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ABSTRACT
In an unpublished anatomical treatise written around 1670, the English anatomist and fellow of the Royal Society of London Edmund King proposed that the human body was ultimately an assemblage of tubes and contained liquids. Without literally seeing every of its constituents to be tubular, how did King come to posit a tubular body? This article tackles the question by examining King’s inquiry about the pulse against his framing of the circulatory system into a universally tubular model. Asking how King registered this model despite the limited visibility of vascularity in practice, I discuss the place of analogy in his anatomical observation. I argue that analogy constituted an essential strategy for extending what King had perceived to account for the hardly perceptible nuances of the human body. I concentrate on two of his analogies, in which the artery was compared to the cord and the ureter. These two analogies revealed remarkable epistemic potency in representing and reasoning the pulse as the inherent motion of the living artery. They suggest that in seventeenth-century observation accounts, analogy was not simply a rhetoric suspicious of violating the principle of scientific empiricism; rather, they opened up ways of seeing and imagining nature.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Lauren Kassell, Dániel Margócsy, and Christoffer Basse Eriksen for their unremitting and inspirational feedback and advice. I am also grateful for Nick Hopwood, Xinyi Wen, Weiao Xing, and Sebestian Kroupa for offering provocative suggestions in the early and later revisions. Last but not least, I thank Seb Falk, Genevieve Caulfield, and Clarissa Chenovick for their generous and meticulous assistance in polishing this work.
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Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 [Henry Oldenburg], 'An Account of More Trials of Transfusion, Accompanied with Some Considerations thereon, Chiefly in Reference to Its Circumspect Practice on Man; Together with a Farther Vindication of This Invention from Usurpers', [21 October 1667], Philosophical Transactions, 2, Issue 28 (1667), 517–25 (pp. 520–1).
2 Edmond King, ‘An Account of the Experiment of Transfusion, Practised upon a Man in London’, [9 December 1667], Philosophical Transactions, 2, Issue 30 (1667), 557–9 (p. 558).
3 King noted that ‘the Bloud did not run so vigorously the second minut, as it did the first, nor the third, as the second, &c.’ See ibid, p. 558.
4 Ibid, pp. 558–9.
5 Ibid, p. 558.
6 Ibid.
7 Galen, whose enormous pulse doctrines profoundly influenced medical diagnosis and prognosis from the Middle Ages into the early modern period, defined the pulse as the faculty of the arteries deriving from the heart and conditioned by their coats. The diastole and systole of the heart and arteries keeps to be simultaneous, so that the characteristics of the pulse reflect the state of the heart. See Galen, De usu pulsuum, De causis pulsuum in Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia, ed. by Karl G. Kühn, 20 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), V, pp. 149–210; IX, pp. 1–204.
8 When introducing Edmund King’s account of the lamb-Coga transfusion experiment and briefing its circumstance, Richard Lower and Edmund King were referred to as ‘those two Learned Physitians and dextrous Anatomists’. See Edmond King, ‘An Account of the Experiment of Transfusion, Practised upon a Man in London’, p. 557.
9 Edmond King, ‘An Account of an Easier and Safer Way of Transfusing Blood out of One Animal into Another, viz. by the Veins, without Opening any Artery of Either’, Philosophical Transactions, 2, Issue 25 (1666), 449–51 (p. 450).
10 Nonetheless, they themselves often deployed analogies to convey ideas and explain practices they thought novel and not easily comprehensible. See Katharine Park, ‘Bacon’s “Enchanted Glass”’, Isis, 75, Issue 2 (1984), 290–302; Lorraine Daston, ‘Galilean Analogies: Imagination at the Bounds of Sense’, Isis, 75, Issue 2 (1984), 302–10; Peter Galison, ‘Descartes’s Comparisons: From the Invisible to the Visible’, Isis, 75, Issue 2 (1984), 311–26.
11 See for example John Wilkin’s plan of reforming the English prose style in John Wilkins and 17th-Century British Linguistics: A Reader, ed. by Joseph L. Subbiondo (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1992).
12 Steven Shapin, ‘Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle’s Literary Technology’, Social Studies of Science, 14, No. 4 (1984), 481–520; Peter Dear, ‘Totius in Verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society’, Isis, 76, No. 2 (1985), 145-61.
