Philip Henry Pye-Smith

“ He begins his treatise by pointing out the many inconsistencies and defects in the Galenical theory, quoting the writings of Galen himself, of Fabricius, Columbus, and others, with great respect, but with unflinching criticism. For, in his own noble language, wise men must learn anatomy, not from the decrees of philosophers, but from the fabric of nature herself, "nec ita ia verba jurare antiquitatis magistræ, ut veritatem amicam in apertis relinquant, et in conspectu omnium deserant." ”

“ The fact that an inscription was lately placed on the bust of Cæsalpinus at Rome, which states that he preceded others in recognizing and demonstrating "the general circulation of the blood," is only a proof of the blindness of misplaced national vanity. ”

“ Harvey could not discover the capillary channels by which the blood passes from the arteries to the veins. This gap in the circulation was supplied several years later by the great anatomist Malpighi, who in 1661 saw in the lungs of a frog, by the newly invented microscope, how the blood passes from the one set of vessels to the other. Harvey saw all that could be seen by the unaided eye in his observations on living animals; Malpighi, four years after Harvey's death, by another observation on a living animal, completed the splendid chain of evidence. ”

“ Aristotle taught that in man and the higher animals the blood was elaborated from the food in the liver, thence carried to the heart, and sent by it through the veins over the body. His successors of the Alexandrian school of medicine, Erasistratus and Herophilus, further elaborated his system, and taught that, while the veins carried blood from the heart to the members, the arteries carried a subtle kind of air or spirit. For the practical physician only two changes had been made in this theory of the circulation between the Christian era and the 16th century. ”

“ Galen had discovered that the arteries were not, as their name implies, merely air-pipes, but that they contained blood as well as vital air or spirit. And it had been gradually ascertained that the nerves (νεῠρα) which arose from the brain and conveyed "animal spirits" to the body were different from the tendons or sinews (νεῠρα) which attach muscles to bones. First, then, the physicians of the time of Linacre knew that the blood is not stagnant in the body. So did Shakespeare and Homer, and every augur who inspected the entrails of a victim, and every village barber who breathed a vein. ”

“ The transference of the spiritus naturalis to the lungs, and its return to the left ventricle as spiritus vitalis, was the function which he regarded as important. Indeed a true conception of the lesser circulation as a transference of the whole blood of the right side to the left was impossible until the corresponding transference in the greater or systemic circulation was discovered. Servetus, however, was the true predecessor of Harvey in physiology, and his claims to that honour are perfectly authentic and univer sally admitted. ”

“ Galen taught almost as erroneously that each parent contributes seeds, the union of which produced the young animal. Harvey, after speaking with due honour of Aristotle and Fabricius, begins rightly "ab ovo"; for, as he remarks, "eggs cost little and are always and everywhere to be had," and moreover "almost all animals, even those which bring forth their young alive, and man himself, are produced from eggs" ("omnia omnino animalia, etiam vivipara, atque hominem adeo ipsum, ex ovo progigni") . ”

“ Fourthly, they had no conception of the functions of the heart as the motor power of the movement of the blood. They doubted whether its substance was muscular; they supposed its pulsation to be due to expansion of the spirits it contained; they believed the only dynamic effect which it had on the blood to be sucking it in during its active diastole, and they supposed the chief use of its constant movements to be the due mixture of blood and spirits.
Of the great anatomists of the 16th century, Sylvius (In Hipp. et Gal. Phys. Partem Anatom. Isagoge) described the valves of the veins ”

“ HARVEY, William (1578–1657) , the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, was the eldest son of Thomas Harvey, a prosperous Kentish yeoman, and was born at Folkestone on April 1, 1578. After passing through the grammar school of Canterbury, on the 31st of May 1593, having just entered his sixteenth year, he became a pensioner of Caius College, Cambridge; at nineteen he took his B.A. degree, and soon after, having chosen the profession of medicine, he went to study at Padua under Fabricius and Casserius (see Anatomy, vol. i. pp) . ”

“ Even in Italy, Trullius, professor of anatomy at Rome, expounded the new doctrine in 1651. But the most illustrious converts were Pecquet of Dieppe, the discoverer of the thoracic duct, and of the true course of the lacteal vessels, and Thomas Bartholinus of Copenhagen, in his Anatome ex omnium Vetorum Recentiorumque Observationibus, imprimis Institutionibus leati mei parentis Caspari Bartholini, ad Circulationem Harveianam et vasa lymphatica renovata (Leyden, 1651) . ”

“ He adds—"Though all of his profession would allow him to be an excellent anatomist, I never heard any that admired his therapeutic way. I knew several practitioners that would not have given threepence for one of his bills" (the apothecaries used to collect physicians prescriptions and sell or publish them to their own profit) , "and that a man could hardly tell by his bill what he did aim at." ”

“ The natural spirit of the left side and the vital spirit of the right side of the heart were therefore, he concluded, practically the same, and hence two instead of three distinct spiritus should be admitted. It seems doubtful whether even Servetus rightly conceived of the entire mass of the blood passing through the pulmonary artery and the lungs. ”

“ He then goes on to describe the order in which the several parts appear in the chick. He states that the punctum saliens or fœtal heart is the first organ to be seen, and explains that the nutrition of the chick is not only effected by yelk conveyed directly into the midgut, as Aristotle taught, but also by absorption from yelk and white by the umbilical (omphalomescraic) veins ”

“ And the field was almost untrodden since the days of Aristotle. Fabricius, Harvey's master, in his work De Formatione Ovi et Pulli (1621) , had alone preceded him in modern times. Moreover, the seventy-two chapters which form the book lack the coordination so conspicuous in the earlier treatise, and some of them seem almost like detached chapters of a system which was never completed or finally revised.
Aristotle had believed that the male parent furnished the body of the future embryo, while the female only nourished and formed the seed ”

“ He elaborately and clearly demonstrates the effect of obstruction of the blood-stream in arteries or in veins, by the forceps in the case of a snake, by a ligature on the arm of a man, and illustrates his argument by figures. ”