Medical comets: scholarly contributions by medical undergraduates

world only promises more than it offers; Nature offers more and greater things than it promises" (p. 115) is baffling-but not if "yields" is substituted for "offers" (the Latin is "praestat"); then we learn that the world-that world which in Wordsworth's words "is too much with us; getting and spending, we lay waste our powers"-comes up with less than it promises; but anatomy comes up with much from its unpromising source material. This Prelude is followed here by an English translation of an account of the dissection Stensen then performed, written in Latin by his student Holger Jakobsen; the Latin manuscript is reproduced facsimile. The dissection extended over parts of nine days in mid-winter, and one day is omitted-presumably a Sunday. There was an admirable comparative exhibition of the gut of various vertebrates, and intriguing speculations throughout about function. The final item is a translation from a Latin essay from the last years of Stensen's life, when he was a bishop; the scientist in him was evidently still thinking, even if not experimenting any longer. The phrase "reflex action" appears, along with diagrams of neural connections. Were the "reflex" words in this context then originated by Stensen? Not so; it seems clear that it was Willis who first used them freely (in Latin), being much preoccupied with the analogy of the reflection of light and sound, and no doubt Stensen found them in Willis's work. The evidence is in Georges Canguilhem's La formation du concept de reflexe aux 17e et 18e sie'cles (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1955, pp. 65-8).