The Works of William Harvey M.D. William Harvey

Attica and Eubœa. He had no conception of a circle of the blood beginning and ending in the heart. On the contrary, he regarded the liver as the fountain-head of the blood; and if he has any reference to a moving power in connexion with the heart, it is nothing more than the diastole or dilatation of the organ that is named—a passive state therefore considered as an active and efficient cause, which is absurd.

      The first modern anatomist of high repute, who treats particularly of the motion of the blood, may be said to be Realdus Columbus;[55] for Servetus, though educated to the medical profession, had long forsaken it for divinity, and only uses his old anatomical knowledge as a means of illustrating a theological dogma. Columbus, in treating of the heart and lungs, has certainly much that is remarkable, and much that is true; and had he said nothing more than we find in single detached sentences or paragraphs of his book, he must have been regarded as having gone a great length in the right direction. The blood, he says, once it has entered the right ventricle from the vena cava, can in no way again get back; for the tricuspid valves are so placed that whilst they give a ready passage to the stream inwards, they effectually oppose its return. The blood continuing to advance from the right ventricle into the vena arteriosa or pulmonary artery, once there cannot flow back upon the ventricle, for it is opposed by the sigmoid valves situate at the root of the vessel. The blood, therefore, agitated and mixed with the air in the lungs, and having thus in some sort acquired the nature of spirit, is carried by the arteria venosa or pulmonary vein into the left ventricle, from whence, being received into the aorta, it is, by the ramifications of this vessel, transmitted to all parts of the body.

      This much taken by itself looks very like an exposition of the circulation of the blood as understood at the present time, though we still see that the blood must be made to participate in the nature of spirit before it enters the arteries, and is not the blood which is contained in the veins, and which nourishes the body; but when we go farther and turn to other parts of his writings, we see that Columbus could never have conceived any proper idea of the circulation. For example, he continues, with Galen, to regard the liver as the origin of all the veins. The vena portæ, he says, arising by innumerable roots from the concavity of the liver, proceeds to carry blood from this organ by different branches to the stomach, spleen, and intestines, to the end that it may convey nourishment in the first case, black bile in the second, and in the third serve a double function—viz. supply nourishment to the intestines at once, and by a kind of imbibition, obtain nutritive matter, which is forthwith sent back to the liver for elaboration into blood. The vena cava again, he describes as arising from the convex aspect of the liver, whence, by its ramifications, it carries the blood that is requisite to nourish and maintain every part of the body.

      This of itself is enough. But when, in addition, we find that Columbus denies the muscular nature of the heart, we are fully qualified to form a true estimate of the conception which he could have had of the motion of the blood, and of his right to be regarded as the discoverer of its ceaseless circular movement.

      The next who is brought upon the scene with the imputed honour of having had a knowledge, not only of the lesser, but of the greater or systemic circulation also, is Andreas Cæsalpinus,[56] of Arezzo. The account which this celebrated peripatetic philosopher gives of the passage of the blood from the right to the left side of the heart is essentially the same as that given by Columbus. From the right ventricle the blood passes into the pulmonic artery, and from this, by numerous anastomoses, into the pulmonic veins, which transmit it to the left ventricle. Cæsalpinus says well that it is absurd to call the pulmonary artery by the name of vena arteriosa, on the mere ground of its taking its departure, like the vena cava, from the right ventricle; it is a true artery, and is, in all respects, analogous to the aorta. The title of arteria venosa, again, given to the pulmonic vein is not less ridiculous; inasmuch as this vessel, though it end in the left ventricle, has all the properties of the veins at large.

      So far it looks as if Cæsalpinus had an exact idea of the pulmonary circulation; indeed, he uses the word Circulation in reference to the transit of the blood through the lungs; but when we discover him still speaking of the permeation of the septum ventriculorum by the blood, our faith in the extent and accuracy of his knowledge begins to waver.

      With reference to the greater or systemic circulation, again, Cæsalpinus speaks of the swelling of the veins between the circle of pressure and the extremities of the vessels, when a ligature is thrown round a limb; and he even goes so far as to state that the common opinion which admitted a progressive motion—i.e. a motion from trunks to branches—of the blood in the veins was erroneous. Did we go no farther we should be led to conclude, as in Columbus’s case, that Cæsalpinus believed in the continuous movement of the blood in the veins in one direction only; and, as he has already spoken of the exit of the blood from the left ventricle, and of its reception by the aorta for general distribution, it might forthwith be inferred that, possessed of the essential elements of the greater circulation, he must, as matter of course, have been familiar with this as an ultimate result. And such an inference has indeed been drawn for him by high authority; but Cæsalpinus came not himself to any such conclusion; it was arrived at by others in his behalf, and after the lapse of almost a century from the date of his first publication. When we find Cæsalpinus, in other and closely connected passages of his writings, singing the old cuckoo note about a flux and reflux of the blood in the veins, and even using the accredited word—Euripus—to express his idea of its tide-like nature; when we further perceive that he was ignorant of the existence of the valves of the veins, and finally arrive at his explanation of the cause of the swelling which takes place in the veins of an extremity beyond a ligature—the cause with him consisting in an effort of the blood to get back to the focus or centre, lest, through the compression of the veins, it should be cut off and suffocated—we not only feel that we were warranted in entertaining a wholesome scepticism of the conclusion come to by the admirers of Cæsalpinus in regard to his knowledge of a circulation of the blood; but waxing in our infidelity as we become farther acquainted with his thoughts on the constitution of the blood, we find everything opposed to the likelihood of his having arrived at the same result as Harvey; and, at length, we discover that he neither had nor could have had any true knowledge of the circulation. Starting from the Aristotelian doctrines of growth and nutrition (of which so much will be found in Harvey’s work on Generation), Cæsalpinus held that there were two kinds of blood, one for the growth, another for the nourishment of the body. The blood which went to augment the body, and which he designated alimentum auctivum, or aliment of increase, flowed from the liver into the vena cava, which he seems to have thought was connected with the heart only, ut inde virtus omnis a corde descendat—that a sufficiency of virtue might be thereby communicated to it. The auctive blood, he farther thought, was attracted into the ventricles of the heart by the inherent heat of the organ. The dilatation of the heart and arteries he imagined to be due to “an effervescence of the spirit;” and the cause of their “collapse”—not systole, be it observed, in the active sense—was the appropriation by the parts of the body of the nutritive and augmentative matter. Again, though Cæsalpinus speaks of the intercommunication of the minute arteries and veins, he still thought that it was only during sleep that the blood mixed with the spirits passed from the former into the latter class of vessels; for it is during sleep, he says, that the veins become distended, whilst the pulsations of the arteries are then moderated. He plainly sees no connexion between a delivery by the artery and a filling by the vein. It is along with all this, and as if to settle the question of the kind of knowledge Cæsalpinus had of the movement of the blood, that he uses the old word Euripus, to express his idea of its alternating or tide-like motion.

      Cæsalpinus, let us add, had no conception of the heart as the efficient cause of any motion which the blood might have. In the often-quoted passage from the work ‘De Plantis,’[57] it is still the spirit inherent in, or associated with, the blood, that is the cause of its motion.

      Cæsalpinus, consequently, tried by a very moderately searching criticism, presents himself to us as but very little farther advanced than the ancients in his ideas on the motion of the blood.—The interpretation which successive generations of men give to a passage in a writer, some century or two old, is very apt to be in consonance with the state of knowledge at the time, in harmony with the prevailing ideas of the day, and, doubtless, often differs signally from the meaning that was in the mind of the man who composed it. The