vi CIRCULATION OF BLOOD : ITS DISCOVERY 163 



of thinking from the Christianismi restitutio, which had been 

 published two years previously, in 1553, by Servetus. 



Foster, on the contrary, maintains that the passage quoted 

 from the first edition of Vesalius was an expression of irony on 

 the part of the author, who frequently made use of this means 

 when his personal opinions were in too forcible contrast with the 

 doctrine of Galen. In the second edition, when his own fame 

 was established, and the revival of anatomy had advanced with 

 giant strides, he suppressed the greater portion of these veiled 

 doubts, and openly expressed his own opinions. This hypothesis 

 of Foster, however, seems arbitrary and untenable, when we take 

 into account the temperament of Vesalius, and his critical, not to 

 say aggressive, attitude towards the doctrine of Galen, on account 

 of which Silvio gave him the nickname of " Vesanus." 



On the other hand, Ceradini, by an elaborate comparison of 

 the contents and dates of some of the lesser publications of Vesalius 

 (which would take us too far afield if we entered upon it), showed 

 that he had learned the impermeability of the septum from his 

 prosector Columbus at Padua in 1542, and had defended this 

 doctrine at Pisa in 1543, without, however, explicitly deducing- 

 its physiological corollary, the theory of the lesser circulation, 

 which implied, as already recognised by Galen, an anastomosis 

 between the vena arteriosa and the arteria venosa. Vesalius 

 grudged any praise of Columbus, whom he never forgave for 

 having, as it seems, excited the students" of Padua to animosity 

 against him. 



Without belittling the great services rendered by Vesalius in 

 the reform of anatomy, it may be held proved that he had no 

 direct share in the discovery of the circulation. Indirectly, 

 however, he contributed to the refutation of not a few of Galen's 

 fallacies, more particularly in regard to the theory of hepatic 

 haematopoiesis. The fact that the lumen of the vena cava is 

 larger in the proximity of the heart than it is nearer the liver, 

 in his eyes justified the return to Aristotle's theory of cardiac 

 haematopoiesis, and the admission that not only the arteries but 

 the veins also are dependent on the heart. 



IV. When in the year 1543 Vesalius, in obedience to a wish 

 expressed by Cosimo I. dei Medici, who had appointed him 

 Professor at Pisa, addressed himself to giving a short course of 

 " amministrationes anatomicae " upon the fallacies of Galen, it is 

 probable that his hearers included Andreas Cesalpinus of Arezzo, 

 who was at that time barely nineteen years old, and to whom 

 belongs the great honour of having first recognised and demon- 

 strated the general circulation of the blood. 



In 1571 the Aretine physician and philosopher published his 

 Peripateticarum questionum libri quinque, in which he assumes 

 a constant and physiological transit of the blood from the arteries 



