Harvey and the transit of the blood from the arteries to the veins 'per porositates' / by W.S. Forbes.

  • Forbes, William Smith, 1831-1905.
Date:
1878
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Harvey and the transit of the blood from the arteries to the veins 'per porositates' / by W.S. Forbes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    [Extracted from the American Journal of the Medical Sciences for July, 1878 ] HARVEY AND THE TRANSIT OF THE BLOOD FROM Wirim TO THE VEINS “PER POROSITATES.” In the life of Harvey, written by Doctor Robert Willis, and prefixed to his translation of the works of Harvey, page xli., published by the Sy- denham Society, in 1847, we find this assertion : “ For Harvey, it must be observed, left the doctrine of the circulation as an inference or induc- tion only, not as a sensible demonstration.” Again : “ His [Harvey’s} the arteries to the veins] was even defective; he had no notion of one order of sanguiferous vessels ending by uninterrupted continuity, or by an intermediate vascular network, in the other order.” In Sharpey and Quain’s Anatomy (see “capillaries”), we find the fol- lowing statement: “ That the blood passed from the arteries into the veins was of course a necessary part of the doctrine of the circulation, as demon- strated by Harvey; but the mode in which the passage took place was not ascertained until some time after the date of his great discovery.” The words “ not ascertained” in this paragraph are guarded, yet the impression is decidedly made that Harvey did not have the idea of the way in which the blood is conveyed from the arteries to the veins. The same statement has been made by others. In a lecture delivered at the Royal Institution, London, on the 25th of January last, Mr. Huxley is reported as having said: “ One thing Harvey could not do, because the instruments of the time would not enable him to do it. He never gave the exact channels by which the blood passes into the veins.”—British Medical Journal, Feb. 2, 1878. Harvey’s treatise, written in Latin, was published first at Frankfort, in 1628. It is a fact that the compound microscope, consisting of two lenses placed at a distance, so that the one next the eye magnifies the enlarged image of any object placed in front of the other, was invented by Hans Zansz, who, with his son, Zacharias Zansz, were spectacle makers at Mid- ' An extract from an address delivered before the College of Physicians of Phila- delphia, on the Tercentennial Anniversary of Harvey’s birth, April, 1878. By W. S. FORBES, M.D.,’ SENIOR SURaEON TO THE EPISCOPAL HOSPITAL, PHILADELPHIA. _/ * r idea of the way in which it was accomplished [transit of the blood from