Arterio-contractile

From the facts detailed by Harvey, Goodwyn and others, which establish that in asphyxia the left ventricle of the heart ceases to contract before the right ventricle, the author infers that the irritability of the latter is greater than that of the former; and proposes to distinguish the first as arterio-contractile, and the latter as veno-contractile, from the circumstance of their being stimulated respectively by arterial and by venous blood.

In fact, in the midst of a suspended respiration, and an impared condition of some other functions, one vital property is augmented. This is the irritability, and especially the irritability of the left side of the heart. The left side of the heart, which is, in the hybernating animal, in its state of activity, as in all the other mammalia, only arterio-contractile, becomes veno-contractile.

Goodwyn conceived that the heart ceased to act because the left side, being only arterio-contractile, was incapable of being stimulated by venous blood; but this idea was fully disproved by the experiments of Bichat, which render it certain that the blood stimulates the ventricles not by its quality, but by its bulk. (Goodwyn on the Connex. of Life with Resp. pp. 82, 83; and Bichat, Sur la Vie et la Mort.)