A Discourse of the Heart by James de Back.

THIS paper reviews the Discourse of the Heart by James de Back, which was included in the English language edition of The Anatomical Exercises of William Harvey of 1653. The edition used for this review is a 1673 reprint published at London. There are no illustrations. Its contents include the anatomical exercises concerning the motion of the heart and blood by Harvey (of 1628) with the preface of Zachariah Wood, physician to Rotterdam, to which is added The Discourse ofthe Heart by James de Back, Physician in Ordinary to the town of Rotterdam. There follow the Two Anatomical Exercitations concerning the Circulation of the Blood (of 1649) to John Riolan, the son. The Harvey writings are so well known and have been so widely and wisely commented upon as to require no further amplification in terms of their significance and their historical setting. They are the very fabric of modern cardiac and circulatory physiology, and more broadly of the establishment of experimental method, especially with regard to 'ocular testimony' in medicine. To read these writings is sufficient to impel one into that heuristic attitude which is so characteristic of them; an attitude so vital to the proper conduct and establishment of the sciences with its acute openmindedness guided only by observation prepared to constant scepticism and seeking to be tested and modified if necessary by further observation. Nonetheless, it is pertinent to the consideration of de Back to present Harvey's apologia as this forms the conceptual proscenium from which subsequent actors declaimed.