Anatomizing the pulse: Edmund King’s analogy, observation and conception of the tubular body

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In an unpublished anatomical treatise written around 1670, the English anatomist and fellow of the Royal Society of London Edmund King proposed that the human body was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.

KEYWORDS:

• Edmund King
• tubular body
• analogy
• observation
• pulse

1. Introduction

On 23 November 1667, Arundel House in London was crowded for the first experimental blood transfusion between a human and an animal to take place in England. About one month earlier, the anatomist and fellow of the Royal Society of London Edmund King submitted a protocol for the trial. To ensure the safety of the recipient, he promised, special caution would be taken to ‘carefully observe Weight and Measure’ of the transfused blood.¹ Surrounded by over forty witnesses, King and his colleague Richard Lower transfused blood from a lamb’s carotid artery into the vein of a mentally disordered man named Arthur Coga. The precision required for experimenting upon these two living subjects nevertheless brought Lower and King apparent difficulty. To fit the small vein on Coga’s arm, the original silver pipe fixed with quills was replaced by another one proportionally thinner (‘one third part lesse’²). After inserting the quill ends into the incisions on the lamb and Coga’s vessels, the blood stream throughout the settled transfusion passage appeared increasingly weak.³ In such circumstances, how could they gauge the received volume of lamb blood and control the timing to stop the transfusion? King provided two solutions. One was to consult the recipient’s self-evaluation. Coga, who had let 6 or 7 ounces of blood before being supplemented from the lamb, felt after two minutes that ‘he had enough’.⁴ The other rested on the experimenters’ calculation. As the pipe was now 1/3 thinner, the blood transmitted per minute should have decreased to approximately half of the volume of that in the previous pipe. But this estimation would only make sense if the blood flow kept unbroken. When the transfusers saw the decreasingly vigorous blood through the transfusion passage, and could not trace it further into Coga’s vein, how did they justify a constant infusion? King answered, ‘because we felt a Pulse [on Coga’s vein] during that time’.⁵ Indeed, at the beginning of the transfusion, before Coga himself perceived the influx, they had already ascertained its existence by feeling ‘a Pulse in the said veine just beyond the end of the Silver-pipe’.⁶

The pulse proved highly significant to King and Lower’s precision control of the risky experiment. When their eyes could not capture the influent lamb blood beneath Coga’s skin, the pulse reclaimed it as a sensible matter of fact. On what knowledge did King base his belief that the pulse was a reliable proxy for the arterial blood flow even if it was visually untraceable? This casts light on King’s thesis of the tubular model of the human body, whose structure and function was ultimately determined by organic tubes and contained liquids. As will be shown below, King put the pulse forward as a central element of this model when he asserted the overall fabric of blood circulation to be tubular. Yet the model should have posed similar obstructions to King as he had confronted in the lamb-Coga transfusion: His vision, even assisted by microscopes, could never discern every detail of the body. How did he posit a tubular body without actually seeing the tubes in each of its constituent parts?

This question leads us to probing into the ocular impasse in late seventeenth-century observation of nature, about which the pulse that Edmund King declared to have felt at the Arundel House offers an important hint. By definition, only the arteries can pulsate, thus one would never grasp the pulse from the veins.⁷ This is a fact of which King, as a learned physician and dextrous anatomist, should have been fully conscious.⁸ Indeed, in an earlier report of animal transfusion, when recounting his touch upon the recipient sheep’s vein as blood of the donor calf flowed in, King referred to the stroke explicitly as ‘just like a pulse’.⁹ Retrospectively, in terms of Coga’s vein, King would not indicate that it pulsated as an artery. Instead, he endowed the transfused vein with one-off arterial capacity in order to overcome its difficult visibility and naturalize its unnatural tactility. The pulse bore no piece of eye-witnessing, but an analogy, that is, an epistemic conduit which temporarily approximated a vein filled with arterial blood to an exact artery.

King’s fiction of the venous pulse reflects the hybridity of early modern scientific observation, which has long attracted the attention of historians of science. Into the seventeenth century, the profound use of analogy in scholastic philosophical discourses was doubted by many intellectuals to be harmful to the observation-grounded understanding of nature.¹⁰ In the nascent Royal Society, an array of virtuosi, including John Wilkins, Thomas Sprat, Robert Boyle, and Robert Hooke, held similar skepticism. Despite the variations of their specific standpoints, they basically agreed that the ‘plain’ description of perceived natural phenomena was essential to scientific reasoning.¹¹ Reviewing their declared plainness of observation accounts critically, Steven Shapin and Peter Dear point out how the virtuosi armed seemingly undecorated speeches with delicate literary technologies to form virtual witnessing, promote communal consensus, and reinforce experimental authority.¹² Their acute gaze continues in recent studies of verbal analogy in seventeenth-century experimental literature.¹³ Erin Webster identifies rich metaphors and similes in the works of Boyle, Hooke and so forth, and considers the nuanced interactions of analogical rhetoric and the plain style.¹⁴ She argues that beneath the hatred of scholastic figuration, plain language revealed the virtuosi’s deep anxiety over the limit of human vision. Karin Ekholm explains how under the pressure of seeking proper representation for the latest anatomical discoveries about generation, William Harvey turned to a host of analogies. She argues that, unlike his teacher Fabricius ab Aquapendente appreciating the power of images, Harvey recognized analogy as a superior vehicle to unfold physical processes, particularly those rejecting even ‘the sharpest eye’.¹⁵ Alexander Wragge-Morley, by examining John Ray’s anatomy of plants and Thomas Willis’s of the brain, highlights analogy as Ray and his fellow naturalists’ tactic of ‘verbal picturing’. He highlights their ingenuity in cultivating analogy to restore the vividness of observational circumstances and outcomes for better achieving objectivity. Underlining that the naturalists often transferred their experiences of quotidian things to the analogized curious phenomena as a way of perceiving the latter, Wragge-Morley agrees largely with Ekholm on esteeming analogy as the antidote of the virtuosi’s imperfect vision.¹⁶

