Part 7

Through these attacks, however, the writings of Vesalius fell into somewhat bad odour in the court; for in that very superstitious age there was a kind of vague dread felt of reading the works of a man against whom such serious charges of arrogance and impiety were brought. And so it came about that when he received the summons to take up his residence permanently at Madrid, and the orthodoxy of the day seemed for the moment to triumph, in a fit of proud indignation, he burned all his manuscripts; destroying a huge volume of annotations upon Galen; a whole book of medical formulæ; many original notes on drugs; the copy of Galen from which he lectured, and which was covered with marginal notes of new observations that had occurred to him while demonstrating; and the paraphrases of the books of Rhases, in which the knowledge of the Arabian was collated with that of the Greeks and others. The produce of the labour of many years was thus reduced to ashes in a short fit of passion, and from this time Vesalius lived no more for controversy or study. He gave himself up to pleasure and the pursuit of wealth, resting on his reputation and degenerating into a mere courtier. As a practitioner he was held in high esteem. When the life of Don Carlos, Philip's son, was despaired of, it was Vesalius who was called in, and who, seeing that the surgeons had bound up the wound in the head so tightly that an abscess had formed, promptly brought relief to the patient by cutting into the pericranium. The cure of the prince, however, was attributed by the court to the intercession of St. Diego, and it is possible that on the subject of this alleged miraculous recovery Vesalius may have expressed his opinion rather more strongly than it was safe for a Netherlander to do. At any rate, the priests always looked upon him with dislike and suspicion, and at length they and the other enemies of the great anatomist had their revenge.

A young Spanish nobleman had died, and Vesalius, who had attended him, obtained permission to ascertain, if possible, by a post-mortem examination, the cause of death. On opening the body, the heart was said--by the bystanders--to beat; and a charge, not merely of murder, but of impiety also, was brought against Vesalius. It was hoped by his persecutors that the latter charge would be brought before the Inquisition, and result in more rigorous punishment than any that would be inflicted by the judges of the common law. The King of Spain, however, interfered and saved him, on condition that he should make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Accordingly he set out from Madrid for Venice, and thence to Cyprus, from which place he went on to Jerusalem, and was returning, not to Madrid, but to Padua, where the professorship of physic had been offered him, when he suffered shipwreck on the island of Zante, and there perished miserably of hunger and grief, on October 15, 1564, before he had reached the age of fifty. His body was found by a travelling goldsmith, who recognized, notwithstanding their starved outlines, the features of the renowned anatomist, and respectfully buried his remains and raised a statue to his memory.

Two of the works of this great man have been already referred to, namely: "De Corporis Humani Fabrica;" "De usu Radicis Chinæ." Besides these the following have appeared: "Examen Observationum Gabrielis Fallopii;" "Gabrielis Cunei Examen, Apologiæ Francisci Putei pro Galeno in Anatome;" a great work on Surgery in seven books.

With respect to the last of these, it may be sufficient to remark that there is every reason to believe that the name of the famous anatomist was stolen after his death to give value to the production, which was compiled and published by a Venetian named Bogarucci; and that Vesalius is not responsible for the contents.

The other works are undoubtedly genuine. In 1562 Andreas seems to have been roused for a short time from the lethargy into which he had sunk, by an attack from Franciscus Puteus; for to this attack a reply appeared--from a writer calling himself Gabriel Cuneus--which has always been attributed by the most competent authorities to Vesalius himself. In this rather long work, covering as it does more than fifty pages in the folio edition, the views of Vesalius, which are at variance with Galen, are gone through seriatim and defended.