13 For recent discussions of the ‘plain language’ reform in the early Royal Society, see Miles MacLeod, ‘How Language Became a Tool: The Reconceptualisation of Language and the Empirical Turn in Seventeenth-Century Britain’, in Language as a Scientific Tool: Shaping Scientific Language Across Time and National Tradition, ed. by Miles MacLeod, Rocío G. Sumillera, Jan Surman, and Ekaterina Smirnova (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 25–41; Fabien Simon, ‘Language as ‘Universal Truchman’: Translating the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century’, in Translating Early Modern Science, ed. by Sietske Fransen, Niall Hodson, and Karl A. E. Enenkel (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 308–40.
14 Erin Webster, The Curious Eye: Optics and Imaginative Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
15 Karin Ekholm, ‘Pictures and Analogies in the Anatomy of Generation’, in Reproduction: Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. by Nick Hopwood, Rebecca Flemming, and Lauren Kassell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 209–24.
16 Alexander Wragge-Morley, Aesthetic Science: Representing Nature in the Royal Society of London, 1650–1720 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), pp. 106–60.
17 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 153.
18 A Lambeth degree of MB was conferred on Edmund King from Archbishop Juxon on 12 May 1663, based on which he was incorporated MD at the University of Cambridge on 5 October 1671. For a brief survey of Lambeth medical degree and its interaction with universities and the Royal College of Physicians of London in assessing medical profession in the early modern period, see William Stubbs, ‘Lambeth Degrees’, The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Review, 1, No. 216 (1864), 633–8; Cecil Wall, ‘The Lambeth Degrees’, The British Medical Journal, 2, No. 3904 (1935), 854–5.
19 Robert L. Martensen, ‘King [alias Freeman], Sir Edmund’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography <https://www.oxforddnb.com/> [accessed 2 February 2021].
20 Robert G. Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists: A Study of Scientific Ideas and Social Interaction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 202–7; Simon Schaffer, ‘Regeneration: The Body of Natural Philosophers in Restoration England’, in Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge, ed. by Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 83–120 (pp. 94–105).
21 Edmond King, ‘An Account of an Easier and Safer Way of Transfusing Blood Out of One Animal into Another, viz. by the Veins, Without Opening any Artery of Either’.
22 [Henry Oldenburg], ‘An Account of More Tryals of Transfusion’, p. 522. For the precedent progression until the registration of King’s transfusion method on 24 October 1667, see Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London, 4 vols. (London: Printed for A. Millar in the Strand, 1756–7), II, pp. 201–2.
23 London, British Library, MS Sloane 1586, 1587, 1588, 1589, 1590, 1591, 1593, 1594, 1597, 1598, 1640. For Edmund King’s correspondence to Hans Sloane, see MS Sloane 4038, fols. 207, 215–20; 4078, fols. 192, 196.
24 MS Sloane 1586, fol. 65r; MS Sloane 1587, fol. 1r.
25 Adrian Johns, ‘History, Science, and the History of the Book: The Making of Natural Philosophy in Early Modern England’, Publishing History, 30, (1991), 5–30; The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 444–542.
26 One of the many examples can be seen in MS Sloane 1587, fol. 6v.
27 MS Sloane 1586, fol. 68r.
28 Sietske Fransen, ‘Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, His Images and Draughtsmen’, Perspectives on Science, 27, Issue 3 (2019), 485–544; Sachiko Kusukawa, ‘The Early Royal Society and Visual Culture’, Perspectives on Science, 27, Issue 3 (2019), 350–94; Matthew C. Hunter, Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Nathan Flis, ‘Drawing, Etching, and Experiment in Christopher Wren’s Figure of the Brain’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 37, Issue 2 (2012), 145–60; Anna Marie Roos, ‘The Art of Science: a ‘Rediscovery’ of the Lister Copperplates’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 66, Issue 1 (2011), 19–40; Anthony Geraghty, The Architectural Drawings of Sir Christopher Wren at All Souls College, Oxford: A Complete Catalogue (London: Lund Humphries, 2007).
29 MS Sloane 1587, fol. 2r.
30 Ibid. For King’s involvement in the Royal Society’s experimental inquiries about muscular motion, see Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists, pp. 232–7.
