ Again the bone, in its nascent stage, enters into the organic principle of bone, and there, by the inherent heat of that principle, is resolved into three factors, viz, its excreted portion goes towards the formation of hairs, mustaches, etc, its thick or condensed portion is assimilated into the organic principle of bone, and its subtile portion is metamorphosed into marrow. ”

“ The joint contains a fluid to oil it, so that the ends of the bones move upon each other very easily. If the joints were dry, every movement of the body would be very difficult and painful.
16. The bones are held together at the joints by means of strong bands called ligaments.
17. How the Bones are Made.—The bones [Pg 98] are not so solid as they seem to be. The outside of most bones is much harder and firmer than the inside. Long bones, like those of the arms and the legs, are hollow. The hollow space is filled with marrow, in which are the blood-vessels which nourish the bone. ”

“ Lastly, with relation to their Use; some serve to support and carry the whole Body, as the Leg-Bones, and others are appointed to grind the Meat, as the Teeth; or else to form some Cavity, as the Skull-Bone, and those of the Ribs.
What are the Parts to be distinguished in the Bones?
They are the Body, the Ends, the Heads, the Neck, the Apophyses, the Epiphyses, the Condyli or Productions, the Cavities, the Supercilia or Lips, and the Ridges.
The Body is the greatest Part, and the middle of the Bone; the Ends are the two Extremities; the Heads are the great Protuberances at the Extremities ”

“ You see the larger part at the end is full of little holes, like a sponge. This makes it light and strong. There is a hollow place in long bones filled with marrow. It also fills the spongy parts. Marrow is made of fat and cells.
You must not think that live bones look like one which has been lying out-of-doors a long time. Live bones are full of blood and have a pinkish color. They also have an outside skin, which can be peeled off, as you see in this picture.
A bone with the outside skin partly peeled off.
Amy: What are the bones made of?
[Pg 29]
End of a bone sawed open. ”

“ While the growth of the bones occurs, of course, mainly during the earlier years of life, yet they do not attain their full maturity until about the twenty-fifth year; and it is stated that in persons devoted to intellectual pursuits, the skull grows even after that age. It is plainly necessary that during this period of bone growth the nutrition of the body should be of the best, that the bones may be built up from pure blood, and supplied with all the materials for a large and durable framework. Else the body will be feeble and stunted, and so through life fall short of its purpose. ”

“ Form of bones.—A bone is not like a solid piece of timber, but is hollow like the frame of a bicycle. This makes it strong and light. At its ends a bone is like a hard sponge covered with a firm shell. This makes it too strong to be easily crushed, and keeps it light.
A bone grows like any other part of the body. It is made of living cells like woven threads. Lime is mixed among the cells, and makes them stiff like starch among the threads of a linen collar. Blood tubes go through every part of the bone so as to [Pg 110] feed the cells. ”

“ The skeleton begins as a continuum, and a continuum it remains all life long. The things that link bone with bone, {713} cartilage, ligaments, membranes, are fashioned out of the same primordial tissue, and come into being pari passu, with the bones themselves. The entire fabric has its soft parts and its hard, its rigid and its flexible parts; but until we disrupt and dismember its bony, gristly and fibrous parts, one from another, it exists simply as a “skeleton,” as one integral and individual whole. ”

“ In the biological aspect of the case, we must always remember that our bone is not only a living, but a highly plastic structure; the little trabeculae are constantly being formed and deformed, demolished and formed anew. ”

“ The short, square, and flattened bones of the body, such as those of the wrist, the skull, and the hips, instead of being hollow inside are spongy; and the spaces in the bone-sponge are filled with a soft tissue called the red marrow in which new red and white corpuscles for the blood are born, to take the place of those which die and go to pieces. ”

“ We may well reckon up Fifteen distinct Parts, which are the Bone, the Cartilage, the Ligament, the Tendon, the Membrane, the Fibre, the Nerve, the Vein, the Artery, the Flesh, the Fat, the Skin, the Scarf-Skin, the Hair, and the Nails.
What is a Bone?
It is the hardest and driest Part of the whole Body, and that which constitutes its principal Support. ”

“ They are merely the expression of a great consistent system, and are in architecture what is often found in animal anatomy,—a bone, or process of a bone, useless, under the ordained circumstances of its life, to the particular animal in which it is found, and slightly developed, but yet distinctly existent, and representing, for the sake of absolute consistency, the same bone in its appointed, and generally useful, place, either in skeletons of all animals, or in the genus to which the animal itself belongs. ”