Inspired by such scholarship, this article will scrutinize one unpublished anatomical work from Edmund King. In this manuscript, King investigated the pulse upon his modelling of a comprehensively tubular vascularity, which responded to the post-Harveian crux of the thesis of blood circulation: the purported completeness of the blood circuit did not always find its foundation from anatomical evidence. I shall argue that King’s analogies served as a potent device of observation, which strategically extended what he saw to account for what he thought beyond the spectrum of vision. As will be seen, in observing the living, tubular form of the pulse, King built analogical links between the arteries and a number of entities, among which this article focuses on the cord and the ureter. Such analogies offered him no direct look into the imperceptible depth of the circulation, but bridged his experiences of visible vessels to invisible ones, and those of inanimate tubes to counterparts in vivo. By analyzing how King’s enlistment of the cord and the ureter coalesced his perception and imagination of the circulation, I address the function of analogy as a representative and reasoning strategy. I first suggest that the two, somewhat discrepant, analogies were made compatible in respective contexts where King chose to stress certain aspects of the property of the meta-entity, the tube. They explained why, to integrate the imagery of the tube, analogies must be deployed and comprehended in plurality. I then suggest that analogies allowed King’s subjective values to intervene in organizing evidence and making supposedly objective facts. Comparing the arterial tubes to things that he thought comparable in certain ways, King reasoned the pulse considerably out of what he believed it to be. In this process, analogies penetrated both his ‘thought and action’,¹⁷ engaging deeply in his perception and conception of the tubular human body. They exemplified that in late seventeenth-century empirical observation, analogy was not reduced to a rhetorical substitute for incompetent vision or a betrayal of objectivity. More deeply and subtly, it was embedded in and overarched ways of seeing.

2. The tubular human body

Edmund King appears rather inconspicuous among the high-profile cohort of virtuosi in the early Royal Society. Apart from his engagement in the transfusion project, he has seldom captured historians’ attention. He received no prestigious university education.¹⁸ His initial career in Northampton, his hometown, and London before being elected as a Royal Society fellow in 1666 is little known.¹⁹ Even his professional trajectory thereafter offers us very limited access, as he produced few publications other than eight observations in the Philosophical Transactions between 1665 and 1693. These printed records about him, mostly associated with the Society, tended to portray an enthusiastic practitioner.²⁰ In previous transfusions between animals, he mastered a specialized technique of connecting their veins and demonstrated it at the Society.²¹ Before having his protocol of the aforementioned human-animal transfusion experiment registered, he seemed desperate for communal support: ‘We have been ready for this Experiment for six Months, and wait for nothing but good opportunities’.²² These episodes nevertheless raise questions about the development of his philosophy. For this reason, it is worth giving further attention to his unpublished writings.

The Sloane Collection of the British Library keeps eleven volumes of King’s manuscripts, including a wealth of quotidian medical cases, extensive recipes, and meticulous dissection notes.²³ These substantial manuscripts provide rich information about King’s multifaceted professional life around dissecting tables, microscopes, laboratories, and sickbeds. They help to draw out a more detailed portrait of him as a sophisticated practitioner of anatomy and medicine and, more importantly, a philosopher seriously pondering the body. This article limits its focus to an anatomical treatise catalogued as MS Sloane 1587.

In comparison with his larger volumes of cases and recipes for private use in the Collection, the short MS Sloane 1587 displays distinct features of readiness for publication. In the opening dedication to the Royal Society at the turn of 1673 to 1674, King acknowledged his debt to the Society’s ‘generous Design’ of improving natural knowledge.²⁴ Given the Society’s autonomous imprimatur, the dedication might have been made in hope of institutional assistance with the publishing process.²⁵ More than that, when analyzing MS Sloane 1587 alongside another volume of King’s work, MS Sloane 1586, which contains highly similar material, it is not difficult to find convincing evidence of editing. On most folios of MS Sloane 1586, only the rectos were used with a relatively casual handwriting, whereas in MS Sloane 1587, most folios have impressively legible handwritings on both sides. That MS Sloane 1587 was possibly a revised version later than MS Sloane 1586 can find plausibility not only from its neater handwriting and thriftiness of paper use, but from the corrections of previous miswritten points. They are testament to multiple iterations of text refinement. The standing correction notes in MS Sloane 1587 further leave the question open of whether it was the last version before going to press.²⁶

The lack of images is equally persuasive to determine the manuscripts as works in progress for printing rather than transcribed copies for circulation. The only image throughout MS Sloane 1587, which also serves as the only one in MS Sloane 1586, is a crude sketch of a device for manifesting the changing volume of arm muscles during the pulse. However, King certainly intended to illustrate this treatise. In MS Sloane 1586, the main text was frequently annotated with numbered ‘vid. Diagr.’ marks at the margin, one of which was even written alongside a space deliberately left blank, indicating where the corresponding picture was to be inserted (Figure 1).²⁷ These diagram marks were maintained in the copy of MS Sloane 1587. The eventual separation of texts and images suggest that King did not expect his treatise to stay in the manuscript format, but, like many of his colleagues, might have outsourced the production of image for the final print.²⁸ The paucity of illustrative components in the two manuscripts of an identical text merits further study by specialists in book history. This article, however, will examine the absent imaging from an epistemological perspective: It will explore the potency of words in expressing the anatomical intricacy of the human body in this work.

Figure 1. A recto with a space deliberately left blank to imply the insertion of the corresponding image in the future print version, from MS Sloane 1586. Courtesy of the British Library, London.

