«From Aristotle s Pneuma to Lavoisier s Oxygen Some Major Physiological Trajectories in the History of Medicine» Frank W. Stahnisch fwstahni@ucalgary.ca
Introduction
Some modern language expressions regarding air : German: - Heisse Luft - Luftikus - Luftmensch English: - to walk on air - vanish into thin air - assume an air of importance
Some Ancient Views on Air ( Pneuma ) and the Brain
The physiological model of the four humours
The brain, then, tempers the heat and seething of the heart. In order, however, that it may itself have moderate amount of heat, branches run from both blood-vessels, that is to say from the great vessel and from what is called the aorta and end in the membrane which surrounds the brain [ ]. For when vapour [or air] steams up from the earth and is carried by the heat into the upper regions, as soon as it reaches the cold air that is above the earth, it condenses again into water owing to the refrigeration, and falls back to the earth as rain. These, however, are matters which may be suitably considered in the Principles of Diseases, so far as natural philosophy has anything to say to them. (Aristotle, Parts of Animals II, pp. 185ff.)
Aristotle s Theory of the Four Natural Forms : - Psyché (often pneuma used as related element) - Animal Form - Vegetable Form - Mineral Form
For, as has been observed elsewhere, sleep comes on when the corporeal element [the evaporated air is] conveyed upwards by the hot veins to the head. But when the air has been thus carried up can no longer ascend, but is too great in quantity [to do so], it forces the hot [substance] back again and flows downwards. Hence it is that men sink down [as they do in sleep] when the hot air which tends to keep them erect. (Aristotle, Parts of Animals II, ibid.)
Thomas Acquinas (1225-1274 A.D.) A ventricular model of the actions of the brain (Gerard de Harderwyck, d. 1503)
Oculus Imaginationis (16th Century) Robert Fludd (1574-1637) mirrored the actions of the brain through the assumption of an imaginative [or inner] eye related to the cerebral ventricles
On Air and Nerve Action in the Early Modern Period
De naturali parte medicinae libri septem (Paris, 1542) Jean François Fernel (1497-1558)
Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608-1679) De motu animalium: Pars altera (Rome, 1681, p. 321)
The animal spirits, after being distributed from the brain to the whole body, are dissipated partly by insensible transpiration and partly by entering the veins, where they mingle with the blood and return with it to the heart. From there they proceed to the brain and again into the nerves. (Regius, 1646, pp. 225f.)
Jan Swammerdam (1637-1680) Swammerdam s illustration of a nerve-muscle preparation. He placed a frog thigh muscle in a glass syringe with a nerve protruding from a hole in the side of the container. Irritating the nerve caused the muscle to contract, but the level of the water was not increased.
The Changes to Oxygen Measurement and the Physiological Investigation of Respiration
Antoine Lavoisier Pierre-Simon de Laplace (1743-1794) (1749-1827)
The laboratory workplace in the Collège Lavoisier s volumetric containing equipments (glass and brass instruments) elaborating on Robert Boyle s air pump
François Magendie (1783-1855)
The operating table in the Collège de France, where Bernard conducted many of his experiments on respiration physiology Claude Bernard (1813-1878)
Du chaleur animal (Paris, 1855, p. 238) Bernard s experimental sphygmometers used in cavalry horses at the École vétérinaire d Alfort (near Paris)
[ ] we now say that those chemical phenomena which result in heat production take place towards the periphery of the body, in the very depths of the tissues in contact with the blood. (Bernard, 1867, p. 190)
Animals can live longer in oxygen if we remove the carbon dioxide as fast as it is formed. (Bernard, 1857, p. 130).
Julien Legallois (1770-1840): From Aristotle s Pneuma to Lavoisier s Oxygen HAC, Vancouver, 2011
The practice of clinical reanimation technique around 1870: From Aristotle s Pneuma to Lavoisier s Oxygen HAC, Vancouver, 2011
Conclusion Fritz Kahn (1888-1968) : Man as Industrial Palace
When Descartes conceives the nerves as ropes or tubes, the muscles as sails of a ship, and the living body as a wrist watch and he certainly does not really see them as such, is he then more rational and prudent than Willis, who imagines the spiritus animales as the light and the muscle as a firebox of a gun? When, formally spoken, the wrong can entail the right, it is by means of what unknown logic that enables us to accommodate the analogical power of the imagination during the discovery of scientific notions, and on the grounds of which we can also reject those thoughts? (Canguilhem, 1968, p. 23)