3. Harvey and the circulation of the blood.
Man as machine. Herbs, witches and the rise of rationalism.
Hippocrates ca. 460 BC
-----------------------
Corpus Hippocratus brought to the library in Alexandria 300 B.C.
Aristotle 384-322 B.C.
---------------------
Galen 130-200 A.D.
-----------------
East and West in the history of science.
----------------------------------------
Development of what we think of as modern science hardly started before
the 17th century. Development in Mesopotamia, Egypt India & China by the
beginning of 3000 bc. "ex oriente lux, ex occidente lex". In 4,500 BC
Egyptians had decimal system of numbers. In 4241 BC the Eyptians had a
calendar of 365 days. We have a papyrus, the "Rhind" papyrus, from 1750 BC
which contains many of the geometrical methods of Euclid 1300 years
later. Of the same era is the "Edwin Smith" papyrus which gives 48 case
histories of medical significance under the heading of name,
examination, diagnosis, judgement, treatment, gloss. It is now our
judgement that a lot of what we think of as Greek science and
mathematics was in fact transmitted from Egypt and Mesopotamia.
There is a thousand year gap between our knowledge of Greek science and
that of Egypt and Mesopotamia which is unlikely to be filled. This
period coincides with the replacement of bronze by iron which
obliterated the transmitting culture of the Aegean. But Greek astonomy
largely came from Babylonian sources. Whereas the flowering of Greek
art is not remarkably better than Egyptian the Greek scientific
achievement is immeasurably superior though founded upon its
predecessors. Sarton considers that the scientific achievements of the
Greeks outstripped their political wisdom and their morality and this
stultified its further deelopment. Thus Euripides "blessed is he who
has attained scientific knowledge, who seeks neither the troubles of
citizenship nor rushes into unjust deeds, but contemplates the ageless
order of immortal nature...".
The Romans who vanquished the Greeks distrusted science except as
directly applied, and the Christian tradition as the Hebrew before it
was inimical to knowledge, preferring love and charity. In 100 ad a
Christian was to write that the Greeks excelled only in writing and
lying. The contact between Greek thought and western civilisation was
maintained by the intervention of the Arabs. The Muslim empire that
developed from 610 adeventually conquered Persia in its spread to the
east.
In Baghdad from 750 to 1258 the Abbasid dynasty used Syrian translators
to recover Greek knowledge and prepare Arabic versions of the major
Greek works. Unlike Christianity the devout Muslim had a duty to read
the holy book, so that schools were set up a a religuous duty and the
book,the Koran, was in Arabic. Thus the empire of the Moslems was as
bound as the Roman empire by a common language. And during the
flowering of the Moslem empire the believers tolerated the unbelievers,
even the Jews whose treatise Guide of the Perplexed by Maimonides was
even written in Arabic, as were the earliest Hebrew grammars. The other
religuous duty of the Moslem, the pilgrimage to mecca served to unify
and diversify the spread of knowledge throughout the empire. Around
1020 there was a mathematical school in Cairo where cubic equations
were solved, while in the west the common attainments scarcely reached
arithmetic.
We can only speculate as to how is it that the
oriental supremacy was lost shortly thereafter. A further translation
effort begun by Constantine the African who translated a large amount
of Greek work back from Arabic into Latin in the Monastery of Monte
Cassino before he died in 1087. Down to about 1250 the main effort of
Christian scholars became the translation of Greek work from Arabic
into Latin. Some even translated direct from the Greek in the later
phases. An astronomical work, the Almagest was translated from Greek in
Sicily in 1160, but the prestige of the translator from the Arabic,
Gerard of Cremona, was such that his later translation in 1175 was more
popular.
As the Jewish scholars became more isolated from the Moslem
tradition fewer had Arabic and could read the arabic texts, so a second
wave of translations followed in the 14th century, as Latin works were
translated into Hebrew for the Jewish doctors. And finally in the
fourteenth century some works were translated back into Greek!
By the 13th century the intellectuals of the western tradition, Roger
Bacon, Albertus Magnus were acknowledging the superiority of Moslem
culture that was already in decline. The decline of Moslem Spain and
the increasingly inward-looking tendency of the Jews meant that the
oriental origins of the resurgence of science became forgotten. But the
final contribution of mediaeval science was the development of the
experimental spirit, which was almost completely missing from the Greek
tradition with the exception of medecine.
The first great exponent of experiment in medecine was perhaps Leonardo
da Vinci(1452-1519).
The alternative tradition - Witchcraft.
--------------------------------------
From the 13th Century onward the belief in witches and witchcraft
spread rapidly across Europe. In 1484 Pope Innocent V111 published a
bull " Summis Desiderantes" condemneing witches as heretics and
included those who interfered with human fertility. The infamous
"Malleus Maleficarum" was written with Papal approval, giving much
detail on the practices and detection of witches. The result was 200
years of torture at the hands of the Inquisition. In England, after
the Reformation, the Protestant belief in and hatred of witchcraft
intensified. Between 1542 and 1685 a thousand witches were executed
and over the whole period of persecution about one in five accused of
witchcraft in England were killed. The number in Scotland was higher
and in Europe as a whole over 200,000 were killed in 400 years. That
such a reign of terror was perpetrated in the name of Christianity may
seem strange today, but the mediaeval view of religion was very
different, finding nothing strange in torture to extract confessions
to palpably impossible feats such as riding on broomsticks. John
Wesley, a hero of protestantism, is on record as saying as late as 1768
that "The giving up of (belief in) witchcraft is in effect the giving
up of the Bible".
