Harvey's Views on the Use of the Circulation of the BloodCurtis, John Green
History
Harvey's Views on the Use of the Circulation of the Blood
Curtis, John Green
Blood -- Circulation; Harvey, William, 1578-1657
erroneous ideas, and of the valves he knew nothing. He recognized
no essential differences between the matters distributed by way of
the vena cava and by way of the aorta, all being, alike, one thing,
blood; though the blood was hotter or cooler, thinner or thicker,
purer or cruder, in different regions or parts of the body, in
different sets of vessels, in different cavities of the heart, or at
different times in the same place.
We have seen already that, in the genuine works of Aristotle, there
is no sign that what we call the tissues of the adult require or
receive a derivative of the air, whether crudely mingled with the
blood in the earlier Hippocratic way, or separate in Erasistratean
fashion, or in the form of such "spirituous blood" as Galen
afterward accepted. We have seen that the air which Aristotle
believed to enter the heart for cooling purposes, cannot be traced
beyond it; that whatever spirits may exist in the body for him,
would seem to be either of the nature of vapor produced within the
body itself, or of a nature quite indeterminate.[130]
The living egg of the hen has had a vast deal to do with the history
of psychology as well as of physiology. It is partly owing to what
Aristotle believed to go on in the egg that we speak to-day of
good hearts and bad hearts--even of sweethearts. Aristotle knew
nothing of the nerves, and, therefore, could reasonably fail to find
conclusive evidence that the brain and spinal cord had to do with
what we call nervous functions. So he fell back upon a doctrine at
least as old as the Iliad,[131] and made a psychological center of
the heart. This being proved, for Aristotle, largely by its demeanor
in the early embryo, to be the life-long source of the nutritive
blood; and being, for him, the central hearth of the heat by means
of which the blood is perfected and warmed; he held it a matter of
necessity that in the heart should dwell the so-called "nutritive
soul"; that is, the faculty which uses as its most immediate
instrument the "innate," "natural," "vital," "psychical," heat, to
bring about nutrition, growth, and generation. He says:--
"It is impossible that the other faculties of the soul should
exist without the nutritive, or these without the natural fire;
for in this has nature set that faculty aglow."[132]
Dealing with these other faculties, he sees that there must be an
organ where the results of sight, hearing, and the other senses, are
compared; and deliberately discussing and rejecting the claims made
for the brain he makes the heart this "common sense-organ of all the
sense-organs," as he styles it. He says:--
"If in all the creatures the seat of life is in this part, it is
clear that here also must the origin of sensation be; for we say
that the body has life because it is an animal, but we say that
it is animal because it has sensation."[133]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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