In 1561 Fallopius, who had studied under Vesalius, published his "Anatomical Observations," containing several points in which he had extended the knowledge of anatomy beyond the limits reached by his master. He had taught publicly for thirteen years at Ferrara, and had presided for eight years over an anatomical school, so that he was no novice in the field of biology. Yet so completely had Vesalius lost the philosophic temperament that he regarded this publication as an infringement of his rights, and in this spirit wrote an "Examen Observationum Fallopii," in which he decried the friend who had made improvements on himself, as he had been decried for his improvements on Galen. The manuscript of this work, finished at the end of December, 1561, was committed by the author to the care of Paulus Teupulus of Venice, orator to the King of Spain, who was to give it to Fallopius. The orator, however, did not reach Padua until after the death of Fallopius, and he consequently retained the document until Vesalius, on his way to Jerusalem, took possession of it, and caused it to be published without delay. It appeared at Venice in 1564.

The letter on the China root--a plant we know nowadays as sarsaparilla--by the use of which the emperor's recovery was effected, has been already referred to. It was addressed to the anatomist's friend, Joachim Roelants. Very little space, however, is taken up with a description of the medicine which gives title to the letter. Something certainly is said of the history and nature of the plant, the preparation of the decoction and its effects; but the writer soon introduces the subject which was at that time of very vital importance to him, namely, his position with regard to the statements of Galen and his followers. He collects together various assertions of the Greek anatomist, on the bones, the muscles and ligaments, the relations of veins and arteries, the nerves, the character of the peritoneum, the organs of the thorax, the skull and its contents, etc., and shows from each and all of these that reference had not been made to the human subject, and that therefore the statements were unreliable.

To the work on the "Fabric of the Human Body" we have already alluded, as well as to the causes which led to its being written. More than half of this great treatise is occupied with a minute description of the build of the human body--its bones, cartilages, ligaments, and muscles. It may have been owing to the thorough acquaintance which Vesalius showed with these parts that his detractors pretended afterwards that he only understood superficial injuries. But other branches of anatomy are fully dealt with. The veins and arteries are described in the third book, and the nerves in the fourth; the organs of nutrition and reproduction are treated of in the next; while the remaining two books are devoted to descriptions of the heart and brain.

Vesalius gives a good account of the sphenoid bone, with its large and small wings and its pterygoid processes; and he accurately describes the vestibule in the interior of the temporal bone. He shows the sternum to consist, in the adult, of three parts and the sacrum of five or six. He discovered the valve which guards the foramen ovale in the ftus; and he not only verified the observation of Etienne as to the valve-like fold guarding the entrance of each hepatic vein into the inferior vena cava, but he also fully described the vena azygos. He observed, too, the canal which passes in the ftus between the umbilical vein and vena cava, and which has since been known as the ductus venosus. He was the first to study and describe the mediastinum, correcting the error of the ancients, who believed that this duplicature of the pleura contained a portion of the lungs. He described the omentum and its connections with the stomach, the spleen, and the colon; and he enunciated the first correct views of the structure of the pylorus, noticing at the same time the small size of the cæcal appendix in man. His account of the anatomy of the brain is fuller than that of any of his predecessors, but he does not appear to have well understood the inferior recesses, and his description of the nerves is confused by regarding the optic as the first pair, the third as the fifth, and the fifth as the seventh. The ancients believed the optic nerve to be hollow for the conveyance of the visual spirit, but Vesalius showed that no such tube existed. He observed the elevation and depression of the brain during respiration, but being ignorant of the circulation of the blood, he wrongly explained the phenomenon.

Exclusively an anatomist, he makes but brief references in his great work to the functions of the organs which he describes. Where he differs from Galen on these matters he does so apologetically. He follows him in regarding the heart as the seat of the emotions and passions--the hottest of all the viscera and source of heat of the whole body; although he does not, as Aristotle did, look upon the heart as giving rise to the nerves. He considers the heart to be in ceaseless motion, alternately dilating and contracting, but the diastole is in his opinion the influential act of the organ. He knows that eminences or projections are present in the veins, and indeed speaks of them as being analogous to the valves of the heart, but he denies to them the office of valves. To him the motion of the blood was of a to-and-fro kind, and valves in the veins acting as such would have interfered with anything of the sort. He expresses clearly the idea, that was entertained in the old physiology, of the attractions exerted by the various parts of the body for the blood; and especially that of the veins and heart for the blood itself. "The right sinus of the heart," he says, "attracts blood from the vena cava, and the left attracts air from the lungs through the arteria venalis (pulmonary vein), the blood itself being attracted by the veins in general, the vital spirit by the arteries." Again, he speaks of the blood filtering through the septum between the ventricles as if through a sieve, although he knows perfectly well from his dissection that the septum is quite impervious.

