General physiology : an outline of the science of life / by Max Verworn, tr. from the 2d German ed. and edited by Frederic S. Lee. With two hundred and eighty-five illustrations.

Max Verworn

Date:: 1899

Credit: General physiology : an outline of the science of life / by Max Verworn, tr. from the 2d German ed. and edited by Frederic S. Lee. With two hundred and eighty-five illustrations. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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$importance which many centuries later Harvey knew how to give it, Galen himself practised vivisection upon pigs and monkeys. Along with general recognition of his immortal service, Galen has often been reproached with the charge that he was not content with collecting ])hysiological facts, making observations ai\d devis- ing experiments, but that he felt strongly the necessity of arrang- ing his collected material into a complete and comprehensive sj^stem of physiology, in which he allowed hypothesis and philo- sophical speculation a place that exact investigation ought to have filled. Nothing can be more unjust than this reproach. If Galen had been satisfied with ascertaining disconnected physio- logical facts, physiology and with it all medicine Avould not have been advanced one step farther than Aristotle had already brought them. Galen's greatest importance lies in the union of scraps of physiological knowledge into a coherent system. Isolated observations obtain value only in connection with other fixcts, and only a survey of the relations of facts makes possible further systematic progress. It is only natural that, in this first attempt to put together the material of physiological observation into a coherent picture of the life of the human body, recourse must now and then be had to hypothesis, even much bold hypothesis. The single fault from which Galen's system suffers is not its binding cement of philosophical speculation, but the peculiar dualism that misled him, in accordance with which, in explaining vital phenomena, he strove to give at the same time a place both to the rigid idea of necessity, which sprang from his exact scientific investigations, and to teleology, which was derived from the Aristotelian philosophy. Nevertheless, in a just estimation of his. time, when Aristotelian ideas had already begun a universal sway that was to last more than a thousand years, Galen can scarcely be reproached for this, the less when it is recalled that the teleological idea of a final purpose in all things appears here and there in modern natural science even to-day, quite independent of philosophy. Galen's system is based upon the doctrine of the spirits {imeuma\ The causes of all the vital phenomena of the human body, which is composed of the four fundamental juices, viz.: the blood, the phlegm, the yellow and the black gall, are the three different forms of spirits, of which the animal spirits {irvevfia ■\jrv')(i kov) have their seat in the brain and the nerves, the vital spirits {irvevfia ^wtikov) in the heart, and the natural spirits (Trvev/xa ^vctlkov) in the liver. These three forms, which must be regenerated continually by the receipt of vital spirits from the air, are the agencies that maintain the functions of the respective organs. The body possesses many functions, but they may be arranged, according to the forms of the spirits, into three classes, and each function is carried on by a faculty (Bvva/jLi<;) corresponding to its respective$