Volume 1

In search of the soul and the mechanism of thought, emotion, and conduct ... / by Bernard Hollander.

  • Bernard Hollander
Date:
[1920]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: In search of the soul and the mechanism of thought, emotion, and conduct ... / by Bernard Hollander. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    145/536 (page 129)
    129 in the medical schools for nearly three centuries. It appeared in print in 1478. It was compiled largely from the writings of Galen and Avicenna. At the end of the XVIth century it was still the only text-book used in the University of Padua, and it was probably the first anatomical treatise illustrated by woodcuts. It was held in such esteem, that deviations from his descriptions were considered abnormal. As to the work itself, it is full of preconceived opinions and theories. Of course he held the universal belief in animal spirits (which he believed to pass to the middle ventricle by a worm-like passage—vermis), but he was original in one respect, anticipating a modern view, in teaching that cellules exist in the brain, each of which is the seat of a particular intellectual faculty. After Mundinus, dissecting gained a firmer foothold as a mode of instruction, and public dissections wrere decreed in the Universities of Montpellier in 1366, at Venice in 1368, at Florence in 1388, at Vienna in 1404, Bologna 1405, Padua 1429, Paris 1478. JAC. BERENGARIO DA CARPI (1470-1530) is said to have dissected more than one hundred human bodies. He corrected Mondino’s book, and wrote an excellent treatise on head injuries : “ Tractatus de fractura calvarise s. cranii ” (1518). MAGNUS HUNDT (1449-1519), Rector of Leipsic University, was one of the last famous scholastics. His text-book on anatomy is considered the first sound one, and one not without interest even at the present day. It was illustrated with woodcuts. Hundt was the first mediaeval author to make use of the term anthro¬ pology. JACOBINUS SYLVIUS (1478-1555), whose real name was JACQUES DUBOIS, was the first regular teacher of anatomy from the human body and the first to study the bloodvessels by means of coloured injections. He dissected a great number of animals and as many human bodies as he could procure. Unfortunately, he subordinated all his own research to the authority of Galen. ANDREAS VESAL1US (1514-1564), a pupil of Jacques Sylvius, born at Louvain, became professor at Padua, the centre of the great European revival of learning and of the greatest intellectual freedom of the time. Venice was then mistress of Padua and in every way fostered its uni¬ versity. It was under the protection of the enlightened Venetian Senate that Vesalius enjoyed those unique opportunities for the study of anatomy which enabled him, in 1543, to publish his work on the structure of the human body, “ De corporis humani fabrica,” Basle, 1543, a work that broke the medical slumber of more than a thousand years. Hitherto Galen, who had never dissected a human body, was regarded as an absolute authority. There were dissectors and dissections before Vesalius, but he alone made anatomy a living, working science. Vesalius gave a more perfect description of the heart, but he still believed that blood was formed in the liver ; and as regards the brain, he confined himself to representing it as the central organ of sensation and movement. The question of the significance of the same for the activity of the soul he abandoned to the philo¬ sophers ; but he was the first to draw attention to the difference between the grey and white matter of the brain and to describe the five ventricles. Vesalius, while he took a materialistic view of the nature of the soul, distinguished three souls : the vital, the natural, and the chief soul, each of which was but the sum of the spirit of corresponding function, and he assigned to the brain the chief soul, the sum of the animal spirits, whose functions were distinctly mental. The natural spirit was made by the liver, and from the vital spirits, which were made by the heart and utilised in the bodily functions generally, the brain elaborated the animal spirits in its ventricles and influenced the muscles and other organs by sending them out along the nerves. He was clear that the soul was engendered in and by the brain, but beyond that he knew nothing. Vivisection taught him that Vol. i] k