Despite no title in either manuscripts, in the remainder of this article, the text will be examined based on the content of MS Sloane 1587 and referred to as On the Tubular Body, since Edmund King argued in the very front that ‘most, if not all Parts, of the Body, do consist chiefly of Tubes and Liquors’.²⁹ After the dedication, the main section comprises King’s selected anatomical observations in over two decades until 1680, which is preceded by a list of eight arguments. The first argument of the fundamentally tubular human body marshals the following seven. The second and third arguments suggest that the tube is the basic building block of the body: All vessels are made up of other smaller vessels and, at the lowest level, ‘fine Tubes’ and ‘included Liquors’. They share similar fibrous form, moving like muscles to convey the fluid content inside.³⁰ In the fourth, fifth, and sixth arguments, King explained how the body maintains health and develops diseases as a tubular system. Liquors and spirits in any local tubes, by their muscle-like motion, are diffused over the body, thus how tubes move determines the body’s overall condition. Most diseases are caused by the abnormal movement of tubes and the residue congested in their ‘Coats and Cavitys’, to which King attributed the pathology of membranes.³¹ Finally, in the seventh argument, King explicated blood circulation by squaring the vascularity into a coherent tubular network. The comprehensively tubular blood circuit underpins the eighth and final argument, in which King weighed in on the persistent Renaissance controversy over the pulse and addressed its relationship to the heart.³²

These eight arguments exhibit a smooth transition of focus on the tube from anatomical structure to physiological function, which might imply King’s consent to the viewpoint widely praised by seventeenth-century anatomists that anatomy was the cornerstone of physiology.³³ Throughout this treatise, the sequence of the arguments embedded similar episteme that characterized King’s reasoning of the living body upon his autopsia of specific tubes. This collides with the traditional Hippocratic-Galenic physiological framework that health and its collapse rested generally upon the proportion of the four humours (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile).³⁴ Nonetheless, the tube as the body’s basic component linked King’s model to the growing philosophical camp of mechanism in his era. He adopted the then widespread clockwork metaphor to assert the significance of studying tubes. ‘ … whoever dos attempt to amend faults in a curious Engine should be as wel skill’d as he can, in the Frame & make of it’, he commented in the dedication.³⁵ To figure out the causes of health and diseases of the machine-like body, an anatomist should act as a clockmaker expert in the know-how of its ‘gears’. Tubes were Edmund King’s gears.

King’s mechanistic metaphor pinpoints the ambitious goal of observing bodily tubes. In his treatise, the tube stood as both a cluster of dissected hollow cylinders and a concept; it was the model expositing and explaining the primary form of the human body. Philosophers of science stress that models are not simply the mirror of phenomena, but ‘mediators between theories and phenomena’.³⁶ Model thence refers to an epistemological purpose varying from direct presentation; it bears the potential for generalization, a capacity for bringing plural witnessing efforts together and framing their interrelatedness out of contingency. For seventeenth-century naturalists eager to distil a universal law of objectivity out of numerous particulars, models met their intellectual thirst. When King delved into the tube in his anatomical observations, the fellow virtuosi in the Royal Society sought other models to help make sense of the fine texture of nature in diverse aspects. In the anti-Aristotelian atmosphere, they took critically the Aristotelian concept of minima naturalia, the smallest unit possessing the same form as the larger matter.³⁷ The central concern of their corpuscularian hypotheses was less about what kinds of intrinsic elements constituted matter, than how they caused the so-called secondary qualities of matter that affected the beholder’s sensations.³⁸ Robert Boyle, for instance, suggested motion as the primary principle that determined sensory properties of matter. The motion of corpuscles, he stated, ‘hath, of all other affections of matter, the greatest interest in the altering and modifying it, since it is not only the grand agent or efficient among second causes, but one of the principal things that constitutes the form of bodies’.³⁹ Resembling King, Boyle took advantage of the clockwork metaphor to advocate how a perceivable nature comes into being from the unperceivable corpuscular movement. Wheels, strings, pins, he accounted, ‘may have each of them its peculiar bulk, shape, and other attributes’, yet they could impact on each other to empower the entire watch to work.⁴⁰ From the variant qualities of small parts, therefore, one might obtain a more sophisticated access to knowing the organized model in function.

In Edmund King’s time, the Royal Society was immersed in highly vibrant yet controversial discussions on corpuscularism.⁴¹ In terms of practice, for instance, opinions diverged on whether the microscopic image of things previously invisible could really reveal truths about corpuscles, and if so, how effective they were to offer intelligence for the visible, macroscopic world.⁴² This was also the question raised for the anatomists trying to model the body into a homogenous collective of small units resembling natural philosophers’ corpuscles. The curiosity about the structure of bodily parts had long been ingrained in the discipline of anatomy. In the seventeenth century, it gained new meanings promoted by the closer conversation between anatomy and physiology as well as the invention of artificially augmented vision. Many anatomists were keen to observe smaller corporeal structures, among which the tube comprised a popular research theme.⁴³ In so doing, they sought to synthesize great numbers of scattered evidence into one unit, from which they speculated on function and the causes of life and death.⁴⁴ As King’s arguments show, dense morphological inquiries were not merely for satisfying the observer’s desire to view the body’s inner panorama. Rather, the primary concern was to understand its holistic function. The rising tide of empiricism enriched the longstanding anatomical episteme of explaining great by small. In such an environment, it was reasonable and, to be sure, productive for King and his colleagues to stay curious about the body’s ‘corpuscles’.

But the corpuscularian approach would in some new ways problematize King’s empirical reasoning of the body and the pulse. First, corpuscles were after all invisible, and so was the body to some extent. To define the human body as fundamentally tubular technically required the anatomist to look through vessels all over the body and at the highest level of detail, against which his ocular endeavour would inevitably be unfeasible and inadequate. Neither the action of seeing, however assiduous, nor the microscopes, however powerful, were not to encompass the omnipresent tubes. Second, incomplete evidence, even if abundant, would always come up against the problem of induction.⁴⁵ As King based his pulse argument on the proposition of the uniformly tubular blood circuit, the latter’s partial observability would put at stake the former’s sensibility.

In addition, the accepted tool for communicating clear experimental facts – objective images – could not fully represent the pulse as the vital characteristic of the tubular body. As the Dutch anatomist Govert Bidloo condemned his competitor Frederik Ruysch’s illustrations and wax preparations, even the most exquisite image fails to depict the vivacity of a pulsating body, because life exists as a process, not fragmented frozen phenomena.⁴⁶ Conversely, images, as Bidloo criticized, expose static features of observed objects at specific times of witnessing. They are incapable of expressing the pulse properly, since the living artery – where the pulse takes place – exists in a continuous period of time rather than discrete moments. Moreover, the pulse is primarily tangible instead of visible. When drawn as a flat image, its tactility would insurmountably be lost.

