REVIEWS. 
191 
domination of priestcraft, and "by the want of the inductive and experimental 
method of reasoning. Like all great discoveries, it was led up to, and it was 
facilitated by the revolution in morals, religion, and method of thought which 
was proceeding. Dr. Willis places the ideas of the ancients and of those of 
the modern predecessors of Harvey most fairly before the world, and gives 
the proof that our great countryman not only taught the truth, but demon- 
strated it. Everyone before him had taught untruth, or only part of truth, 
and no one had demonstrated. Now, at the present day, scientific men do 
not acknowledge the imaginator as the discoverer, but the experimentalist, 
who proves and places a fact as a useful truth before the world. Everybody 
knows that Joule of Manchester demonstrated by experiment the mechanical 
equivalent of heat ; but to Mayer we only owe thoughts on its [pos- 
sibility — the one is the discoverer, and to the other the world owes nothing. 
The Greeks progressed wonderfully in anatomy, and their great knowledge 
of the heart and vessels may be said to have culminated in Galenus of Per- 
gamus, born 131 a.d., whose works ruled medical and anatomical science for 
thirteen centuries. Amongst the first of the modern imaginators, but who 
believed one kind of blood to be distributed by the veins for growth and main- 
tenance, and another by the arteries, charged with heat and spirit for vital 
endowment, was Rabelais, and he certainly knew much anatomy. Sylvius 
followed and injected the arteries, but missed the significance of the obstruct- 
ing valves in the veins. Winter of Andernach, the master of Vesalius and 
Servetus, demonstrated and described the valves of the heart, and noted the 
influence of the air on the blood in the lungs. Vesalius was a pure anatomist, 
but he considered that the motion of the blood was of a to-and-fro kind, and 
did not realise the importance or physiology of the venous valves. Persecuted 
by the Inquisition, he perished miserably in returning from a forced pilgrimage 
to Jerusalem. Servetus followed, and, strangely for the age, was a reformer 
in religion and a physiologist. He stated that the blood moved from the 
right to the left side of the heart through the lungs, in his work on the 
Restoration of Christianity, for which book he was burned by Calvin, the 
Protestant. He was aware of the peculiarities of the foetal lung, and of its 
having no independent existence. Columbus (Realdus) described the vena 
portae particularly, but denied muscularity to the heart. Eustachius dis- 
covered the thoracic duct in the horse, and its relation to the great venous 
trunk of the neck ; and Eallopius intensified the belief that the veins were 
the distributors of blood, instead of the arteries. Sarpi, before his age in 
learning, was nearly assassinated by the orders of Paul V., but he did not add 
as much as did Arantius, who showed how the perfect closure of the heart’s 
valves was produced. Then came Ruini and Caesalpinus, neither of whom, 
however, were discoverers. Fabricius began the truth by demonstrating the 
presence and functions of the valves in the veins ; and, finally, Rudius, know- 
ing nothing of the function of the heart, and who believed that the pulmo- 
nary artery drew air into the left ventricle, (!) paved the way for Harvey, 
of Folkestone. His “ Exercise on the Motions of the Heart and Blood” 
checked his professional prosperity, and all the “ physitians ” were against 
him ; but in after years, and after the appearance of his “ Generation of Ani- 
mals,” his brother physicians put up an inscription which gave him the credit 
for his great discovery. Dr. Willis describes the splendid work of this great 
man in a most readable and scholarly manner. 
