Some apostles of physiology : being an account of their lives and labours, labours that have contributed to the advancement of the healing art as well as to the prevention of disease / by William Stirling.

  • Stirling, William, 1851-1932.
Date:
1902
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Some apostles of physiology : being an account of their lives and labours, labours that have contributed to the advancement of the healing art as well as to the prevention of disease / by William Stirling. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    before and was therefore in full digestion, to show the recurrent laryn¬ geal nerves, and the movements of the diaphragm, he saw a network of white tracts in the mesentery. He at first thought they were nerves. He punctured one, there flowed out a white liquid—the chyle. In a transport of joy he, like Archimedes, cried out “Eureka !” He had dis¬ covered the lacteals. He traced them to the group of mesenteric glands still known as the “ pancreas Aselli.” He thought they went to the liver, and thus failed to trace their true ending. He recognised the presence of valves in these vessels and showed that they prevented a backward flow. They were seen by Asellius and others, including Bartholinus, both “in living animals, and men newly hanged and choaked.” Bartholinus in liis quaint way describes how he saw the “ milkey veins in the body of Sueno Olai, who was choaked with a piece of tongue, having before eaten and drank plentifully, because respiration being hindered by the bit of tongue and his heart being suffocated, there was no necessity for the liver to draw any chyle.” Indeed, Bartholinus believed them to pass to the Spigelian lobe of the liver. PANCREAS ASELLI (l) ANI) LACTEALS (b) CONVERGING TO IT. ASELLl’s FIGURE SHOWING LACTEALS PASSING TO THE LIVER. T^OLKESTONE and Dieppe are not so far apart—the one the birtli- ^ place of Harvey, the other of JEAN PECQUET (1622), the discoverer of the receptacalum rhyli and its continuation as the thoracic duct. Pecquet announced his discovery in his Experimental nova 38 b.BB