Columbus (died 1559) was a pupil of Vesalius, whom he succeeded in the chair of anatomy at Padua. He had a glimpse of how the blood passes from the right to the left side of the heart, but he had no true knowledge of the circulation.
Michael Servetus (1511-1553) was either a pupil or fellow-student of Vesalius, who, in 1553, described accurately the pulmonary circulation. He recognised that the change from venous into arterial blood took place in the lungs, and not in the left ventricle. He was a pioneer in physiological science by his great discovery of the respiratory changes in the lungs.
Levasseur (about 1540), says Hallam,[853] appears to have known the circulation of the blood through the lungs, the valves of the veins, and their direction and purpose.
Gaspare Tagliacozzi (1546-1599) was a professor at Bologna, whose name is famous in the history of surgery from his skill in performing “plastic operations.” Rhinoplastic operation is a term in surgery sometimes synonymous with the Taliacotian operation, which is a process for forming an artificial nose. It consists in bringing down a piece of flesh from the forehead, and while preserving its attachment to the living structures, causing it to adhere to the anterior part of the remains of the nose. Tagliacozzi, himself, to replace the lost substance employed the skin of the upper part of the arm, as Branca did previously. Patients flocked to him from all parts of Europe. The world was, as usual, ungrateful; the great surgeon was considered to have presumptuously interfered with the authority of Providence. Noses and lips which the Divinity had destroyed as a punishment for the sins of men had been restored by this daring man. After his death some nuns heard voices in their convent crying for several weeks: “Tagliacozzi is damned!” By the direction of the clergy of Bologna his corpse was taken from the grave and re-interred in unconsecrated ground.[854] We are not in a position to sneer at this, for the preachers of the nineteenth century said something very similar of the use of chloroform in midwifery only a few years ago. In 1742 the Faculty of Paris declared Tagliacozzi’s operation impossible; but the English journals, in 1794, discovered that such a method of surgical procedure had been in use in India from ancient times, and then the scientific world tried the experiment and succeeded perfectly.
Ambroise Paré, “the father of French surgery” (1509-1590), availed himself of the opportunities offered him in military surgery during the campaign of Francis I. in Piedmont. It was the practice of the time to treat gunshot wounds with hot oil—a treatment which Paré revolutionized by using merely a simple bandage.
In 1545 he attended the lectures of Sylvius at Paris, and became prosector to that great anatomist. His book on Anatomy was published five years later. By his employment of the ligature for large arteries, he was able so completely to control hæmorrhage that he was able to practise amputation on a larger scale than had before been attempted. Paré is considered as the first who regularly employed the ligature after amputation. He declares in his Apologie that the invention was due to the ancients, and he explains their use of it, although he ascribes to inspiration of the Deity his own first adoption of the practice.
The philosopher Ramus in 1562 urged Charles IX. of France to establish schools for clinical teaching, such as already existed at Padua.
Robert Fludd, M.D., or in the Latin style he affected, Robertus de Fluctibus, was born in 1574; he was an ardent supporter of the Rosicrucian philosophy. He had a strong leaning towards chemistry, but had little faith in orthodox medicine. His medical ideas consisted of a mysterious mixture of divinity, chemistry, natural philosophy, and metaphysics.
In 1573, Harrison, in his unpublished Chronologie, remarks that “these daies the taking in of the smoke of the Indian herb called tabaco, by an instrument like a little ladell, is gretly taken up and used in England against rewmes.”
It was not till 1576 that croup was well understood. Laënnec thinks it was quite unknown to the Greek and Arabian physicians; but Forbes says that it was known to Hippocrates and Aretæus, although its pathology was not understood. Ballonius was the first who accurately described the false membrane, which is a characteristic of the disease.[855]