182 The English School [lect. 



on transfusion ; through these he became for a while the talk 

 of the town. The inordinate hopes which were raised by this 

 new method were never realized ; but the fact that such experi- 

 ments were at that time made is a striking proof of what a 

 revolution had been effected in men's views as to the circula- 

 tion of the blood in the thirty-seven years which had passed 

 since Harvey's book was published. Before the doctrine of the 

 circulation of the blood had been established, to prolong life or 

 cure disease by injecting blood into a blood vessel would have 

 seemed the height of absurdity. 



The fame of his transfusion seems to have brought Lower 

 from Oxford to practise in London, where especially after 

 Willis's death in 1675 he became very popular; but his 

 pronounced political attitude, he was a fervent whig, stood 

 in his way, his practice ' fell off' and he died in anything but 

 prosperous circumstances in 1690. 



In 1669 he published his Tractatus de corde. In this he 

 not only gave a much more accurate description than anyone 

 had given before of the structure of the heart, including the 

 distribution of its nerves, but he also gave an account of the 

 physiology of the heart, in which he completed and extended 

 Harvey's exposition with the help of all the new exact physics 

 which had come to hand since Harvey wrote his work. He 

 gave more accurate measurements than Harvey had published 

 (Harvey as we know had made man}' observations in addition 

 to those recorded in his book, observations which he promised 

 to publish but never did) concerning the amount of work done 

 by the heart, and the velocity of the flow in the arteries. He 

 recognized the meaning of the stout walls of the arteries and 

 the thin coats of the veins. He noticed that when one carotid 

 was ligatured the other beat more forcibly on account of the 

 greater amount of blood thrown into it. He produced ascites 

 by ligaturing the vena cava high up, and intravascular clotting 

 by injecting milk. He was aware that the heart would beat 

 for a while cut away from all its connections. In short he 

 obtained at that early date a rough perhaps, but true view of 

 most of the main facts of the circulation. As a Fellow of 

 the Royal Society he was of the opinion that new truths 



