514 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



tous discoveries until the advent of anesthesia and asepsis in the middle 

 of the nineteenth century. We may therefore leave surgery and turn 

 to Harvey and events in physiology prior to 1800. 



Harvey was of the Elizabethan period, a contemporary of Shake- 

 speare, Milton, Dryden, Bacon, Descartes and Kepler. He studied at 

 Cambridge and Padua and on his return to England, as Lumleian 

 lecturer, gave most of his time to teaching and dissection. It was 

 during the second year (1616) of such labors that he first propounded 

 his theory of the circulation of the blood, but it was not until 1628 that 

 his complete work on the subject was published. With the discussion 

 as to the part played by his forerunners, by Servetus, Csesalpinum and 

 others in elucidating the mysteries of the circulation we are not now 

 concerned. The honor of the establishment of the theory is Harvey's. 

 More than this, it was the character of his exhaustive observations on 

 a score of different animals (and on the heart of the chicken in ovo), 

 his logical reasoning, and his convincing experiments that finally led 

 to the correct solution and to the resurrection of a new method in 

 medicine, that of experimental physiology. It may be remembered 

 that Galen has been referred to as the first experimental physiologist; 

 after fourteen hundred years he was followed by Harvey; then came 

 Haller and Hunter, prophets of that modern experimental physiology 

 which was in the nineteenth century to advance along all lines and to 

 give to medicine a scientific foundation. 



It is difficult to overestimate the significance of Harvey's discovery 

 of the circulation of the blood. Sir Thomas Brown considered it 

 greater than Columbus's discovery of America; Hunter ranked it with 

 that of Columbus and that of Copernicus. Certainly it opened a new 

 world in medicine. Progress, however, did not immediately follow 

 Harvey's discovery, though four years after his death the capillary 

 system, a link necessary to the completion of his doctrine of the circula- 

 tion, was discovered by Malpighi. The period, was, however, one of 

 detailed observation in anatomy, and despite the work of Malpighi and 

 Borelli, experimental physiology languished until the time of Haller 

 (1708-1777), who made additions to the knowledge of the mechanics 

 of respiration, established the theory of irritability as a specific property 

 of muscle and made important observations in embryology. How 

 prophetic of the advances of the nineteenth century are the problems 

 with which Haller and Hunter busied themselves. The study of the 

 irritability of muscle suggests physiological instruments of precision, 

 and embryology implies the compound microscope and the microtome, 

 the familiar instruments of the latter nineteenth-century investigator 

 in medicine. Hunter's problems — phlebitis, aneurism, syphilis, inflam- 

 mation, the repair of wounds, the coagulation of the blood — remind 

 one of many phases of present-day investigation. Prophetic also of the 