Thus, neither the human eye nor any two-dimensional imaging technology could completely grasp Edmund King’s pulse in the tubular form. More powerful means was entailed to show the structure, function, and vivacity of the tube altogether in an intact manner; that is, to regard the tube as a model instead of many a dissected specimen. The following section will examine how King’s verbal analogy met that need by cementing the homogeneity of vascular tubes in a range of sizes and their structural-functional consistency. Through the analogical link, sensation and knowledge of the observed blood vessels were designated to inform those inaccessible to the human senses.

3. An artery as a cord

Edmund King’s modelling of the tubular vascularity was bred by the ongoing interest in blood circulation among late seventeenth-century anatomists. In 1628, the English anatomist and physician William Harvey published his ground-breaking Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus. Although having practised rich observations and experiments, Harvey declared that ‘the blood is driven round a circuit with an unceasing, circular sort of movement’ without witnessing the circuit in every part.⁴⁷ In the following decades, blood circulation gained considerable recognition, which, nevertheless, by no means reduced scholars’ enthusiasm for detailing the fabric of the blood circuit.⁴⁸ Under the recently invented microscope, some of them, including King, saw the delicacy of the circuit on previously inaccessible scales. But amplified lenses only extended their eyes to the smaller, subvisible blood vessels, not the fine, invisible ones. Such limitation of their magnified vision would raise the question – no matter how physiologically important it was – about how the arteries connected to the veins at the extremity of the circulation. This section examines Edmund King’s anatomical observation of the complete blood circuit, in which he compared the artery to the cord. The cord analogy was significant to King’s methodology he referred to as to ‘Explain small things by great’, which set an opposite vector of reasoning to the corpuscularian allusion carried by contemporary microscopic technology.⁴⁹ It did not absolutely replace the role of evidence, but conveyed implicit perceptions in evidence down to the levels where visual efforts became futile. It provoked, cohered, and scaled multiple exercises of ‘verbal picturing’.

One will not understand the epistemic power of King’s cord analogy without fully realizing the difficulty of eye-witnessing in anatomical practices of his era. The precise observation of the natural body, as the transfusion trials in the late 1660s exemplified, brimmed with visual challenges. Without the assistance of microscopes, Harvey envisioned a blood circuit inside the body by his famous calculation of the blood volume and less-discussed analogies including the rise and fall of the sun, rainfall and river flow, and sluice gates.⁵⁰ But he reported that he had not seen some essential details such as how tiny arteries and veins connected.⁵¹ With the rise of optical magnification in late seventeenth-century scientific observation, observers zoomed in on scales once beyond their sight, admiring the ‘new Worlds and Terra-Incognita’s to our view’.⁵² Their visual shocks increasingly loaded the microscope with corpuscularian implications, hence not a few optimistic observers at that time expected to detect through the lenses the fine components of nature. Yet in practice, microscopes produced optical amplification that was not infinite, and there was always substance even the lenses-assisted eye failed to approach. The sharpened sight and the remaining insurmountable visual incapacity were the two sides of the same coin marked by the improved microscopic technology.

In this context, what Harvey left unclarified about the connection of arteries and veins – whether there is a consecutive canal between them (anastomosis), or there is some part in non-vascular organs straining blood throughout (parenchyma) – drew the attention of anatomists in the following generations. As early as 1661, the Italian anatomist Marcello Malpighi published his demonstration of capillaries in the lungs.⁵³ As was reported, he injected air and coloured liquids into the pulmonary artery, and eventually detected them in the veins. Combining other microscopic evidence from his lung dissections, Malpighi believed that arterial blood flowed into the veins through closed inosculations instead of gaping ‘into the substance of the lung’, thus acknowledging anastomosis and denying parenchyma.⁵⁴ Malpighi’s opinion reached England through his contact with the Royal Society. Thomas Willis, leading neuroanatomist in the Society and close friend and collaborator of Edmund King, agreed with Malpighi in his own study of blood vessels in Pharmaceutice rationalis.⁵⁵ He very likely examined Malpighi’s hypothesis together with King, to whose ‘most dexterous’ anatomical skills and ‘sedulous’ experimental labour he owed much.⁵⁶ Their cooperation in identifying anastomoses can also be verified from King’s end: On the Tubular Body contains King’s record that some cuts of arteries and veins had been sent to Willis.⁵⁷ In 1667, seven years before the first volume of Pharmaceutice rationalis was printed off, the Philosophical Transactions already published King’s observation in which he confirmed the dissected parts normally thought as parenchyma indeed consisted of clustered vessels.⁵⁸

Malpighi, Willis, King, and other curiosi, while availing themselves of the visual stimulation brought by optical lenses, experienced the concomitant pain of seeking how blood ran across arteries and veins on decreasingly perceivable scales. King, for instance, complained about his over-and-again practical failures of preserving one vessel intact without destructing many thinner others in propinquity. ‘I was both confounded and tired’, he lamented.⁵⁹ Along the access to the body’s very depth loomed the anathema of imperceptibility.

King conceived his seventh argument on blood circulation in uniform tubes and cord analogy in such an uneasy atmosphere. This argument began with his wary exercise of Baconian casuistry.⁶⁰ Unlike Willis directly quoting Malpighi’s opinion, King suspended judgement, juxtaposed the two hypotheses of anastomosis and parenchyma, and attempted to test them under the same criterion of observation. He had ‘taken pains’ to try to observe either anastomosis or parenchyma, yet neither was caught by his restless eyes.⁶¹ When both hypotheses remained unwarranted, King nevertheless offered a pair of totally opposite judgments: While claiming that ‘there is no such thing’ as parenchyma, he affirmed it worthwhile to ‘make a disquisition for some more probable way’ to prove the existence of anastomoses.