31 MS Sloane 1587, fol. 2r.
32 Ibid. For how the pulse was distinguished as a central topic in anatomical and physiological debates from the fourteenth into early seventeenth centuries, see J. J. Bylebyl, ‘Disputations and Description in the Renaissance Pulse Controversy’, in The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century, ed. by A. Wear, R. K. French, and I. M. Lonie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 223–45.
33 Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomist Anatomis’d: An Experimental Discipline in Enlightenment Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 156–65.
34 The four-humour theory remained influential from the Middle Ages into the early modern period, but it did not always serve as the principle of medical practice. By contrast, disease concepts at that time varied substantially, and illnesses were, on many occasions, not dealt with by philosophising the condition of the four humours. See Peter Murray Jones, ‘Complexio and Experimentum: Tensions in Late Medieval Medical Practice’, in The Body in Balance: Humoral Medicines in Practice, ed. by Peregrine Horden and Elisabeth Hsu (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013), pp. 107–28; Michael Stolberg, Experiencing Illness and the Sick Body in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 85–9.
35 MS Sloane 1587, fol. 1r.
36 Models: The Third Dimension of Science, ed. by Soraya de Chadarevian and Nick Hopwood (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 1–2.
37 Aristotle, Physics 1.4, 187b, 14–21, in Aristotle’s Physics: Book I and II, trans. by W. Charlton (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 9.
38 For a sophisticated inquiry about differentiations and relations between primary and secondary qualities of matter in early modern natural philosophical studies, see Primary and Secondary Qualities: The Historical and Ongoing Debate, ed. by Lawrence Nolan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
39 Robert Boyle, Selected Philosophical Paper of Robert Boyle, ed. by M. A. Stewart (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), p. 44.
40 Ibid, p. 41.
41 The controversy was widely distributed within and without the English context in the Renaissance. On the complicated confluence of Aristotelian metaphysics and atomism in the sixteenth century, see Christoph Lüthy, ‘An Aristotelian Watchdog as Avant-Garde Physicist: Julius Caesar Scaliger’, The Monist, 84, No. 4 (2001), 542–61. For glimpsing how Aristotelian hylomorphic theories met mechanical philosophy in varied ways in scientific studies in seventeenth-century England, see Stephen Clucas, ‘‘The Infinite Variety of Formes and Magnitudes’: 16th- and 17th-Century English Corpuscularian Philosophy and Aristotelian Theories of Matter and Form’, Early Science and Medicine, 2, No. 3 (1997), 251–71. On the diversity of philosophical ideas deemed mechanical before Robert Boyle’s explicit announcement of the ‘mechanical philosophy’ (interchangeable with ‘corpuscular philosophy’ in his context), see Daniel Garber, ‘Remarks on the Pre-History of the Mechanical Philosophy’, in The Mechanisation of Natural Philosophy, ed. by Daniel Garber and Sophie Roux (Dordrecht, Heidelberg, London and New York: Springer, 2013), pp. 3–26. On how Robert Boyle’s experiments spoke or could not speak to his mechanical philosophy, see William Newman, ‘The Alchemical Sources of Robert Boyle’s Corpuscular Philosophy’, Annals of Science, 53, Issue 6 (1996), 567–85; Newman, From Atoms to Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Peter R. Anstey, ‘Robert Boyle and the Heursitic Value of Mechanism’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 33, Issue 1 (2002), 157–70; Andrew Pyle, ‘Boyle on Science and the Mechanical Philosophy: A Reply to Chalmers’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 33, Issue 1 (2002), 171–86; Alan F. Chalmers, ‘Experiment versus Mechanical Philosophy in the Work of Robert Boyle: A Reply to Anstey and Pyle’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 33, Issue 1 (2002), 187–93; Chalmers, ‘Boyle and the Origins of Modern Chemistry: Newman Tried in the Fire’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 41, Issue 1 (2010), 1–10.
42 John Locke, for instance, contended that microscopy could not expose knowledge at the corpuscularian level, nor could microscopic discoveries account definitively for natural phenomena. See his opinion in The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. by Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 301–3; p. 310. On Robert Hooke’s similar viewpoint, see Ian Lawson, ‘What Did Hooke Want from the Microscope? Magnification, Matter Theory and Mechanism’, Early Science and Medicine, 25, Issue 6 (2020), 640–64.