It will thus be seen that the physiological teaching of Galen was left undisturbed by Vesalius.

FOOTNOTES:

See Professor Morley's article on "Anatomy in Long Clothes," in Fraser's Magazine, 1853, from which most of the facts in this sketch have been taken.

HARVEY.

HARVEY.

The importance of Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood can only be properly estimated by bearing in mind what was done by his predecessors in the same field of inquiry. Aristotle had taught that in man and in the higher brutes the blood was elaborated from the food in the liver, conveyed to the heart, and thence distributed by it through the veins to the whole body. Erasistratus and Herophilus held that, while the veins carried blood from the heart to the members, the arteries carried a subtle kind of air or spirit. Galen discovered that the arteries were not merely air-pipes, but that they contained blood as well as vital air or spirit. Sylvius, the teacher of Vesalius, was aware of the presence of valves in the veins; and Fabricius, Harvey's teacher at Padua, described them much more accurately than Sylvius had done; but neither of these men had a true idea of the significance of the structures of which they wrote. Servetus, the friend and contemporary of Vesalius, writing in 1533, correctly described the course of the lesser circulation in the following words: "This communication (i.e. between the right and left sides of the heart) does not take place through the partition of the heart, as is generally believed; but by another admirable contrivance, whereby from the right ventricle the subtle blood is agitated in a lengthened course through the lungs, wherein prepared, it becomes of a crimson colour, and from the vena arterialis (pulmonary artery) is transferred into the arteria venalis (pulmonary vein). Mingled with the inspired air in the arteria venalis, freed by respiration from fuliginous matter, and become a suitable home of the vital spirit, it is attracted at length into the left ventricle of the heart by the diastole of the organ." But when Servetus comes to speak of the systemic circulation, what he has to say is as old as Galen.

The opinions, therefore, on the subject of the blood and its distribution which were prevalent at the end of the sixteenth century prove--

(1) That although the blood was not regarded as stagnant, yet its circulation, such as is nowadays recognized, was unknown;

(2) That one kind of blood was thought to flow from the liver to the right ventricle, and thence to the lungs and general system by the veins, while another kind flowed from the left ventricle to the lungs and general system by the arteries;

(3) That the septum of the heart was regarded as admitting of the passage of blood directly from the right to the left side;

(4) That there was no conception of the functions of the heart as the motor power of the movement of the blood, for biologists of that day doubted whether the substance of the heart were really muscular; they supposed the pulsations to be due to expansion of the spirits it contained; they believed the only dynamic effect which it had on the blood to be that of 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.

This was the state of knowledge before Harvey's time. By his great work he established--

(1) That the blood flows continuously in a circuit through the whole body, the force propelling it in this unwearied round being the rhythmical contractions of the muscular walls of the heart;

(2) That a portion only of the blood is expended in nutrition each time that it circulates;

(3) That the blood conveyed in the systemic arteries communicates heat as well as nourishment throughout the body, instead of exerting a cooling influence, as was vulgarly supposed; and

(4) That the pulse is not produced by the arteries enlarging and so filling, but by the arteries being filled with blood and so enlarging.

We can now consider the method by which Harvey arrived at these results. The work, "De Motu Cordis et Sanguinis," after giving an account of the views of preceding physiologists, ancient and modern, commences with a description of the heart as seen in a living animal when the chest has been laid open and the pericardium removed. Three circumstances are noted--

(a) The heart becomes erect, strikes the chest, and gives a beat;