PATHFINDERS OF PHYSIOLOGY IJ* 



having obtained the degree on a thesis, the subject of which was "The 

 Distinction Between Body and Mind." An illness in the shape of an 

 obstinate ulcer of the leg turned his attention to medicine, which he 

 studied along with the ancillary studies, chemistry and botany. He 

 was graduated M. D. in 1693, and eventually gave up the idea of the- 

 ology for medicine. In 1701 he was appointed to the chair of medicine 

 in the University of Leyden. His great ability as teacher caused stu- 

 dents to flock to his lectures. His worth was quickly recognized by 

 the authorities of the university who increased his emolument and 

 endeavored to make his position attractive to prevent him from going 

 elsewhere. Sir Michael Foster says of him: "Much sought after as 

 a physician, acute at the bedside, brilliant as an expositor in the pro- 

 fessorial chair, he was also a great teacher in the sense that in his 

 daily intercourse with his pupils he was alwaj/s ready to lay his mind 

 open before them and to let them share his experience and his 

 thoughts. Russell pays the following tribute to Boerhaave's genius: 

 "Boerhaave was easily the most remarkable physician of his 

 age, a man who, when we contemplate his genius, his condition, the 

 singular variety of his talent, his unfeigned piety, his spotless char- 

 acter and the impress he left not only on contemporary practice, but 

 on that of succeeding generations, stands forth as one of the brightest 

 names on the pages of medical history, and may be granted as an ex- 

 ample not only to physicians but to mankind." Boerhaave was a 

 scholar and scientific thinker, too broad to be the slave of one idea. 

 He was eclectic in the true sense of the term, though he never allied 

 himself with the medical sect which goes by that name. He had a 

 mind open to truth wherever it might be sought. He made use 

 of anatomy, physics and chemistry, but never allowed one to exclude 

 the other. He made each subservient to the elucidation of physiology. 

 Boerhaave was not an extreme advocate of either mechanical or 

 the chemical fermentative school; he recognized that digestion is in 

 part a solution of some of the constituents of food by means of 

 various juices, which he, however, regarded not of the nature of 1 

 fermentation. He denied, however, the acidity of the gastric juice. | 

 Colored vegetable juices were at the time coming to be used as we \ 

 now use litmus paper, in reaction tests. Boerhaave regarded the ) 

 solution by means of juices only as part of the digestive process; the 

 remaining process he held consisted of trituration in the stomach, by 

 which process the nutritive parts of food were expressed. His views 

 were dominant the early part of the eighteenth century. 



An Epochal Year, 1757 — ^The years 1757 was the dividing line be- 

 tween modern physiology and all that had gone before. It was the 

 date of the publication of the first volume of Haller's Elementa Phys- 

 iologia, the eighth volume of which appeared in 1765. Albrecht von 

 Haller was born at Berne, Switzerland, in 1708. The story is told of 

 his early precosity, when at the age of four he is said to have ex- 

 pounded the Bible to his father's servants. Before he was ten, he 

 wrote in Latin verse a satire on his tutor. Haller's attention had been 

 directed to medicine after his father's death in 1721, while residing in 

 the house of a physician in Biel, and in his sixteenth year he entered 

 the University of Tubingen. Dissatisfied with his progress there, he 

 went to Leyden ,where Boerhaave was at the height of his fame. He 

 graduated in 1727, and turned his attention to botany, publishing a 



