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Reeve, Arthur B. (Arthur Benjamin), 1880-1936

"The Dream Doctor"

There were the heart and lungs.
"I have rendered the stomach visible," resumed Kennedy, "made it
'metallic,' so to speak, by injecting a solution of bismuth in
buttermilk, the usual method, by which it becomes more impervious
to the X-rays and hence darker in the skiagraph. I took these
pictures not at the rate of fourteen or so a second, like the
others, but at intervals of a few seconds. I did that so that,
when I run them off, I get a sort of compressed moving picture.
What you see in a short space of time actually took much longer to
occur. I could have either kind of picture, but I prefer the
latter.
"For, you will take notice that there is movement here--of the
heart, of the lungs, of the stomach--faint, imperceptible under
ordinary circumstances, but nevertheless, movement."
He was pointing at the lungs. "A single peristaltic contraction
takes place normally in a very few seconds. Here it takes minutes.
And the stomach. Notice what the bismuth mixture shows. There is a
very slow series of regular wave-contractions from the fundus to
the pylorus.


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