It took great courage to protest. In 1584 Reginald Scot published
his "Discovery of Witches" which denied the reality of the Devil and
Witches and his lead was followed by others. Perhaps the most
influential was Sir John Holt, Lord chief Justice 1689 - 1710 who used
his authority to direct every jury under him to dismiss cases brought
under the Act of 1604 in which James I gave vent to his personal
bigotry.
Nowadays the more sensational newspapers call spirits, poltergeists,
and people no longer blame old women for stones thrown
mysteriously in the night, or the death of cattle or young children.
Michael Servetus
----------------
Fabricius
----------
Girolamo Fabrizi d'Aquapendente, who is known by his latinized name of
Vesalius
--------
A lecturer at Padua, Vesalius, who published a monumental work on
anatomy De Humani Corporis Fabrica in Basle in 1543. Vesalius found
that publication did not bring admiration in Padua, and he left to
become personal physician to the Imperial household of the Emperor
Charles V, being succeeded by his student Columbus and then by
Gabriele Fallopius
Realdus Columbus
----------------
Ambrose Pare 1510-1590.
------------------------
He was a barber-surgeons apprentice. Practised the tying off of
arteries rather than cauterising them and stopped the practice of
treating gunshot wounds with boiling oil.
Harvey 1578-1657.
----------------
Harvey was born in Folkestone and and went from King's School,
Canterbury to Gonville and Caius College Cambridge in in 1593, studying
the normal arts and philosophy course, which concentrated on an
examination of the works of Aristotle. For his training in medicine he
went to Padua in Italy in 1597.
Padua was then the foremost medical school in Europe, and the
university had just rebuilt the anatomy theatre, steeply raked with
galleries, seating 200 students. This was the first permanent Anatomy
Theatre in any University and it still can be seen there. The Professor
of Anatomy was was Fabricius.
The curriculum at Padua was conventional, based on the works of
Galen(130-200) a Greek who practised in Rome, and whose written works
had survived the dark ages. Galen had been a physician to gladiators at
festivals and came to the notice of Marcus Aurelius, eventually
becoming the Emperor's personal pysician. In a resurgence of anatomy at
Padua, linked to Vesalius in the 1530s, demonstrations of anatomy,
using the bodies of executed criminals, were regularly held. But
Fabricius, who taught rarely, was concerned not with the Galenic
programme, but with extending the medical researches of Aristotle. He
was concerned with functional anatomy, looking at the functions of the
'animal' body, of which man was just an example.
Harvey graduated MD in 1602, and returned to London where he set up in
practice. At St. Bartholomews Hospital he was physician from 1609 until
1644, this was a one day a week appointment with a small salary where
the poor were treated under charitable conditions. He became a member
of College of Physicians and was appointed Lumleian lecturer there in
1615, holding the post until 1628.
His research concentrated on the function of the heart, an organ which
had not been covered by Fabricius, but which was central to the
Aristotelian view of man. It was believed at the time that the arterial
and venous systems were quite distinct and served different functions.
Veins were believed to distribute food extracted by the liver, the
arteries distributed pneuma, the life giving spirit, which was
extracted from the air by the lungs. It was also known that the heart
expands and contracts, but the pulsation of the arteries was thought to
be independent of the movement of the heart. Harvey, however, took as
his subject not just the heart but the heart and the arteries, and in
order to investigate the organs function he carried out extensive
vivisection on animals. Thus he was able to watch live hearts beating
as animals died under his knife. The fact that the blood circulates
around the body in man and in everything that has blood is by no means
obvious, even after Harvey's discovery it was not possible to observe
it directly, and the evidence was all circumstantial.
He discovered the circulation of the blood about 1618 but did not publish
until De Motu Cordis Sanguinis in Animalibus (Frankfurt 1628).
Although a great medical advance it had limited efect on the treatment of
patients.
Alphonse Borelli
----------------
Antony van Leeuwenhoek 1632-1723
---------------------------------
References
==========
Talbot C.H. & Hammond E.A.
The Medical practitioners in Mediaeval England
Wellcome 1965
Singer C. & Underwood E.A.
A Short History of Medicine.
Oxford 1962
Harvey Wm.
On the Circulation of the Blood
Everyman's Library (Dent)
The Circulation of Blood
Helen Rapson
Muller 1982
Keele K.
William Harvey
Nelson 1965
Keynes G.
The Life of William Harvey
Oxford 1966
William Harvey
Andrew Cunningham
in Man Masters Nature
Ed. Roy Porter
BBC Publications 1987
Last updated 23rd December 1998
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