King’s following elaboration exhibits how his assumption of the minutest vascular passage survived the predicament of seeing and acquired observational probability. On the one hand, he applied the tubular model to depict the consistent movement of arteries and veins at their smallest connections. The blood transmission from an artery to a vein was decomposed into four sequential phases. First, the major arteries ramify into all the extremes of the body, driving blood away from the heart through synchronous constriction and contraction.⁶² Second, blood arrives at the minutest inosculations of arteries and veins, which King supposed to be in the tubular form.⁶³ Third, the influx ebbing from arterial ends presses and enlarges the mouth of the connected veins.⁶⁴ Last, veins are dilated to accept the influx, thus the transmission is accomplished at the thinnest segments of the blood circuit.⁶⁵ The four phases together draw the always alternative movements of basic arterial and venous tubes, which King endorsed by observing instead the evident motions of larger and palpable arteries and veins.⁶⁶ Namely, blood vessels in easily observable sizes were taken by King as the natural magnification of their counterparts difficult to perceive. This way of seeing was backed up by the tubular model, as it primarily legislated the structural-functional congruence of vascular tubes that are of the same type yet in different sizes. On the key prerequisite of their homogenous nature, great tubes thus could fully represent the features of small ones and vice versa. The underlying methodology, in King’s own speech, was to ‘Explain small things by great’.⁶⁷ While microscopes amplify the observer’s vision, King’s tubular model enlarges the objects to observe.

On the other hand, King adopted the tubular model to project the structural heterogeneity of the least arterial and venous coats. Through microscopic lenses, he observed that ‘the Artery hath right [straight] Fibres wch in the vein has them wthout, and whereas the Artery hath circular Fibres wthout, the vein has them wthin’.⁶⁸ This observation was perhaps shared with Willis when King delivered him specimens of blood vessels. In Pharmaceutice rationalis, the anatomical tables displayed a host of images presenting the fibrous differences of arterial and venous tubes that King clarified in his own manuscript (Figure 2).⁶⁹ According to his highly teleological explanation, the structural divergence of the fibres was ‘order’d’ for performing simultaneously contrary motions of arteries and veins.⁷⁰ From the tubular configurations of the visible vessels extended King’s speculation of the obscure inosculation, where he replayed the strategy of explaining small by great. Comparing the synchronous alternant motions of arteries and veins in easily observable sizes, he posited that the fine artery ‘being shortned by vertue of their strait fibres’ resulted in the impletion of blood into the conjunct vein, thus the fibres must experience a corresponding ‘reduction (or restitution)’ to come back to the vein’s ‘due dimension’ and prepare for the ongoing arterial influx.⁷¹ Interestingly, here the microscopic images of blood vessels played both the roles of the small and the great: They took the significance of natural philosophers’ corpuscles when examining the vessels available for bare eyes, whereas serving as the amplified representation of those unavailable even with optical magnification. The tubular form – that is, the tube as a model – contributed to a continuum of knowing beyond the territory of seeing.

Figure 2. The distinct arterial and venous coats, from Thomas Willis, Pharmaceutice rationalis (Hague, 1677), Table VI, Sect. 1, Cap. 1, Fig. 1 & 2. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

King buttressed this explanatory strategy by his analogy of the artery and the cord. He described, ‘for we say so of a cord, when the end of it is so divided, as that all the lesser threds wch composed it, are spread open, yet these are distinct threads too, and often times as lesser cords’.⁷² Resembling a cord, the artery ‘will divide & subdivide [in] all manner of wayes so fine, that no Eye (much less knife) can trace them’.⁷³ At face value, the cord carried an indication echoing King’s second argument that tubes in the human body were generally the assemblage of smaller tubes. Yet it conveyed further connotations. To King, the infinitely reducible materiality of the cord that one’s daily experience could tell was endowed upon the artery through the analogy. It encapsulated his response to the existing debate over anastomosis and parenchyma in spite that he observed neither. A cord would never reduce to nothingness, and so was an artery in comparison. Unlike the convenience of splitting cords into hairy threads in needlework, anatomists, as King suggested, usually suffered the difficulty of separating tiny blood vessels, yet the analogy enabled, if not induced, them to trust that the vessels was always there. In addition, more than morphological features, the consecutive tubular structure also transferred visible contraction and dilation of sturdy arterial stems to their minute ends. By specifying its shape on every scale into one coherent form, the conceptualized cord and threads also confirmed the compared vessel’s uninterrupted function of transmitting blood. In such manner, King’s tubular model, although not entirely visible, reconciled with the thesis of blood circulation. The arterial tube and the cord as two distinct sorts of substance were made compatible here as King valued their constant materiality and elasticity in common.

The analogical implication of the cord and the corpuscularian implication of microscopy entwined into a cognitive loop, which offers King’s tubular model with striking flexibility to navigate across the great and the small of the human body. This cognitive loop also featured King’s other anatomical observations than On the Tubular Body. In December 1669, his study of the vascular network in genital organs of human beings and animals was published in the Philosophical Transactions, in which he described blood vessels in the male rabbit’s testicles as ‘very curiously embroidered’.⁷⁴ Unlike the manuscript, to this observation account was attached an exquisite illustration of tenuous vessels in human testicle resembling man-made embroidery (Figure 3, Fig. I in the original plate). It may remind us of the delicate textiles in Ruysch’s cabinet, which were placed deliberately in the anatomical preparations to help manifest the human body as a divinely embroidered craft.⁷⁵ Yet King seemed not satisfied with the embroidery revealed in his image, which, as he annotated in the text, ‘represents only the 4th or 5th part of what was exhibited of the same testis’.⁷⁶ The words reflect his critique that image spoke for parts, not a pattern. For people reading the observation solely by the image, the unillustrated parts of the specimen would be invisible; only through reading the image with its verbal explanations could they apprehend the entire interweaving texture that King attempted to evoke by the imagery of embroidery. Different from the embroidery metaphor aiming at representation, the cord analogy made the subvisible arteries malleable for the intelligibility of blood vessels in all sizes ranging from the visible to the invisible. In examining Willis’s observation statements in Cerebri Anatome, Wragge-Morley labels his metaphors ‘medium scales’.⁷⁷ He notes that the metaphors introduced objects ‘generally much larger and always more easily visible than the bodies for which they stood’, and as enjoying most beholders’ experiential familiarity, they were useful to represent curious things. King’s cord analogy of course played the role of ‘medium scale’, yet it went beyond that. It instructed the observer to mobilize the limited microscopic view within and without the spectrum of sensation. It did stand at the anxious edge of invisibility, but it was not a helpless excuse of the failed eyes.⁷⁸ Instead, it offered more dynamic ways of seeing.

