Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England

Part 1

Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England

Charles W. Bodemer

Lester S. King

William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England

Embryological Thought in Seventeenth Century England

by Charles W. Bodemer

Robert Boyle as an Amateur Physician

by Lester S. King

Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967

William Andrews Clark Memorial Library University of California, Los Angeles/1968

Foreword

Although the collection of scientific literature in the Clark Library has already served as the background for a number of seminars, in the most recent of them the literature of embryology and the medical aspects of Robert Boyle's thought were subjected to a first and expert examination. Charles W. Bodemer, of the Division of Biomedical History, School of Medicine, University of Washington, evaluated the embryological ideas of that remarkable group of inquiring Englishmen, Sir Kenelm Digby, Nathaniel Highmore, William Harvey, and Sir Thomas Browne. Lester S. King, Senior Editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, dealt with the medical side of Robert Boyle's writings, the collection of which constitutes one of the chief glories of the Clark Library. It was a happy marriage of subject matter and library's wealth, the former a noteworthy oral presentation, the latter a spectacular exhibit. As usual, and of necessity, the audience was restricted in size, far smaller in numbers than all those who are now able to enjoy the presentations in their present, printed form.

C. D. O'MALLEY

Professor of Medical History, UCLA

Embryological Thought in Seventeenth Century England

CHARLES W. BODEMER

To discuss embryological thought in seventeenth-century England is to discuss the main currents in embryological thought at a time when those currents were both numerous and shifting. Like every other period, the seventeenth century was one of transition. It was an era of explosive growth in scientific ideas and techniques, suffused with a creative urge engendered by new philosophical insights and the excitement of discovery. During the seventeenth century, the ideas relating to the generation and development of organisms were quite diverse, and there were seldom criteria other than enthusiasm or philosophical predilection to distinguish the fanciful from the feasible. Applying a well-known phrase from another time to seventeenth-century embryological theory, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness."

Embryology underwent some very significant changes during the seventeenth century. At the beginning of the century, embryology was descriptive and clearly directed toward morphological goals; by the end of the century, a dynamic, more physiological attitude was apparent, and theories of development derived from an entirely different philosophic base. During this time, English investigators contributed much, some of ephemeral, some of lasting importance to the development of embryology. For this discussion, we will divide the seventeenth century into three overlapping, but generally distinct, periods; and, without pretence of presenting an exhaustive exposition, we will concentrate upon the concepts and directions of change characteristic of each period, with primary reference to those individuals who best reveal the character of seventeenth-century English embryology.

An understanding of the characteristics of embryological thought at the beginning of the seventeenth century may enhance appreciation of later developments. During the latter part of the sixteenth century, the study of embryology was, for obvious reasons, most often considered within the province of anatomy and obstetrics. From Bergengario da Capri to Jean Riolan the Younger, study of the fetus was recommended as an adjunct of these subjects, and it required investigation by direct observation, as decreed by the "restorers" of anatomy. Embryonic development was, however, also studied independently of other disciplines by a smaller group of individuals, and the study of chick development by Aldrovandus, Coiter, and Fabricius ab Aquapendente laid the basic groundwork of descriptive embryology. In either case, during the last half of the sixteenth century the attempt of the embryologist to break with the traditions of the past was overt, although consistently unsuccessful. When dealing with the fetus, the investigators of this period were, almost to a man, Galenists influenced to varying degrees by Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Avicenna. Each felt compelled to challenge the immediate authority, and yet their intellectual isolation from the past was incomplete, and their views on embryogeny corresponded with more often than they differed from those of the person they railed against.

Embryology emerged as a distinct scientific discipline during the last half of the sixteenth century and early years of the seventeenth century as a result of the aforementioned investigations of Aldrovandus, Coiter, and Fabricius. Concerned with description and depiction of the anatomy of the embryo, they established a period of macro-iconography in embryology. The macro-iconographic era was empirical and based upon first-hand observation; it was concerned more with the facts than with the theories of development. This empiricism existed in competition with a declining, richly vitalistic Aristotelian rationalism which had virtually eliminated empiricism during the scholastic period. However, the decline of this vitalistic rationalism coincided with the rise of a mechanistic rationalism which had its roots in ancient Greek atomistic theories of matter. The empiricism comprising the leitmotif of the macro-iconographic movement then became blended with, or, more often, submerged within, the new variety of rationalism; hence, mechanistic rationalism, divorced entirely or virtually from empiricism, characterizes embryology during the first half of the seventeenth century. It is a particularly vigorous strain of seventeenth-century English embryological thought, well illustrated in the writings of that English man of affairs, Sir Kenelm Digby.

