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The
Dawn of Modern Medicine
:
The
event that dominated 17th-century medicine and marked the beginning
of a new epoch in medical science was the discovery of how the blood
circulates in the body by the English physician and anatomist William
Harvey. Harvey's "Essay on the Motion of the Heart and the
Blood" (1628) established that the heart pumps the blood in
continuous circulation. The Italian anatomist Marcello Malpighi
advanced Harvey's work by his discovery of tiny blood vessels called
capillaries, and the Italian anatomist Gasparo Aselli provided the
first description of the lacteals, capillaries found in the lymphatic
system. In England the physician Thomas Willis investigated the
anatomy of the brain and the nervous system and was the first to
describe diabetes mellitus. The English physician Francis Glisson
advanced the knowledge of the anatomy of the liver, described the
nutritional disorder rickets (sometimes called Glisson's disease),
and was the first to prove that muscles contract when activity is
performed. The English physician Richard Lower studied the anatomy
of the heart, showed how blood interacts with air, and performed
one of the first blood transfusions.
The
French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes, who
also made anatomical dissections and investigated the anatomy of
the eye and the mechanism of vision, maintained that the body functioned
as a machine. This view was adopted by the so-called iatrophysicists,
such as Italian physician Sanctorius, who investigated metabolism,
and the Italian mathematician and physicist Giovanni Alfonso Borelli,
who worked in the area of physiology. Opponents of this view were
the iatrochemists, who regarded life as a series of chemical processes,
including Jan Baptista van Helmont, a Flemish physician and chemist,
and Prussian anatomist Franciscus Sylvius, who studied the chemistry
of digestion and emphasized the treatment of disease by drugs.
The
English physician Thomas Sydenham, called the English Hippocrates,
and later the Dutch physician Hermann Boerhaave, reestablished the
significance of bedside instruction in their emphasis on the clinical
approach to medicine. Sydenham carried out extensive studies on
malaria and introduced the new treatment quinine, obtained from
cinchona bark, into Europe in 1632. After the invention of the first
compound microscope in 1590, Dutch scientist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek
used this groundbreaking technology in 1676 to identify organisms
later called bacteria. This was the first step toward recognition
that microbes were the cause of infectious disease.
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