43 Typical studies of organic tubular texture in this period included Marcello Malpighi’s anatomy of the glands and kidneys, Francis Glisson’s anatomy of the liver, Richard Lower’s of the heart, Thomas Willis’s of the brain, Regnier de Graaf’s of the genital organs and Nehemiah Grew’s of plants. They provoked ongoing studies on fibres as the building block of organisms in the Enlightenment. See Tobias Cheung, ‘Omnis Fibra Ex Fibra: Fibre Œconomies in Bonnet’s and Diderot’s Models of Organic Order’, Early Science and Medicine, 15, Issue 1–2, (2010), 66–104; Hisao Ishizuka, ‘Visualising the Fibre-Woven Body: Nehemiah Grew’s Plant Anatomy and the Emergence of the Fibre Body’, in Anatomy and the Organization of Knowledge, 1500–1800, ed. by Matthew Landers and Brian Muñoz (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), pp. 113–28.
44 Andrew Cunningham, ‘Fabricius and the ‘Aristotle Project’ in Anatomical Teaching and Research at Padua’, in The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century, ed. by A. Wear, R. K. French and I. M. Lonie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 195–222; Roger French, Medicine Before Science: The Business of Medicine from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 185–221 (pp. 215–21).
45 Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
46 On the debate over the most appropriate representation format of anatomical phenomena between Ruysch and Bidloo, see Dániel Margócsy, Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), pp. 135–66 (p. 145).
47 William Harvey, The Circulation of the Blood and Other Writings, trans. by Kenneth J. Franklin (London: J. M. Dent, 1963), p. 87.
48 It is worth noting that in this period, there were instances in which the blood circuit and its certain crucial parts, such as capillaries, were witnessed. During the late 1650s, John Locke noted that if removing the skin of a frog and holding it against the sun, ‘you may see ye circulation of bloud’. See Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists, p. 155 (n. 76). Later in this section, I will also mention Malpighi’s experiment on capillaries in the lungs. However, these observations did not immediately end contemporary examinations of minute structures of blood circulation.
49 MS Sloane 1587, fol. 9v.
50 Benjamin Goldberg, ‘A Dark Business, Full of Shadows: Analogy and Theology in William Harvey’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 44, Issue 3 (2013), 419–32; Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, ‘Harvey in the Sluice: from Hydraulic Engineering to Human Physiology’, History and Technology, 24, Issue 1 (2018), 1–22.
51 William Harvey, The Circulation of the Blood and Other Writings, p. 70: ‘that in the members and extremities the blood passes from the arteries into the veins either directly by anastomosis, or indirectly through the porosities of the flesh, or in both ways, just as it passes (see earlier) from the veins into the arteries in its cardio-pulmonary course’. In his letter to Paul Marquard Schlegel in 1651, Harvey denied the ancient conception of anastomosis because he did not observe it, but agreed that ‘there exists a passage from arteries into veins, and that on occasion directly and without the intervention of fleshy substance’, see in the same book, pp. 187–90 (p. 189).
52 Robert Hooke, Micrographia, or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies, made by Magnifying Glasses, with Observations and Inquiries thereupon (London: John Martyn and James Allestry, 1665), preface, xiir. For the early modern appreciation of the microscope as a corpuscularian tool, see Christoph Lüthy, ‘Atomism, Lynceus, and the Fate of Seventeenth-Century Microscopy’, Early Science and Medicine, 1, No. 1 (1996), 1–27 (pp. 14–7); Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
53 Marcello Malpighi, De pulmonibus observationes anatomicae (Bononiae: Typis jo. Baptistae Ferronii, 1661); Malpighi, De pulmonibus epistola altera (Bononiae: Typis jo. Baptistae Ferronii, 1661).
54 James Young, ‘Malpighi’s ‘De Pulmonibus’’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 23, Issue 1 (1929), 1–11, p. 4.