“ The formation of bone is peculiarly instructive, because the large proportion of inorganic matter in its substance, and seemingly deposited in the organic tissue, would lead one to suppose that it was almost an accidental formation, which might take place anywhere; yet101 although what is called connective tissue will ossify under certain conditions, true bone is the product of a very peculiar modification, which almost always needs to be preceded by cartilage. ”

“ The bones, though the hardest, are the most delicate parts in the whole body; but when it is affected, nature forms a new periosteum over the sound part, and gradually pushes forward the decayed scale. This wonderful work is performed by nature only, and must not be disturbed. By scraping, and boring of it, the tender periosteum will only be molested, the sound bone will become foul again, and so you may go on for ever; and I never saw a sore of that kind healed up by this improper method, till nature over-powered art, or the surgeon was tired with scraping, perforating, &c. ”

“ It is this which makes the bones so hard and firm that they do not bend by the weight of the body. When we are young, the bones have less of this bone-earth, and so they bend easily, and readily get out of shape. When we get old, they contain so much bone-earth that they become more brittle, and often break very easily.
20. A person's height depends upon the length of his bones. The use of alcohol and tobacco by a growing boy has a tendency to stunt the growth of his bones, so that they do not develop as they should. ”

“ Bone.—In bone the intercellular tissue is rendered hard by the deposit of mineral salts, the resulting material being of great strength and rigidity. The texture may be close and dense like ivory or open and spongy, the difference lying merely in the fact that the one has fewer spaces between the solid particles than the other. ”

“ Physiologists and others have dissected man's body, and they have reduced everything to a mass of flesh and bone. They can discuss this bone or that bone, they can discuss various organs, but these are all material things. ”

“ Among those which grow lean which is that which grows leanest?
In very strong men which are the muscles which are thickest and most prominent?
In your anatomy you must represent all the stages of the limbs from man's creation to his death, and then till the death of the bone; and which part of him is first decayed and which is preserved the longest.
And in the same way of extreme leanness and extreme fatness.
The divisions of the head (812. 813) .
812.
ANATOMY. There are eleven elementary tissues:— Cartilage, bones, nerves, veins, arteries, fascia, ligament and sinews, skin, muscle and fat. ”

“ The terms raw bone, fine bone, boiled and steamed bone, etc., are used to indicate methods of preparation, and inasmuch as bone is a material which is useful largely in proportion to its rate of decay, its fineness has an important bearing upon availability, since the finer the bone the more surface is exposed to the action of those forces which cause decay or solution, and the quicker will the constituents become available. ”

“ An extremely ignorant person might answer that all parts of a living body are alive except the bones. It required some education before we medical men learned to realize, without surprise, that crude metallic bodies—bullets, pins, needles, wire sutures buried in our internal organs, nails driven into our fractured bones by surgeons, finger rings, scissors, forceps, spectacles, etc., left in the peritoneal cavity by careless operators—could remain in a human body without any immediate danger to life. ”

“ Before we speak of the form of a bone, let us say a word about, the mechanical properties of the material of which it is built615, in {674} relation to the strength it has to manifest or the forces it has to resist: understanding always that we mean thereby the properties of fresh or living bone, with all its organic as well as inorganic constituents, for dead, dry bone is a very different thing. ”

“ Yet one day the sun which has risen, stirring the only emotion in the landscape, will rise upon a tragic, significant, or patient human group, for whom sun and seasons and the wide heavens are small, whose emotion is yet contained within the room of a mean dwelling and whose destiny is accomplished within a tilled field. ”

“ The bone is deposited, atom by atom, in living organic cells, which are formed by living blood, which implies a living animal. The microscopic texture of your stone-girt skeleton does not differ from that of the skeleton which you cleaned from the muscles with your own hands ”

“ I have taken the sternum bone from a dead man’s chest, analyzed it, then brought together similar elements, placed them in a mould, and I have produced a bone which was just as real as the one with which I started. ”

“ Every bone is covered by a thick, tough layer, the periosteum, which has three uses. When the bone is injured by disease or accident, the periosteum makes new bone to fill in and repair the break. It also builds new bone on the surface of the old as long as the body is growing. ”