Syllabus of medical history / Victor Robinson.

  • Robinson, Victor, 1886-1947.
Date:
1933
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Syllabus of medical history / Victor Robinson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    cine. He allowed twelve years to elapse before publishing, in 1628, his Anatomical Disquisition on the Motion of the Heart and Blood. Harvey had sagacious forerunners from Galen down to Realdo Colombo, and his teacher Fabricius taught him that the venal valves are always directed toward the heart, yet in com¬ paring their work with his we realize that while his predecessors groped for the truth and advanced stumblingly, he understood clearly and demonstrated superbly. The dramatic feature of his discovery is the impression of a circuit moving uninterruptedly within us; instead of pools of stagnant blood, we now conceive of a continuous life-stream. With this conception began the read¬ ing of the cryptograms of function—the heart beat, tissue changes, metabolic processes, glandular activity, blood transfusion, the mechanism of respiration—and physiology as a working science came into being. 20. How was the capillary circulation discovered ? The riddle of respiration had puzzled philosophers at least since the days of Aristotle, and surely it is interesting to know how we breathe. Many of the acute minds of the mid-seventeenth century—Boyle, Hooke, Lower, Mayow, and Borelli—tackled this problem, and in 1660 it became the object of Malpighi’s inquiry. Up to this time the lung had been regarded as a sort of porous parenchyma—Fabricius compared it to tow—and it was believed that somewhere within its substance the smaller divisions of the pulmonary artery lost themselves, pouring out their blood into the open spaces, where it was later gathered up by the pulmonary veins, while the minuter parts of the windpipe were also supposed to terminate in this fleshy tissue. But now, with the aid of his lenses and the lungs of a dog, a tortoise, and a frog, Malpighi began that series of observations which has caused him to be re¬ garded as the greatest of microscopists and the founder of histol¬ ogy. He showed that instead of a perforated mass in which the blood was poured and then sucked out, the lung was vesicular in nature, the bronchi being continuous with the air vesicles, the air and blood of the lung never actually in contact, but separated by a membrane, and that the blood was constantly within chan¬ nels, even when crossing from the arteries to the veins—for he