Animals 1
— Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks: Hands and
Wings.
Many right skilful masters in chirurgery, and the best
learned anatomists, are of the opinion that the veins of the eyes reach to the
brain. For mine own part, I would rather think that they pass into the stomach.
This is certain, I never knew a man’s eye plucked out of his head, but he fell
to vomiting upon it, and the stomach cast up all within it.
— Gaius Plinius Secundus (23-79) The
Natural History, translated by Philemon Holland, 132.
I went out to Charing Cross, to see Major-general Harrison
hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as
any man could do in that condition.
— Samuel Pepys (1633 – 1703), Diary
(13 Oct, 1660).
If anyone wishes to observe the works of Nature, he should
put his trust not in books on anatomy but in his own eyes and either come to
me, or consult one of my associates, or alone by himself, industriously
practise exercises in dissection; but so long as he only reads, he will be more
likely to believe all the earlier anatomists, because there are so many of
them.
— Galen, quoted in Daniel Boorstin, The
Discoverers, 346.
Since my eye was powerless to see any further in the living
animal, I consequently believed that the blood issues into an empty space from
which it is collected by a gaping vessel. Yet a dried frog’s lung made me doubt
this, for its smallest parts (vessels, as I later learned) had by chance
remained blood-red, and with a sharper lens I saw not spots resembling shagreen
but small vessels so interconnected as to form rings, and so great is the
divarification of these vessels proceeding from a vein on one side and an
artery on the other that the condition of a vessel is no longer retained and a
rete [network] appears, formed from the branches of the two vessels. This
observation I could confirm in the turtle’s lung, which is equally membranous
and diaphanous.
— Marcello Malpighi (1628 – 1694), On the
Lungs.
The animal machine is governed by three main regulators:
respiration, which consumes oxygen and carbon and provides heating power;
perspiration, which increases or decreases according to whether a great deal of
heat has to be transported or not; and finally digestion, which restores to the
blood what it loses in breathing and perspiration.
— Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743 – 1794), Traité
de Chimie (1793).
Sweet is the lore which nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous form of things;
We murder to dissect.
— William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850), The
Tables Turned.
Man always travels along precipices. His truest obligation
is to keep his balance.
— Jose Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955).
It must be a chemical reflex
— Ernest Henry Starling (1866-1927), of hormones.
Just as physics and chemistry discover the mineral
components of compound bodies by experimental investigation, so to comprehend
the phenomena of life that are so complex, it is necessary to go deep into the
organism and to analyse the organs and tissues in order to reach the organic
components.
— Claude Bernard (1813 – 1878), quoted by Francois Jacob, The Logic of Life (1973).
How, then, could blood ever turn into bone, without having
first become, as far as possible, thickened and white? And how could bread turn
into blood without having gradually parted with its whiteness and gradually
acquired redness? Thus it is quite easy for blood to become flesh, for if
Nature thicken it to such an extent that it acquires a certain consistency and
ceases to be fluid, it thus becomes original newly-formed flesh; but in order
that blood may turn into bone, much time is needed and much elaboration and
transformation of the blood. Further, it is quite clear that bread, and, more
particularly lettuce, beet, and the like, require a great deal of alteration,
in order to become blood.
— Galen (c. 130 – c. 200), On the Natural
Faculties.
The movements of the heart are known to God alone.
— Girolamo Fracastoro (1483-1553) (after Vesalius showed there were no holes in
the septum.
My theory is that Nature has formed them to delay the blood
to some extent, and to prevent the whole mass of it from flooding into the
feet, or hands and fingers, and collecting there. Two evils are thus avoided,
namely, undernutrition of the upper parts of the limbs, and a permanently
swollen condition of the hands and feet. Valves were made, therefore, to ensure
a really fair distribution of the blood for the nutrition of the various parts.
— Fabricius ab Aquapendente (1533 – 1619) explains the valves of the heart.
The ventricle forcibly expels the blood already in motion,
just as the ball player can strike the ball more forcibly and further by taking
it on the rebound, rather than simply throwing it.
— William Harvey (1578 – 1657), On the
Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, 1628.
We have as much right to call this movement of the blood
circular as Aristotle had to say
that the air and rain emulate the circular movement of the heavenly bodies. The
moist earth, he wrote, is warmed by the sun and gives off vapours which
condense as they are carried up aloft and in their condensed form fall again as
rain and remoisten the earth, so producing successions of fresh life from it.
In similar fashion, the circular movement of the sun, that is to say, its
approach and recession, give rise to storms and atmospheric phenomena …
This organ deserves to be called the starting point of life
and the sun of our microcosm just as much as the sun deserves to be styled the
heart of the world.
— William Harvey (1578 – 1657), On the
Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, 1628.
Never shake thy gory locks at me!
— William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616), Macbeth,
III, iv, 50.
Here’s the smell of blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia
will not sweeten this little hand.
— William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616), Macbeth,
V, i, 55.
Nurse it was I who discovered that leeches have red blood
— Baron Georges Cuvier on his deathbed, as a nurse applied leeches (The Oxford Book of Death, D. J.
Enright).
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