55 Thomas Willis, Pharmaceutice rationalis, sive, Diatriba de medicamentorum operationibus in humano corpore, 2 vols. (Oxford: E Theatro Sheldoniano, 1674–5), II, preface:
donec nuper Clar Malpighius … Porro microscopio ad hibito detexit rete quoddam mirabile singulas istas vesiculas vinciens, & conlligans; quod nimi rum ex arteriae & venae productionibus & ramificationibus minutis constat; quae vasa sanguinem per exiles & tortuosos ductus, perque multiplices tubulorum flexus circumagunt.
56 Thomas Willis, Pharmaceutice rationalis (Oxford: E Theatro Sheldoniano, 1674), I, preface: ‘In quo penso, uti prius in quibusdam aliis ejusdem naturae exactius peragendis, Amici mei, viz. Doctiss. D. D. Edmundi King operae sedulae, inque dissecando dexterrimae, plurimum me debere fateor.’ This preface was basically duplicated in the second volume.
57 MS Sloane 1587, fol. 10r.
58 Edmond King, ‘Some Considerations concerning the Parenchymous Parts of the Body’, [30 May 1667], Philosophical Transactions, 1, Issue 18 (1665), 316–20 (p. 316):
and if, upon examination of those bits, much of which is called Parenchyma, I met in them more Vessels, than I had preserved in the parts whence they came: And though the Portion were never so small, yet my bare eye could make this discovery; much more could I, when assisted by a Microscope, perceive, I had destroyed more Vessels, than preserved, in despight of the exactest care, I was capable to use.
59 Ibid, p. 316.
60 Francis Bacon, Novum organum, II, p. xxxvi, in The Works of Francis Bacon, 17 vols., ed. by Basil Montagu (London: William Pickering, 1825–34), IX, pp. 375–90.
61 MS Sloane 1587, fol. 9v.
62 Ibid: ‘A.A.A. The Arterys wch are infinitly divided & subdivided in all parts of our Bodys, in their double motion of Constriction & Contraction drive the Blood to ye Extreams.’
63 Ibid, fol. 10r: ‘B.B.B. In wch two motions, the membrans of ye Arterys and veins being contiguous.’
64 Ibid: ‘C.C.C. must necessarily urge the Blood beyond their power of contraction, in wch Act the mouths of the veines.’
65 MS Sloane 1587, fol. 10r: ‘D.D.D. [veins] seem to be dilated by force for its Reception.’
66 Ibid: ‘In a word, where the motion of the Arterys ceaseth, That of ye veines begins.’
67 Ibid, fol. 9v.
68 Ibid, fol. 10r.
69 Thomas Willis, Pharmaceutice rationalis, II, Table VI, Sect. 1, Cap. 1, Fig. 1 & 2.
70 MS Sloane 1587, fol. 10r: ‘And to name one thing more, wch adds to the probability of the premises: As the vein hath a contrary motion to ye Artery, so are its Fibres order’d for a contrary motion too.’
71 Ibid.
72 MS Sloane 1587, fol. 10.
73 MS Sloane 1587, fol. 10v.
74 Edmond King and Regnerus de Graeff, ‘Some Observations concerning the Organs of Generation, Made by Dr. Edmund King, a Fellow of the R. Society, and by Dr Regnerus de Graeff, Physitian in Holland; which Later Occasioned the Publishing of the Former’, [1 January 1669], Philosophical Transactions, 4, Issue 52 (1669), 1043-7 (p. 1403). In ‘Some Considerations concerning the Parenchymous Parts of the Body’, King applied a similar cloth metaphor to describe the intersected state of the examined blood vessels:
‘I began to think with my self, That it was not impossible for these parts to consist wholly of Vessels curiously wrought and interwoven (probably for more uses, than is yet known;) And the consideration, which came into my mind, of a piece of fine Cloth (which consists of so many several minute Hairs, call’d Wool) was no discouragement to this opinion.' See in the article, pp. 316–7
75 Gijsbert M. van de Roemer, ‘From Vanitas to Veneration: The Embellishments in the Anatomical Cabinet of Frederik Ruysch’, Journal of the History of Collections, 22, Issue 2 (2010), 169–86; Marieke M.A. Hendriksen, Elegant Anatomy: The Eighteenth-Century Leiden Anatomical Collections (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
76 Edmond King and Regnerus de Graeff, ‘Some Observations concerning the Organs of Generation’, p. 1404.
77 Wragge-Morley, Aesthetic Science: Representing Nature in the Royal Society of London, 1650–1720, p. 148.
78 See in Goldberg, ‘A Dark Business, Full of Shadows: Analogy and Theology in William Harvey’: ‘It is clear from De generatione that Harvey turns to analogical explanation because no other explanation based upon his observations was forthcoming: it was a last resort’, p. 420.
