AN ANATOMICAL STUDY ON THE 



wound in two opposite directions. In cutting open 

 an artery it is equally clear that the blood escapes in 

 one continuous direction and that no air either goes 

 in or comes out. 



If the pulsations of the arteries cool and purify 

 the various portions of the body as the lungs do the 

 heart, how, as is commonly said, do the arteries 

 carry from the heart to the separate parts the vital 

 blood stuffed with vital spirits, which keep up the 

 heat of these parts, nourish them in sleep, and re- 

 store them in exhaustion? How, if the arteries be 

 tied off, do the parts at once become not only torpid, 

 cold, and pale, but even cease to be nourished, 

 unless it be as Galen says that they have been de- 

 prived of that heat which fiowed through them from 

 the heart? So it would seem that the arteries carry 

 heat to the parts instead of cooling them. 



Now, how may the diastole draw spirits from the 

 heart to warm the parts at the same time from the 

 outside to cool them? Further, although some 

 state that the lungs, arteries, and heart have the 

 same function, they also say that the heart is the 

 factory of the spirits and that the arteries contain 

 and transmit them, denying, contrary to the opinion 

 of Columbus,^ that the lungs either make or contain 



^ Not Christopher but Matheus Realdus (1516-1559). A vain, 

 unscholarly, and unscrupulous man, pupil of Vesalius, and Professor 

 of Anatomy at Rome. In his De Re Anatomica (1559), he correctly 

 described the pulmonary circulation, but failed to realize the signifi- 

 cance of what he did. He made a distinct advance over the Galenists, 

 however, in thinking that blood was rendered "spiritous" by air in 



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