The circulation.

Date:
1857
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The circulation. 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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    [Conduct; 1 by which marks the advent and accession of the moderns to scientific power and independence. Hitherto they had followed the ancients ; now, they dared to walk alone. Three years afterwards, Aselli discovered the chvliferous vessels ; subsequently, Pecquet pointed out the reservoir of the chyle, and Rudbeck and Thomas Bartholin the lymphatic vessels—all 1 a nmn was Harvey’s most formidable adver- sary. At the present day we have the means of actually witnessing with our own eyes, the phenomenon so furiously denied by a crowd of learned physicians. * M. Flourens, Pro- fessor in the College of France—to whose learned history of the discovery I am in- unknown, or very obscurely kuown, to the debted for the materials of the preceding 9 ancients. Harvey had discovered the most narrative—demonstrates the fact by a striking ' beautiful phenomenon in the animal economy, experiment. In his lessons at the Jardin des which was beyond the reach of antiquity. Plantes, in order to imitate, before the eyes The mantel of authority fell from classic of his pupils, the passage of the blood from shoulders to adora those of the English phy- the arteries to the veins, he opens the crural sician. Doctors, instead of swearing by Galen artery and vein in the leg of a dead dog. and Aristotle, were now compelled to swear He inserts a pipe into the open end of the by Harvey. artery, aud injects water by means of a Not that the novel conquest was effected syringe. In a very few instants, the water, i without violent rebellions aud attempts at injected into the artery, returns by the vein. I counter-revolution. It was regarded as a It is the complete representation of the cir- 1 dangerous heresy ; when ridicule failed to culation of the blood. But, by means of the crush it, there was little scruple in era- microscope, the circulation in the living ploying something, like persecution. Still animal may be distinctly beheld. All that is it was the faculty alone, and not the nation, required is to select some part sufficiently who showed this repugnance to a novel thin to allowthe transmission of light through truth. Moliere laughed at Gui-Patin, while its substance. The ear of a mouse will do, but is inconvenient; the wing of a bat might answer better. Or, the tail of a small fish (such as an eel, a minnow, or a stickleback), coutined in a glass tube—or the gills of a young newt—will serve the purpose. The web of a frog’s foot is commonly used ; the tongue of that victim reptile is vaunted as displaying the spectacle marvellously ; but, as 1 pleaded in a late article, is too cruel a mode to be adopted for the gratification of everyday curiosity. “ This method,” as Dr. Carpenter humanely observes, “ is so much more distressing to the animal, that its em- ployment seems scarcely justifiable for the- mere purpose of display ; and nothing but Borne anticipated benefit to science can justify Boileau satirised the faculty in general. Harvey had no sooner published his book on the circulation of the blood, than twenty anatomists took up their pens to assail it. Harvey did not answer them. Itiolau, the most learned anatomist of his time, was the only man whom Harvey honoured with a reply. When his enemies found they were unable to provoke him into saying a word in self-defence, they got tired of waging an aggressive criticism, and allowed the novel doctrine to spread and make its way. Molidre’s famous Chorus of Doctors, and his other bitter jibes, were hardly a joke or a caricature of Gui-Patin’s practice ; for, starting with the laudable idea of simpli- the laying open the body of the living fving medical treatment, he reduced it to animal, for the purpose of examining the the sole remedies of bleeding and purging, circulation of its luugs or mesentery.’’ The A statement of what he did in that line tail of a tadpole offers a very ready means, would be believed an exaggerated stretch and shows you the pigment-cells into the of the long-bow, if it were not extracted bargain. An advantage is, that the blood- i'rom his own letters. He bled patients corpuscles in the tadpole are larger than at every age, infants as well as old people; in the human subject. They are also oval he bled a patient thirty-two times for one instead of being circular. You may trace aud the same illness; he had himself bled the red corpuscles running along the arteries, seven times for a cold ; he bled his mother- then entering the capillaries or hair-like in-law, who was eighty years of age, four vessels, which are so small and narrow that times ; he bled a child three days old; he the corpuscles can only pass one at a time— bled his own wife eight times from the veins and that, eud foremost. These capillaries are of her arm, and then he bled her from the the communicating tubes, the connecting veins of her foot. She recovered, and he transit from the arteries to the veins ; and exclaimed, “ Bleeding for ever ! ” He you may watch the blood-discs, which have purged a patient, every other day, thirty- traversed the border-land in Indian file, re- two times ; then he talks of another patient turning in congregated troops to the heart, who was bled, in all, twenty-two times thence to repeat their round as long as life and purged forty times, “ We cure many shall last. The camel tribe, exceptional more sick persons,” says Gui-Patin, “with animals in other respects, are the only main- a good lancet and a pound of senna, than mal quadrupeds wtiich have the blood-discs the Arabs could cure witli their whole oval. Of common animals, the goat has very pharmacopoeia of syrups and opiates.” Such small corpuscles, but they are twice as large