Malpighi as anatomist.

  • Meyer, Arthur William, 1873-
Date:
1930
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Malpighi as anatomist. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    1/10
    Reprinted from Science, September 5, 1930, Vol. LXXII, No. 1862, pages 234-238. MALPIGHI AS ANATOMIST By Professor A. W. MEYER DEPARTMENT OF ANATOMY, STANFORD UNIVERSITY In these crowded days it is easy to overlook or for¬ get what one owes to the past. The present is vocal and urging; the past silent and patient. Besides, life is so many-sided that no one can realize fully his en¬ tire indebtedness to the past, although the higher a civilization, the greater this golden heritage always is. It is fortunate that we are willing to pause in a hurried day in order to pay our respects to a searcher who labored with great enthusiasm to almost the very end of his life in order to enlighten man re¬ garding his own body. The name of Malpighi can never become a household word, but the debt that every one owes him nevertheless is great.' There are no greater triumphs than those over ignorance and helplessness, over barbarism and brutishness. Hence it will be a sad day for civilization when the Mal¬ pighis are forgotten. Although we are observing the tercentenary of his birth, Malpighi does not belong to the ancients. He was a modern anatomist, not only in his methods but also in his attitude and outlook. As anatomist, Malpighi was not an observer of the dead alone. He was an experimentalist who worked much with living creatures of different kinds. He used both vertebrates and invertebrates as well as plants, and felt that there was a kinship among all living creatures, so that one could learn regarding the higher from an examination of the lower forms. During all the time that he was professor of medi¬ cine he earnestly tried to reveal and understand the architecture of beings of all kinds, and to this end he used the microscope, chemicals, pigments such as ink, and the processes of maceration, boiling, injection, ligation, dissection and vivisection. How modern he was can best be illustrated by the fact that an enter¬ prising medical student who copied from Malpighi’s works over two hundred years afterward is recorded as actually having received a prize for his contri¬ bution to science. It seems regrettable that Malpighi’s anatomical studies had to be done largely during vacations and spare hours, for his interests did not lie in the single lane of the anatomy of his day. Worms, insects, fishes, amphibians and mammals of many kinds claimed his attention. He made contributions to embryology and to both gross and microscopic mam¬ malian and human anatomy, and was in a large 1 Remarks at the banquet of the Italy-American So¬ ciety of San Francisco at the time of the tercentenary of Malpighi. measure a founder of embryology and of the micro¬ scopic anatomy of organs. Indeed, Sir Michael Fos¬ ter in his “History of Physiology” states that where Malpighi left embryology, it remained till the be¬ ginning of the nineteenth century. It is true that Malpighi was in a sense a preforma- tionist, for he had concluded that the chick is present in the incubated egg. This erroneous conclusion rested upon the observation that when hen eggs which had lain in a warm climate for some time were opened, it was found that development of the new individual had already begun, as indeed it has by the time a fertilized egg is laid. Moreover, since we now know that not all the cytoplasm of an ovum has the same potentialities, it is clear that present-day ideas of development might in some measure still be regarded as embodying a preformation hypothesis, although our ideas contain none of the early implications, and could we but go back farther in oogenesis with our experimental efforts, we would no doubt reach a stage in development in which the segregation of develop¬ mental potentialities probably had not yet occurred. When Malpighi saw something new he was not con¬ tent until others also had seen it, and some of his great discoveries are recorded in letters to his friends. That he took keen delight in his work is shown by his declaration that “in performing these researches so many marvels of nature were spread before my eyes that I experienced an internal pleasure that my pen could not describe.” This devotion to practical stud¬ ies caused him to be ridiculed, and he, like his great predecessor Harvey, was taunted by being asked how dissecting plants and watching the eggs of silkworms and hens hatch could possibly help cure the diseases of man. It is a strange commentary on modern life that there are those among us who still ask this same outworn question. Since the labors of great men of the past often seem magnified by our forgetfulness of other workers in their field of activity and their time, it is well to recall briefly some of Malpighi’s approximate con¬ temporaries in anatomy. Among these were Bar¬ tholin, Bellini, Brunner, Cowper, du Hamel, de Graaf, Gall, Glisson, Highmore, Meibom, Nuck, Peyer, Riolan, Rivinus, Ruysch, Schneider, Steno, Swam¬ merdam, Sylvius, Tulp, Wharton, Willis, Wirsung, etc. These names are known to all physicians, and most of them still are associated with parts of the human body, but Malpighi was greater than any of these. We still associate his name not with one but