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0:00
Hello and welcome to Fundamentals
of Human Physiology.
My name is Charles Sevigny,
and I'm a Senior Lecturer at
the Department of Anatomy
and Physiology at
the University of Melbourne
in Melbourne, Australia.
0:12
Now, this first activity today,
we're going to talk about
what physiology is,
a very important thing
for us to understand.
We'll talk a little
bit about what
you can expect in the
rest of the course.
Then we'll get into some of
the first principles
of physiology,
namely homeostasis,
diffusion, osmolarity,
Fick's law, these
sorts of things.
Now, these might seem
like very basic concepts,
but they form the foundations of
far more complex
things that we'll be
learning over the
rest of the course.
We're going to
ease in today like
an old man into a warm bath.
Starting to think
about these first
principles that we
can build upon.
0:45
But first things first,
let's talk about
what physiology is.
Physiology is the science
of how the body works.
If anatomy is a study
of what's there,
physiology is the study
of how it functions.
This is really fascinating to me
and why I have such a
passion for physiology,
because in order
to understand how
any one system functions,
you need to understand
how all other systems in
our body function because they
all are integrated
and work together.
For example, if you think about
our metabolism in our cells,
our cells require oxygen in
order to undergo metabolism.
We have a respiratory
system to feed that.
They're also putting
off carbon dioxide,
but we need to transport
that around our body
body because our body is huge.
We need a circulatory
system to support that.
That circulatory
system requires fluid,
and we need to make
sure that we have
the right balance of fluid.
That's where our
kidneys come in.
All of these systems
work together to
keep us alive at any
given point and time.
