Harvey's Views on the Use of the Circulation of the BloodCurtis, John Green
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Harvey's Views on the Use of the Circulation of the Blood
Curtis, John Green
Blood -- Circulation; Harvey, William, 1578-1657
"It will not be beside the question to show also from certain
familiar reasonings, that the circulation is both convenient and
necessary. In the first place, since death is corruption from
deficiency of heat[117] and since all living things are warm,
all dying things cold, the heat requires a seat and origin, a
home and hearth, as it were, in which the tinder of nature,
the first beginning of the innate fire, may be contained and
preserved; a place from which, as from their origin, heat and
life may flow out into all the parts, whence nutriment may come
and upon which concoction and nutrition and all quickening may
depend. That this place is the heart, that this is the origin of
life as aforesaid, I should hope that none would doubt.
"Hence the blood has need of motion, of motion such that it may
return to the heart; for, if sent to the outer parts of the
body, far from its source,[118] and left unmoved, it would
become coagulated. Heat and spirits are seen to be generated
and preserved in all by motion, to vanish if quiet supervene.
Therefore, the blood, thickened or stiffened by the cold of the
extremities and of the ambient [air] and destitute of spirits,
as in the dead, must needs return to its source and origin in
order to keep itself whole, to seek thence and repair again its
heat and spirits."...[119]
"Moreover," Harvey says, a page farther on, "since all animals
live by nutriment concocted in their interior, it is necessary
that the concoction and distribution thereof be perfect; and,
further, that a place and receptacle exist where the nutriment
may be perfected and whence it may be led off to the several
members. Now this place is the heart, for it alone of all the
parts contains blood for the public use in its cavities, the
auricles and ventricles, as in cisterns and storehouse; not
merely blood for its private use in the coronary vein and
artery."[120]
In the next chapter we obtain glimpses of the pathological relations
of this physiology. Harvey brings forward tertian fever as a case in
point, explaining that the febrile paroxysm is produced when
"the preternatural heat which has been kindled in the heart is
diffused throughout the entire body by way of the arteries,
together with the morbific matter which thus is evaporated and
dissolved by nature."[121]
As a student of the Greek science reads the foregoing passages,
he clearly sees that the new wine of the circulating blood is
poured into the old bottles of the Aristotelian physiology; and
Harvey tells us so himself, in the last chapter of his most famous
treatise. He says:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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