Therapeutics of the circulation / by Sir Lauder Brunton.

  • Lauder Brunton
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Therapeutics of the circulation / by Sir Lauder Brunton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tion by Harvey. The truth of this discovery was at first denied, then its importance was belittled, then it was attributed to other men ; but now its full importance is recognised, and the claims of Harvey to the discovery acknow¬ ledged. When we look at Harvey’s work, it seems almost incredible that for so many thousands of years men should have overlooked the circulation. When we read Harvey’s own account of his discovery, it seems one of such amazing simplicity that one is inclined to think that nobody could have helped making it. In his own words, it occurred to him “ whether there might not be a motion (of the blood), as it were, in a circle.”1 That it did go round, Harvey showed by the blood issuing from the proximal end of a cut artery, and by the swelling of the veins when an obstruction was put between the periphery and the centre. One of the great reasons why the blood had been supposed not to go round, but to flow backwards and forwards, probably was that the ancients looked upon the arteries as conveying air alone instead of blood, or else conveying a mixture of air and blood. They seem to have come to this conclusion from the fact that the arteries were generally found empty in animals that had been killed for sacrifice; and the reason of their emptiness I shall discuss later, on p. 8. Physiology of the Circulation. The Heart.—The great motor power which
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