4G4 MODERN DEVELOPMENTS OF HARVEy's WORK. 



Ill speaking about the work of Blake and Sliarpey, who are both 

 dead, one requires to use the greatest care not to unduly detract from 

 the merit of one by ascribing more to the other; but those who knew 

 Professor Sharpey's enormous range of knowledge, his readiness toi)ut 

 it all at the disposal of others, and the influence he exerted upon all 

 who came in contact with him, as well as his unseltishiiess in making 

 no claim whatever to* what was justly his due, will at once recognize 

 now greatly Blake was indebted to iSharpey. More especially is this 

 the case when we consider that, althongh the credit for the observa- 

 tions themselves belongs to Blake, yet after the im})etus which Sharpey 

 gave him had passed away, he did very little more during the course 

 of a long life. It seems all the more necessary to commemorate Sharjiey 

 on this occasion, because he has left coini)aratively few writings behind 

 him, and anyone who should judge by them alone of his iniluence ui)on 

 physiological progress in this country would grievously underestimate 

 it; for Sharpey was above all a teacher, and his work was written not 

 with pen and ink on paper or parchment, but was engraved upon the 

 hearts and minds of his pupils and friends. Upon two of these, espe- 

 cially, has Sharpey's mantle fallen, and to Burdon-Sanderson and ^lichael 

 Foster we owe a revival of experimental i)hysio]ogy in this country, a 

 revival of the method which Harvey not only used in making Ids great 

 discovery, but also employed to demonstrate the truth of it to the rulers 

 of this land. By their writings, by their lectures, by their original 

 experiments, by their demonstrations, and by the i)ui)ils they have 

 trained, Burdon-Sanderson and jMichael Foster, under the aus])ices of 

 Acland and Ilumj^hrey, have ditl'used among the medical men of this 

 country a knowledge of physiology so extensive and exact as could 

 only be found before their time among those who had made a special 

 study of the subject. Yet more than to them, more than to anyone 

 else since the time of Harvey, do we owe our present knowledge of the 

 circulation to Carl Ludwig. He it is who first enabled the i)ressure of 

 blood in the arteries to record its own variations automatically, so that 

 alterations could be noticed and measured which were too rapid or too 

 slight to be detected by the eye. To him also we owe the plan of arti- 

 ficial circulation, by which the changes in the functions of the organs 

 and in the vessels which supply them can be observed quite apart from 

 the heart, lungs, or from the nervous system. 



Like Sharpey, Ludwig is a great teacher, and like the great architects 

 of the Middle Ages, who built the wonderful cathedrals which all 

 admire, and the builder of which no man knows, Ludwig has been con- 

 tent to sink his own name in his anxiety for the progress of his work 

 iind in his desire to aid his pui)ils. The researches which have a^jpeared 

 under these pupils' names have been in many instances, perhaps in most, 

 not only suggested by Ludwig, but carried out experimentally with his 

 own hands, and the paper which recorded the results finally written by 

 himself Jn the papers which have appeared under his pupils' names we 

 find their obligations to the master re(\orded in such terms as "unter 



