338 Comparative Anatomy — Its History, Aim, and Method 



Eustachius (1520-74) was a Roman contemporary of Vesalius. 

 He is at a disadvantage historically because much of his work was 

 unpublished and lost. Enough remains to show that he was a very 

 capable anatomist and possibly even a rival of Vesalius, with whose 

 work he found considerable fault. His name comes down to us in the 

 term "Eustachian tube," referring to the passage leading from the 

 "middle ear" to the rear of the nasal passage (nasopharynx). 



Fallopius (1523-62) was a student of Vesalius and became pro- 

 fessor of anatomy at Padua. He studied especially the viscera and 

 nervous system. His name is attached to the anterior division, "Fal- 

 lopian tube," of the vertebrate oviduct. 



Fabricius ab Aquapendente (1537-1619), having studied under 

 Fallopius, succeeded him at Padua and did permanently important 

 work in vertebrate comparative anatomy and also on the embryology 

 of the chick and of mammals. 



PHYSIOLOGY, HISTOLOGY, EMBRYOLOGY 



From Vesalius to the present, there has been no interruption of 

 the progress of anatomic and medical science. Its rate of progress, 

 however, has been variable and the science has undergone important 

 changes in point of view and objective. A notable event in the seven- 

 teenth century was the discovery of the circulation of the blood. 

 William Harvey (1578-1657), an Englishman, took his "arts" degree 

 at the University of Cambridge and then went to Padua to study 

 medicine. He worked in anatomy under Fabricius and so became an 

 intellectual descendant of Vesalius. Having obtained his medical 

 degree, he returned to England and devoted his life to medical practice 

 and research. His great work on the movements of the heart and the 

 circulation of the blood is commonly regarded as marking the beginning 

 of modern Physiology. He did important work also on the embryology 

 of the chick and of mammals. 



The invention of the compound microscope at about the middle 

 of the seventeenth century opened the door to fields vitally related 

 to anatomy. Malpighi (1628-94), working mainly at Bologna, sup- 

 plied a deficiency in Harvey's account of the circulation by demon- 

 strating the microscopic capillaries through which the blood flows from 

 arteries into veins. He also saw the blood-corpuscles. Malpighi and his 

 Dutch contemporaries, Swammerdam (1637-80) and Leeuwenhoek 

 (1632-1723), directed their primitive microscopes toward the study of 

 the anatomy of minute organisms, the minute anatomy of larger organ- 

 isms, and the finer structure of tissues. Their work therefore included 

 the beginnings of Histology. The name Malpighi remains attached to 

 several vertebrate structures — the "Malpighian layer" of the epi- 