Figure 3. Fig. I. The dissected parts of human testicles, which comprise ‘nothing else but a congeries of Vessels of various sorts, and their several Liquors’, from Edmund King, Philosophical Transactions, 4, Issue 52 (1669). Courtesy of the Royal Society, London.

While the cord worked in harmonious unison with the embroidery to configurate the fine artery, it also coalesced with the string to indicate its motion and tactility. These entities together made up the rich meaning of King’s cord analogy. As a physician, King was not unfamiliar with the prevalent comparison of the human body and musical instruments in ancient sphygmological tracts.⁷⁹ In his treatise, he recounted this old analogy, noting that the pulse had been interpreted as a physical vibration ‘from ye sudden shake ye Heart gives the Artery in its Systole’, as if a lute string is ‘tyed cross a Room, if it be struck at one End, it will vibrate to ye other’.⁸⁰ He seemed cautious to validate the analogy, but was not indifferent about the indicated instrument-like body with all its parts pulsating together. In effect, it impacted on his experimental practice, as he suggested inserting a ‘thorn’ into the skin or other fleshly parts to observe the pulse. He was confident that his audience would perceive an identical phenomenon: ‘Whoever examins this, shall find it keeps pace wth the heart, and by consequence wth the great Trunk of ye Arterys’.⁸¹ How cord and items akin to it – string, embroidery, and so forth – enlightened King encourages our further thinking of the affluent knowledge that a single analogy could develop. First, in contrast to the vow of abolishing ancient authority, King’s analogical string showcased how seventeenth-century experimental philosophers cunningly built old notions into their empirical edifice. As such, observation accounts containing analogical utterances could eclectically shelter ideas of diverse origins to claim facts. Second, King’s cord analogy was capable of conveying not only visual, but tactile insights into the pulse. Multifarious experiences, as Karin Ekholm denotes by studying Harvey’s analogies in his anatomy of generation, effectively cultivated assessments of ‘the qualities of things when nothing could be seen’.⁸² King’s reference to the vibrating string, in a similar way, helped to objectify the opaque artery by approximating its sensory accessibility through touch. The analogy rescued the anatomist’s exhausted eyes by inviting other senses in.

In the end of this section, we look at the interrelationship between the designated imagery of cord, embroidery, and lute string in King’s reasoning of the artery. These analogical vehicles, while sharing material commonality, indicated varied aspects of the all-around property of the artery. They remind that analogies must stand in clusters instead of on their own to make sense of the subject they infer. As George Lakoff and Mark Jackson point out, a single metaphor cannot deliver complete indications, as it always compares two elements by selecting some of their entailments to highlight while understating others.⁸³ This urges us to consider what the cord-like artery managed and failed to explicate about the pulse. Doubtlessly, the cord deepened King’s morphological understanding about the circulatory system and well configurated the physiological locus of the pulse. However, they downplayed in the meantime its vibrant nature and intimate correlation with the then received vital components, such as blood and spirits. An artery, despite resembling a cord in many ways, is not a solid thread, and examination of the pulse would be inseparable from asking how arteries contain and disseminate blood. In the late seventeenth century, these concerns occupied the centre of mechanistic interpretations of the body. The last section will investigate how Edmund King situated his tubular model in contemporary disputations of mechanism to represent the pulse as a vivacious sign, for which another analogy was introduced.

4. Pulse across life and death

Observing the pulsating human body was notably difficult for seventeenth-century anatomists. As witnessing vital signs on the opened human body was generally impossible given the prohibition of human vivisection, they often had to turn to either animal vivisection or non-living simulation. Both solutions conditioned insights of questionable accuracy into the living body.⁸⁴ This continued to ignite the pulse controversy during the earlier centuries, in which Edmund King was involved when composing the eighth argument. He rephrased the long-lasting debate into three major questions: what causes the pulse (the blood impulse from the left ventricle or the artery itself), how the artery dilates (automatically or by the blood impulse), and whether the pulse is the artery’s inherent faculty.⁸⁵ These questions are anchored by the relationship between the heartbeat and the arterial pulse, which had gained enormous attention of influential medics in antiquity including Herophilus, Erasistratus and Galen.⁸⁶ In the late seventeenth century, it fuelled prominent disputations about the agency and mechanism of animal and human bodies.⁸⁷ In King’s tubular model of the body specifically, it underlaid and brought to the fore the question about how arterial tubes pulsate. This section discusses how King enlisted a set of material analogies to visualize the living pulse in dead tubes. His interpretation of the artificial pulse, I argue, illuminated a provocative alternative way of explaining life through death.

King attempted to ally his response to the questions with sound observation. ‘I shall not spend time in urging objections agst any of the forecited opinions in particular’, he put it soberly, ‘but keep to the method of this place, wch is to ground my discourse upon Experiment’.⁸⁸ Then he elaborated his practice. ‘I took the ureter of an Oxe wch is strong & tense, that being filled wth Quicksilver, (or what else you please) and laid in what posture you will’, he suggested, ‘if you strike it at one end, you will feel a motion at the other End, like a Pulse, and this Toties quoties as often as you please to repeat it’.⁸⁹ The dense use of experimentalist literary technologies – arbitrary choice of liquids, posture of ureter, and repetition of pressing – revealed King’s appeal for collective testimonies to promote public trust in his observation.⁹⁰ Then, he went on to introduce another manual practice. If one positions four fingers evenly at the other end from the pressed point, King remarked, ‘you shall plainly perceive ye greatest part of the motion at your forefinger’.⁹¹ Noteworthy was that this uneven feeling differs from that of the real pulse, which would impress each finger equally. He further emphasized that upon the ureter, when one presses the forefinger with the greatest strength at the point nearest to the pressed end, the other three fingers would obtain a greater sense of pulsation. Yet in taking the true pulse, the same finger gesture would trigger a rather subtle sensation.

