An anatomical disquisition on the motion of the heart & blood in animals / by William Harvey ; translated from the Latin by Robert Willis.

  • William Harvey
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: An anatomical disquisition on the motion of the heart & blood in animals / by William Harvey ; translated from the Latin by Robert Willis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    the chick in ovo, however, you will find at first no more than a vesicle or auricle, or pulsating drop of blood ; it is only by and by, when the development has made some progress, that the heart is fashioned : even so in certain animals not destined to attain to the highest perfection in their organization, such as bees, wasps, snails, shrimps, crayfish, &c,, we only find a certain pulsating vesicle, like a sort of red or white palpitating point, as the beginning or principle of their life. We have a small shrimp in these countries, which is taken in the Thames and in the sea, the whole of whose body is transparent; this creature, placed in a little water, has frequently afforded myself and particular friends an opportunity of observing the motions of the heart with the greatest distinctness, the external parts of the body presenting no obstacle to our view, but the heart being perceived as though it had been seen through a window. I have also observed the first rudiments of the chick in the course of the fourth or fifth day of the incubation, in the guise of a little cloud, the shell having been removed and the egg immersed in clear tepid water. In the midst of the cloudlet in question there was a bloody point so small that it disappeared during the contraction and escaped the sight, but in the relaxation it reappeared again, red and like the point of a pin ; so that betwixt the visible and invisible, betwixt being and not being, as it were, it gave by its pulses a kind of representation of the commencement of life.^ ' [At the period Harvey indicates, a rudimentary auricle and ventricle exist, but are so transparent that unless with certain precautions their parietes cannot be seen. The filling and emptying of them, therefore, give the appearance of a speck of blood alternately appearing and disappearing.]