Physiology and Medicine 297 



all authority but one " the divine old man Hippocrates," 

 whose medicine rested also on observation. He, first in 

 England, " attempted to arrive at general laws about the 

 prevalence and the course and the treatment of disease 

 from clinical observation." He was essentially a physician 

 occupied in diagnosis, treatment and prognosis. When he 

 was but twenty-five years old, he began to suffer from gout, 

 and his personal experience enabled him to write a classic 

 on this disease, which is even now unsurpassed. 



Francis Glisson, like Sydenham, was essentially English 

 in his upbringing, and did not owe anything to foreign 

 education. His work on the liver has made " Glisson's 

 capsule " known to every medical student, and he wrote 

 an authoritative book on rickets. He, like Harvey, was 

 educated at Gonville and Caius College, and, in 1636, 

 became Regius Professor of Physic at Cambridge, but the 

 greater part of his life he spent at Colchester. 



A contemporary of Mayow was Richard Lower (1631- 

 1691), of Cornwall. He was the first to perform the operation 

 of directly transfusing blood from one animal to another. 

 In 1669 he injected dark venous blood into inflated lungs, 

 and found it became scarlet. This he attributed to something 

 which was being absorbed from the air which was being 

 passed through the lungs. In his " Tractatus de Corde " 

 he gave a more accurate description than anybody had 

 hitherto given of the structure of the heart, including its 

 innervation, and, having at his disposal more exact apparatus, 

 he was able somewhat to expand and complete Harvey's 

 exposition of the physiology of that organ. 



Lower was for a time assistant to Thomas Willis (1621- 

 1675), whose name is commemorated by the " circle of 

 Willis " at the base of the brain. The " Cerebri Anatome " 

 of the latter (1664) was the most complete and detailed 

 account of the nervous system that had been published 

 up to this time, though his hypotheses as to the functions 

 of the parts he described left much to be corrected later. 

 In the preparation of this work he had been helped by 

 Lower and Sir Christopher Wren, who drew the illustrations. 

 Willis was as distinguished a physician as he was a 

 physiologist. 



