JOHN BANISTER AND THE PULMONARY 



CIRCULATION 



I 



WHILE MUCH has been written about the background of William Harvey's 

 discovery of the circulation of the blood, very little attention has been 

 paid to an earlier Englishman, John Banister, who brought to the notice of 

 his countrymen, in their own language, one of the important steps leading 

 to this discovery, the idea of the pulmonary circulation. In 1578 Banister pub- 

 lished an anatomical text, The Historie of Man sucked from the sappe of the 

 most approved Anathomistes, which was based largely on the works of Vesalius 

 and of Realdus Columbus, and which contained in detail the views of Colum- 

 bus on the passage of blood through the lungs. 



Except for Sir D'Arcy Power, who was particularly interested in Banister's 

 influence on the teaching of anatomy and surgery, most historians of anatomy 

 and those who have written on the history of the discovery of the circulation 

 of the blood have passed over Banister's work, either not mentioning it at all, 

 or saying that it was based entirely on classical authorities, or was of no inter- 

 est. In some instances these statements lead to completely erroneous views as 

 to the anatomical ideas of the period. 



There have been two fairly recent articles which refer to Banister, by R. F. 

 Jones and by Goldwin Smith,^ which should be mentioned. Both of these 

 authors speak depreciatingly of Elizabethan medicine, including anatomy, 

 and yet both seem unaware of the important works in the field of anatomy 

 which led to the rapid dissemination of the ideas of Vesalius and of the other 

 great Renaissance anatomists. While there was little original investigation in 

 anatomy in sixteenth-century England, it is important that the latest ideas 

 were made known to English anatomists and surgeons very soon after their 

 appearance on the Continent. Yet Smith says: "The influence of the Renais- 

 sance in the field of medicine in England was not significant. The ferment 

 caused upon the Continent by Vesalius's 'De Himiani Corporis Fabrica' raised 

 but feeble echoes, even in Oxford, Cambridge and London . . . Considerable 

 and varied evidence indicates that England took no active part in the medical 

 Renaissance of the Continent until the appearance of Harvey's 'de Motu 

 Cordis' in 1628." 



They both seem to think of Thomas Vicary's A profitable Treatise of the 

 Anatomie of mans body, published in 1577, although presumably based on an 

 earlier edition of 1548 not now extant, as the typical anatomical work of the 

 period. Jones speaks of Vicary as "the author of the first English treatise on 

 anatomy, published four years after Vesalius had laid the foundations for 

 modern anatomy in a book not drawn from Galen but based upon actual 

 dissection and observation," while Smith says: "Even the great Vicary, physi- 