The ureter experiment showed the artificial pulse to be prominently different from the natural pulse. In the main section of the treatise, more detailed observations further validated that sensory differentiation. King reported that when a gut sample was fully filled with liquid, its pulsation was numb and less obvious; only if it became empty did ‘bigger’ motion occur.⁹² The tactility of the arterial pulse was exactly opposite: The fuller artery tended to produce a stronger pulse. He also described another insight into the gut not obtainable from real arteries: ‘you will feel a double broken motion of ye Pulse as if the motion were divided according to ye several stops of your Fingers’.⁹³ Plentiful experiences of touch into the natural and artificial pulses were accumulated to reinforce King’s adjudication of their difference. The observer’s fingers would tell that the former was vital, active and coherent, little affected by outside pressure, whereas the latter was passive, receding if without extra enhancement.

King’s application of the ureter as an analogy for the artery rested upon the burgeoning fashion of bringing different physical tubes together to unpack physiological puzzles. Michael Shank’s study of how Galen’s demonstration of the circulating urinary system provoked Harvey’s thesis of blood circulation gestures at the popularity of such analogical practices.⁹⁴ Indeed, Harvey had also experimented on reproducing the pulse in dissected physical tubes other than arteries. ‘ … take what length you will of the inflated and dried intestines of a dog or wolf or other animal (such a preparation as you find in an apothecary’s shop), cut it off and fill it with water, and tie it at both ends to make a sort of sausage’, he instructed, then strike at one end to make the intestine tremble. If pressing the fingers at the other end ‘in the way that we usually feel the pulse', one would therefore ‘feel clearly every knock and difference of movement’.⁹⁵ In contrast to King, Harvey viewed such preparations as reliable imitations of the real pulse, and recommended their pedagogical use to teach beginners in pulse diagnosis the key notions of size, rate, strength and rhythm. Harvey’s appropriation of the pulses in living and dead tubes earned the admiration of many later anatomists and physiologists influenced by the surging mechanical philosophy. In the 1670s, the German physician Salomon Reisel translated René Descartes’s mechanistic reinterpretation of blood circulation into a ‘human circulatory statue’. The internal landscape of the living body was purportedly staged in a transparent, tangible hydraulic machine in operation.⁹⁶ Interestingly, ox ureters were also applied to represent vascular tubes in this apparatus.⁹⁷ With glass brain and heart, ureter arteries, and water humours, Reisel reproduced a simulated pulse visible and palpable outside the human body.⁹⁸ Like Harvey, he thought it informative for medical diagnosis.

Harvey’s and Reisel’s justifications diverged from King’s on whether inanimate, but nonetheless organic tubes analogous to arteries had the capability to stand for the real pulse. The contradiction was rooted in the heated polemic during the Renaissance about whether the motion of arteries was passive or active. What Harvey and Reisel proposed was to reject the local agency – the inherent ability to act – of arteries recognized in the Galenic physiological framework, and ascribe it instead to the heart. Diminishing the autonomous motion of arteries in this way took support from a range of contemporary representative devices, one of the most impressive of which was the hydraulic machine.⁹⁹ In the title-page of Nathaniel Highmore’s Corporis humani disquisitio anatomica, for instance, the circulatory system was depicted as a waterwork: From the heart stretches a heavenly hand pumping the fluid out, which flows down through ramifying branches into a round canal.¹⁰⁰ Reisel’s sketch of the blood circuit for Francis Aston conveyed similar ideas of the heart pumping the blood out to the arterial vessels.¹⁰¹ These hydraulic representations rationalized the swelling and recovery of vascular tubes as a passively mechanical process charged by an outsourced engine, which King to some extent agreed with.¹⁰²

Yet it would be wrong to claim that King stood firmly in favour of the passive pulse, as his ureter experiments already made its palpable difference from the natural pulse undeniable. Not restricting all the motivating factors within the heart, King in fact preserved the place of spirits in animating the local circulation of the blood. His fifth argument, which claimed the abnormal rise of spirits, humoural residue, and ‘recrements’ as the major causes of diseases, recognized that spirits flowed inside corporeal tubes. In Descartes’s opinion, animal spirits were extremely ethereal and active substances like ‘a certain very fine wind, or rather a very lively and very pure flame’, gaseous, nearly intangible.¹⁰³ They diffused instantly into blood vessels, glands, muscles, and other tissues throughout the body, bearing impulses of the brain-based soul to activate motions and sensations. But for anatomists committed to verifying the existence of substance through observation, they would not take the alleged invisibility of spirits for granted.

Hence in the manuscript, we read King’s record of his colleague Jonathan Goddard’s experiment of the volume change of muscles during the pulse, which was read at the Royal Society on 16 December 1669. The experiment did not become available for wide notice at once.¹⁰⁴ Yet King, one of the Society’s fellows present at Goddard’s demonstration, took the earliest opportunity to learn about it. Goddard was said to have designed a special case made of ‘Lattin’ whose bottom was connected with a tiny glass pipe. King’s only sketches in the two manuscripts mentioned above were dedicated to this precise measuring device (Figure 4).¹⁰⁵ When one immerses the arm into the water inside the device, some water is consequently pressed into the small pipe and rises to a certain level. Goddard thus arranged a comparative experiment to gauge the arm’s changing volume by inspecting the rise and fall of the water level in the small pipe. As King recorded:

… first it was visible, that as ye water rose upon every pulsation of ye Artery & subsided upon every Intermission, and the Person being order’d to make a contraction or clutch of his Fingers a Fist of both Arms … upon every such contraction, the water in ye small glass canale did descend much more then upon ye intermissions of the Pulse before mention’d.¹⁰⁶

From what was seen in this experiment derived divergent interpretations. Noting that the water in the glass pipe ‘subsided’ when the hand was clutched yet ‘rose’ when the hand was relaxed, Henry Oldenburg seemed to accept the Danish anatomist Nicolaus Steno’s understanding of the muscular motion: Muscles contracts not because of their inflation caused by the afflux of pneuma or animal spirits as Galen, Erasistratus and Descartes contended.¹⁰⁷ King, however, paid attention to the relatively lower water level during the fist than that during the opened palm, suggesting that the pulse was affected in the former condition. He ascribed it to animal spirits, taking Goddard’s entire experiment as an eloquent proof of his idea that in each pulse, ‘Animal spirits are comprest into ye Blood by the nervous points in ye Internal Superficies of the Trunk of the Artery’.¹⁰⁸ The intangible animal spirits thereby gained visual recognition as coinciding with the natural pulse. From that co-occurrence, King’s distinct experiences of the artificial and natural pulses in turn became intelligible: The vibration of the inanimate ureter without animal spirits could not be the same as the pulsation of the vivacious artery with animal spirits. What underlaid their sensory disparity was the intrinsic divergence of life and death.