Digby, whose name, according to one biographer, "is almost synonymous with genius and eccentricity," could claim our attention not only as a scientist of talent, but also as a statesman, soldier, pirate, lover, and a Roman Catholic possessed of sufficient piety and naked courage to attempt the conversion of Oliver Cromwell. Like his father, who was hanged for participation in the Gunpowder Plot, Digby was a political creature, and during the Civil War he was imprisoned for several years. When freed, Digby left England to settle in France. Spending much time at the court of the Queen Dowager, who had been instrumental in securing his release, and exposed to the vigorous intellectual currents of Paris and Montpellier, Digby labored upon a treatise of greater scientific substance and merit than his more famous work on "the powder of sympathy." Published in 1644 under the title Two Treatises, in the One of Which, The Nature of Bodies; in the Other, the Nature of Mans Soule; is Looked into, in Way of Discovery of the Immortality of Reasonable Soules, the book consists of a highly individual survey of the entire realms of metaphysics, physics, and biology.

Digby's cannons were aimed at scholasticism, which, despite "greatly exaggerated" reports, did not die with the Middle Ages. The spirit of scholasticism was alive in many quarters well into the seventeenth century, and although many scholars worked in pursuit of original knowledge, they did not always disturb the scholastic philosophic basis from which their work derived. For example, in his impressive De formato foetu, published in 1604, when Sir Kenelm Digby was one year old, Fabricius all too often submerges a substantial body of observations within a dense tangle of philosophical discussion. Thus, in the same treatise that contains the first illustrations and commendably accurate descriptions of the daily progress of the chick's development, Fabricius devotes an inordinate amount of space to tedious discussions of material and efficient causes in development, emphasizing thereby the supremacy of the logical framework to the observations. In 1620, Digby's last year of study at Oxford University, Fienus published a work, De Formatrice Foetus, designed to demonstrate that the human embryo receives the rational soul on the third day after conception and to discuss at length such subjects as the efficient cause of embryogeny and the proposition that the conformation of the fetus is a vital, not a natural, action. Various expressions of Aristotelian and scholastic biology were clearly abroad during the first half of the seventeenth century, and there is reason, then, for Digby's attack upon Aristotelian ideas of form and matter and of the persistence of "qualities" in physics and "faculties" in biology.

Expressing his disdain of word-spinning, Digby attempts to explain all phenomena by two "virtues" only, rarity and density working by local motion. In discussing embryonic development, Digby writes, "...our maine question shall be, Whether they be framed entirely at once; or successively, one part after another? And, if this later way, which part first?" Toward this end, Digby makes some direct observations upon the development of the chick embryo, incubating the eggs so that the "creatures ... might be continually in our power to observe in them the course of nature every day and houre." His description of chick development is of epigenetic bent:

...you may lay severall egges to hatch; and by breaking them at severall ages you may distinctly observe every hourely mutation in them, if you please. The first will bee, that on one side you shall find a great resplendent clearnesse in the white. After a while, a little spott of red matter like bload, will appeare in the middest of that clearnesse fastened to the yolke: which will have a motion of opening and shutting; so as sometimes you will see it, and straight againe it will vanish from your sight; and indeede att the first it is so litle, that you can not see it, but by the motion of it; for att every pulse, as it openeth, you may see it, and immediately againe, it shutteth in such sort, as it is not to be discerned. From this red specke, after a while there will streame out, a number of litle (almost imperceptible) red veines. Att the end of some of which, in time there will be gathered together, a knotte of matter which by litle and litle, will take the forme of a head; and you will ere long beginne to discerne eyes and a beake in it. All this while the first red spott of blood, groweth bigger and solider; till att the length, it becometh a fleshy substance; and by its figure, may easily be discerned to be the hart: which as yet hath no other enclosure but the substance of the egge. But by litle and litle the rest of the body of an animal is framed out of those red veines which streame out all aboute from the hart. And in processe of time, that body incloseth the hart within it by the chest, which groweth over on both sides, and in the end meeteth, and closeth it selfe fast together. After which this litle creature soone filleth the shell, by converting into severall partes of it selfe all the substance of the egge. And then growing weary of so straight an habitation, it breaketh prison, and cometh out, a perfectly formed chicken.

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