RENAISSANCE I13 



There was another whose opinions on the question of the circulation 

 of the blood attracted far greater attention than the above-mentioned con- 

 tribution to the subject. This was the Italian botanist and physician Ce- 

 sALPiNO, who is still to this day extolled by his countrymen as the true 

 discoverer of the circulation of the blood. Andrea Cesalpino was born at 

 Arezzo in Tuscany in 15 19. He studied philosophy and medicine at Pisa, 

 the latter under Columbus, who was called to that city from Padua. At the 

 age of thirty he became a doctor of medicine and shortly afterwards professor 

 of pharmacology at Pisa. In this capacity he devoted special attention to 

 the study of botany and is reputed one of the pioneers of that science. His 

 contributions in this field will be dealt with in another connexion. In his 

 old age he was summoned to Rome, where he was appointed body-physician 

 to the Pope, and where he died in 1605. 



Cesalpino was a man of manifold interest; besides botany and pharma- 

 cology he studied anatomy, mineralogy, and metallurgy, but he was above 

 all a natural philosopher in the true Aristotelean spirit. His theoretical spec- 

 ulations he published in a work with the characteristic title of Peripatetic 

 Problems. In this book he endeavours to find a general explanation of nature 

 along Aristotelean lines; in the purely philosophical aspect of his conclu- 

 sions he goes beyond his master by deriving both form and matter from a 

 single supreme principle, but as a physicist he takes his stand on the old 

 ground, with celestial spheres and circular planetary orbits, heaviness and 

 lightness as a quality of bodies — everything in fact which Galileo was 

 intent on demolishing.^ Even his biology, the subject of the fifth book, en- 

 tirely follows the lines of Aristotle. It opens with the purely mediasval scho- 

 lastic thesis that if the life in a being is one and indivisible, the body must 

 also be one and its centre one, whence life emanates to the rest of animate 

 things. Plants and lower animals, which are able to live even when cut up 

 into bits, require no such centre point, but in sanguineous animals the heart 

 without doubt constitutes this centre point — the heart, which is the first 

 to begin to live and the last to die, and which is situated in the centre of 

 the body. Thereupon Cesalpino endeavours, in a polemic against Galen inter- 

 larded with quotations from Aristotle, to prove that the veins originate in 

 the heart and not in the liver, and that the nerves likewise originate in the 

 heart and not in the brain, the latter point being proved, i7Jter alia, by the 

 fact that happiness and grief are felt first in the heart, while the function 

 of the brain is to cool the blood, like the receptacle in a distilling appara- 

 tus. By thus swearing to the truth of his master's word, both good and 

 evil, Cesalpino at any rate makes this point in regard to the circulation of 



^ Curiously enough, even Cesalpino, in spite of his loyal Aristoteleanism, fell into the 

 hands of the Inquisition, but he saved himself by his dialectical cleverness, and perhaps also 

 owing to his being in the papal service. 