79 For the widespread musical analogy of the pulse in medieval scholarly medicine, see Nancy Siraisi, ‘The Music of Pulse in the Writings of Italian Academic Physicians (Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries)’, Speculum, 50 (1975), 689–710. For the continuity and evolution of the analogy in the early modern period, see Penelope Gouk, Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
80 MS Sloane 1587, fol. 10v.
81 MS Sloane 1587, fol. 10r.
82 Karin Ekholm, ‘Pictures and Analogies in the Anatomy of Generation’, p. 222.
83 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, pp. 147–58 (pp. 152–3, p. 157).
84 Pathology in Practice: Diseases and Dissections in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Silvia De Renzi, Marco Bresadola, and Maria Conforti (London: Routledge, 2018).
85 MS Sloane 1587, f. 11r.
86 See C. R. S. Harris, The Heart and the Vascular System in Ancient Greek Medicine (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975); Heinrich von Staden, Herophilus: The Art of Medicine in Early Alexandria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone Books, 1999).
87 Jessica Riskin, The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016).
88 MS Sloane 1587, fol. 11r.
89 Ibid.
90 Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
91 MS Sloane 1587, fol. 11r.
92 Ibid, fol. 60v.
93 Ibid.
94 Michael Shank, ‘From Galen’s Ureters to Harvey’s Veins’, Journal of the History of Biology, 18, No. 3 (1985), 331–55.
95 William Harvey, The Circulation of the Blood and Other Writings, p. 159.
96 Mattia Mantovani, ‘Descartes’ Man Under Construction: The Circulatory Statue of Salomon Reisel, 1680’, Early Science and Medicine, 25, Issue 2 (2020), 101–34.
97 Ibid, p. 114.
98 Ibid, pp. 122–6.
99 Simon Werrett, ‘Wonders Never Cease: Descartes’s Météores and the Rainbow Fountain’, The British Journal of the History and Philosophy of Science, 34, No. 2 (2001), 129–47.
100 Karin Ekholm, ‘Anatomy, Bloodletting and Emblems: Interpreting the Title-Page of Nathaniel Highmore’s Disquisitio’, Early Science and Medicine, 18, Issue 1–2 (2013), 87–123.
101 See in Mantovani, ‘Descartes’ Man Under Construction: The Circulatory Statue of Salomon Reisel, 1680’, p. 121.
102 MS Sloane 1587, fol. 11v.
103 René Descartes, Traite de L’Homme, AT XI, 129, in Descartes: The World and Other Writings, ed. by Stephen Gaukroger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 104–5.
104 The experiment was performed at the Society’s meeting on 1 April 1669. Goddard, for unknown reasons, postponed bringing a full account of it until December. It was eventually reported in detail in Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London, 4 vols. (London: Printed for A. Millar, 1756–7), II, pp. 411–13. As Robert Frank points out, it was earlier mentioned by Francis Glisson in his Tractatus de ventriculo et intestinis (London: E.F. for H. Brome, 1677). See Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists, p. 233 (n. 66).
105 MS Sloane 1587, fol. 60v.
106 Ibid, fol. 61r.
107 Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London, II, p. 356. For Nicolaus Steno’s study of muscles and its reception in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, see Troels Kardel, ‘Steno’s Myology: The Right Theory at the Wrong Time’, in Steno and the Philosophers, ed. by Raphaële Andrault and Mogens Lærkein (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 148–73.
108 MS Sloane 1587, fol. 60v.
109 MS Sloane 1587, fols. 5v-6r.
110 James Elkins, ‘On Visual Desperation and the Bodies of Protozoa’, Representations, 40, Special Issue: Seeing Science (1992), 33–56.
111 Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Mechanism: A Visual, Lexical, and Conceptual History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019).