Western Civilization_ Volume B_ 1300 to 1815 - Jackson J. Spielvogel [228]
Vesalius’s hands-on approach to teaching anatomy enabled him to rectify some of Galen’s most glaring errors. He did not hesitate, for example, to correct Galen’s assertion that the great blood vessels originated from the liver since his own observations made it apparent that they came from the heart. Nevertheless, Vesalius still clung to a number of Galen’s erroneous assertions, including the Greek physician’s ideas on the ebb and flow of two kinds of blood in the veins and arteries. It was not until William Harvey’s work on the circulation of the blood nearly a century later that this Galenic misperception was corrected.
William Harvey
William Harvey (1578–1657) attended Cambridge University and later Padua, where he received a doctorate of medicine in 1602. His reputation rests on his book On the Motion of the Heart and Blood, published in 1628. Although questions had been raised in the sixteenth century about Galen’s physiological principles, no major break from his system had occurred. Harvey’s work, which was based on meticulous observations and experiments, led him to demolish the ancient Greek’s erroneous contentions. Harvey demonstrated that the heart and not the liver was the beginning point of the circulation of blood in the body, that the same blood flows in both veins and arteries, and most important, that the blood makes a complete circuit as it passes through the body. Although Harvey’s work dealt a severe blow to Galen’s theories, his ideas did not begin to achieve general recognition until the 1660s, when capillaries, which explained how the blood passed from the arteries to the veins, were discovered. Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood laid the foundation for modern physiology.
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William Harvey,”On the Circulation of the Blood”(1628)
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CHRONOLOGY Important Works of the Scientific Revolution
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Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
1543
Vesalius, On the Fabric of the Human Body
1543
Galileo, The Starry Messenger
1610
Harvey, On the Motion of the Heart and Blood
1628
Galileo, Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems
1632
Cavendish, Grounds of Natural Philosophy
1668
Newton, Principia
1687
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Chemistry
We have already examined the new chemical philosophy that Paracelsus proposed in the sixteenth century, but it was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that a science of chemistry arose. Robert Boyle (1627– 1691) was one of the first scientists to conduct controlled experiments. His pioneering work on the properties of gases led to Boyle’s law, which states that the volume of a gas varies with the pressure exerted on it. Boyle also rejected the medieval belief that all matter consisted of the same components in favor of the view that matter is composed of atoms, which he called “little particles of all shapes and sizes” and which would later be known as the chemical elements.
In the eighteenth century, Antoine Lavoisier (AHN-twahn lah-vwah-ZYAY) (1743–1794) invented a system of naming the chemical elements, much of which is still used today. In helping to show that water is a compound of oxygen and hydrogen, he demonstrated the fundamental rules of chemical combination. He is regarded by many as the founder of modern chemistry. Lavoisier’s wife, Marie-Anne, was her husband’s scientific collaborator. She learned English in order to translate the work of British chemists for her husband and made engravings to illustrate his scientific experiments. Marie-Anne Lavoisier is a reminder that women too played a role in the Scientific Revolution.
Women in the Origins of Modern Science
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FOCUS QUESTION: What role did women play in the Scientific Revolution?
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During the Middle Ages, except for members of religious orders, women who sought a life