Figure 4. Edmund King’s sketch of Jonathan Goddard’s device for showing the volume change of the human arm during the pulse, from MS Sloane 1587. Courtesy of the British Library, London.

That King’s ureter experiment had its pulse knowledge complemented by Goddard’s demonstration exemplifies the intricate engagement of anatomical studies in early modern physiological discourses. The de facto research vehicles of anatomists were cadavers and dying bodies devoid of living features such as the pulse. For King and other anatomists expecting to define the pulse, such a contradiction between their epistemic goal and tool forced them to recreate a pulse out of materials that were not capable of pulsating inherently. The reproduced extraneous pulse was determined to be of an analogical nature, and it echoed the greater analogy that backed up the anatomical simulation of life through death. One may read these analogies as very plain, since their essence lay not in words, but in materials. The key question, nevertheless, is when performing these analogies, how anatomists evaluated the relationship of the paired objects. In terms of the artificial pulse, Harvey and Reisel ultimately appreciated the commensurability between dead phenomena and living landscape. King, on the contrary, was more conservative in registering death as an all-around realistic model of life by stressing their sensory discrepancies. This kept in tune with his general caution about experimental interventions upon natural processes. Widely-applied anatomical techniques of his time like injection, compression and ligation ‘will Signify nothing’, he reminded,

unles we could reduce them to their natural posture, in the Act of contraction, wch is done by a due position of the Fibres in a sound Animal, wch is not in our power by any force, I can yet imagine, to perform the Animal being dead.¹⁰⁹

In this sense, one might operate analogies of living and dead bodies properly by bearing in mind that they unfold knowledge of difference, rather than similarity.

5. Conclusion

Edmund King’s observation of the pulse in his tubular model of the human body entwined with analogies. This article, by examining these analogies, looks at the complex interaction of experience and idea in seventeenth-century empirical observation. In King’s unpublished On the Tubular Body, the pulse embodied striking dynamics of producing and representing knowledge. From time to time, its embedded episteme contravened the contemporary paradigm of objectivity featured by clear witnessing and undecorated speech. King’s tubular model and his pulse disquisitions revealed the inefficiency of transparent vision and plain words in accomplishing deep observation and arriving at general principles. It was upon this cognitive tension that analogies were enlisted to explicate and organize King’s visual efforts to understand the body.

King’s cord analogy to articulate the artery upon blood circulation and ureter analogy to reason the arterial pulse disclose the dual ontology of analogy as both a verbal vehicle and, more significantly, a way of thinking. It maintained a curious relationship with visual experience in King’s anatomical observations. More than ‘a last resort’ of explanation at the edge of visibility, analogy played an astonishingly active role in conveying observed knowledge to where eyes and microscopes failed to reach. It also contributed to combining visual and tactile sensations to stimulate more objective representation, and promoted communication between various observers, ages, theories, evidence, and speculations. Through analogies, the tubular model involved King’s subjective thinking and seeing in a vast, objectivity-oriented conversation about how to observe and conceive the human body. His strategy of representing and reasoning one thing by making it compatible to another fits into James Elkins’s acute viewpoint that ‘the need for analogies is deep-rooted in our habits of seeing’.¹¹⁰

Analogy also offers an angle to think of the intersection of anatomy and mechanism in the late seventeenth century. Microscopes, while expanding the scope of human vision, caused new risks of seeing, urging naturalists to build and tighten sensory connections between microcosm and macrocosm. Mechanism participated profoundly in the endeavour of negotiating knowledge on different scales either perceptible or imperceptible. In King’s case, we have seen his flexible application of mechanistic elements such as the clockwork metaphor, the corpuscularian philosophy and the hydraulic model to distil maximum meaning of what his eyes captured. But clearly, they were not the entirety of his methodological arsenal. Domenico Meli defines mechanism as a common focus on using instruments and machines to explain phenomena and exclude accounts of immaterial entities.¹¹¹ In King’s inspection of the living pulse, analogy offered a critical means of displaying the intangible upon material substrates. It was the material analogies that informed his experimental practice and framed its rationale. This may inspire us to go back to the Arundel House and interrogate the extraneous transfusion tube made up of quills and silver pipes. Was it not itself a prosthetic analogy for the real artery? Was it not an instruction that prompted King to practise on the lamb and Coga with a tube, since they were but two living tubular models? Analogy harnessed thought as well as action.

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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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by Cambridge Trust and China Scholarship Council [grant number: 201808060077].

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. 65^r; MS Sloane 1587, fol. 1^r.

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. 6^v.

27 MS Sloane 1586, fol. 68^r.

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. 2^r.

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. 1^r.

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, 187^b, 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. 9^v.

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, xii^r. 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. 10^r.

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. 9^v.

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. 10^r: ‘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. 10^r: ‘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. 9^v.

68 Ibid, fol. 10^r.

69 Thomas Willis, Pharmaceutice rationalis, II, Table VI, Sect. 1, Cap. 1, Fig. 1 & 2.

70 MS Sloane 1587, fol. 10^r: ‘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. 10^v.

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. 10^v.

81 MS Sloane 1587, fol. 10^r.

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. 11^r.

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. 11^r.

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. 11^r.

92 Ibid, fol. 60^v.

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. 11^v.

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. 60^v.

106 Ibid, fol. 61^r.

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. 60^v.

109 MS Sloane 1587, fols. 5^v-6^r.

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).