Johannes Walaeus. Zijn betekenis vor de verbreiding van de leer van de bloeds omloop

Johannes Walaeus. Zijn betekenis vor de verbreiding van de leer van de bloeds omloop [Johannes Walaeus. His significance in the recognition of the doctrine of blood circulation], by J. SCHOUTEN, Assen, Van Gorcum, 1972, pp. viii, 260, illus., Dfl. 46. Reviewed by Walter Pagel, 58 Millway, London, NW7 3RA. Walaeus [Jan de Wale] (1604-1649) was the first to confirm and amplify by original experiments and observations Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood. At the time the latter was still widely contested-no less than twelve years after its publication in 1628. Nevertheless Walaeus has remained a cinderella of medical histories. Sprengel's account is quite good, but Haeser dismissed him in a few lines. Moreover he may well have misled into belief in an editio princeps of Walaeus' salient two letters to Th. Bartholin outside the latter's Institutiones anatomicae of 1641. We may add that belief in this ghost could have been fed by Primrose's Animadversiones "against Walaeus", already published in 1640. They were, however, really prompted not by any publication of Walaeus, but the thesis of Roger Drake which had been defended sub auspiciis Joh. Walaei in the same year. Nor has Haller's judicious verdict "eximii pretii" appended by Haeser anything to do with the price of this ghost in the bookshop, but it gives in two crisp words the praise which is indeed due to Walaeus. Even worse, his name fails to occur in any of the three volumes of the Handbuch or in Sudhoff, whilst Baas and Diepgen devote to him just a line of praise. On 4 February 1640 Walaeus presided when his pupil Roger Drake (1608-1669) propounded his Disputatio medica de Circulatione naturali seu cordis et sanguinis motu circulari pro Cl. Harveio in sixteen chapters corresponding to those of Harvey's De motu of 1628. The reproduction of this rarissimum in facsimile is a valuable feature of Schouten's book (pp. 175-192). Earlier on, Walaeus should have met Thomas Bartholin who stayed at Leyden from 1637 to 1640 and elicited from him the "two letters" as a contribution to his new edition of his father's Institutiones Anatomicae (Leyden, Fr. Hackius, 1641). Their contents are carefully analysed in the present book And the changes and additions which Walaeus made in the subsequent edition of the Institutiones examined. As these are largely relevant to the motion of the blood little attention is paid to the momentous quantified account of acid gastric digestion followed up in the live dog which Walaeus added in the new edition of the Epistolae in 1645. In 1641 Harvey and Harvey alone had been accorded the palm of the discovery and its significance by Walaeus. In 1645 he gave much space to the supposed ancient forerunners and the to us funny story of Sarpi as the original source from which Harvey was rumoured to have derived the secret. Bartholinus had been at Padua whence he reported the story (heard from Vesling) to Walaeus on 30 October 1642, with the rider that he was probing into it further-but nothing seems to have come of his effort. In 1643 the Padua edition of Harvey's De motu had appeared (under the auspices of Bartholinus) to which for the first time the Walaeus letters were appended -still in the original version and without Sarpi, probably in view of possible further