Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Frederik Ruysch

A Diorama by Frederik Ruysch
Frederik Ruysch (1638 - 1731) Dutch anatomist and botanist, known for his skills in preserving dead body parts, and for his highly artistic and fantastical creations of dioramas using the preserved parts. He was also one of the first to describe the vomeronasal organ of snakes, the valves in the lymphatic system and the central artery of the eye. Ruysch's membrane, named after him, is a thin layer of capillaries behind the internal layer of the retina. Though the main goal of Ruysch's dissections was to study anatomy, he had an artistic side in him which made him create highly original and fantastical arrangements of various body parts in symbolic settings, with many moral and philosophical quotations attached to them. Peter the Great, czar of Russia, once bought an entire collection from him. His daughter, Rachel Ruysch, was a skillful and esteemed painter of flowers, who also helped her father in creating his dioramas. Ruysch devised methods of preservation of dead bodies and parts that were unparalleled, and which he guarded in secret and would not reveal till his death. His preparations, many of which were lost, make for some of the most curious and original assemblages ever put together.

William Cowper

William Cowper
William Cowper (1666 - 1709) English anatomist and surgeon, famous for the eponymous Cowper's glands, the bulbourethral glands of the male genitourinary system, which he was the first to describe. In 1698, he published The Anatomy of Humane Bodies, which was to bring him both fame and notoriety. This work is widely considered to be a plagiarised version of the Dutch anatomist Govard Bidloo's work that was published a few years ago. Though it contained much original work and writing from Cowper himself, essentially much of the text and diagrams were taken directly from Bidloo's work, which Cowper (or his publishers) had purchased in bulk, when Bidloo's book did not have good sales back in his country. This incident was to lead to numerous vitriolic exchanges between both the anatomists, but even with the fact that Cowper burrowed the work and did not give any credit to Bidloo, William Cowper still stands today as one of the most original and diligent anatomists of his time.

William Cheselden

William Cheselden
William Cheselden (1688 - 1752) Famous English surgeon and anatomist, responsible for establishing surgery as a separate profession from the former barber-surgeons. He played an important role in the creation of the Company of Surgeons, which was to later become the Royal College of Surgeons of England. As an anatomist, Cheseldon wrote two highly acclaimed and popular books on human anatomy and osteology. He performed the first known surgical cure for blindness. He also created the lateral lithotomy procedure for bladder stone extraction, for which he was very famous, taking only 30-90 seconds to perform the entire removal operation. Cheselden is also credited with the first iridectomy operation, which he used to cure certain forms of blindness by creating an artificial pupil. He also described the role of saliva in digestion, and held that digestion was not a mere mechanical process of grinding, but also of chemical reactions. Cheselden attended Sir Issac Newton on his last illness and was a friend of the famous poet Alexander Pope and Sir Hans Sloane, physician and collector, whose collections were to later become the British Museum.

Monday, September 27, 2010

Robert Knox

Dr Robert Knox
Robert Knox (1791 - 1862) Scottish surgeon and anatomist, considered the greatest teacher of anatomy of his time. Knox was partially blind in one of his eyes, and his face scarred due to smallpox infection during childhood. Knox was a brilliant scholar who stood first in his class throughout his academic schooling. His lectures were very famous for their wit, excellence and flamboyance, and attracted a large number of students. In 1828, he was unwittingly involved in the infamous Burke and Hare murder scandal, and from then onwards his career went downhill and faced considerable difficulties. Though he was not found guilty, or even called to trial, the public was outraged with him, considering him to be an accomplice & deserving of equal punishment as Burke, who was publicly hanged and later dissected. Rhymes such as "Burke's the butcher, and Hare's the thief / And Knox the boy who buys the beef" were very common, and display the obloquy & acrimony against him. Knox also wrote anthropological essays, but they were highly unscientific in their claims of inferiority of African races over the white, although he derided the Europeans for the colonial imperialistic harm they caused in Africa.

Richard von Volkmann

Richard von Volkmann
Richard von Volkmann (1830 - 1889) Distinguished German surgeon and writer of poems and fairy tales. He was the son of one of the most distinguished physiologists of the time, Alfred Volkmann. Richard von Volkmann was responsible to a large degree for the introduction of Lister's aseptic surgical techniques in Germany. He was one of the most sought after surgeons of his time, consulted widely in Germany and elsewhere. Volkmann was also the first to surgically treat the carcinoma of the rectum by excision. His efforts at treating tuberculosis of bones and joints through diet, cod liver oil and iodine, heralded attempts at preventive surgery. The ischemic contracture which bears his name, Volkmann's Ischemic Contracture was first described by him in a famous paper. The contracture is a result of arterial obstruction, observed mainly in children in the forearm and hand, resulting in a claw deformity, mainly as a result of fracture at the elbow or improper application of tourniquet or plaster, causing ishcemia and necrosis of affected muscle tissue. As a doctor, he was known as someone who would go anywhere and do anything to save a patient, and was widely admired. Volkmann was also an excellent writer of poems and fairy tales, and his book Dreams by the French Fireside is considered a classic of German Literature.

Alfred Wilhelm Volkmann

Alfred Volkmann
Alfred Wilhlem Volkmann (1801 - 1877) German anatomist, physiologist and evangelical philosopher. He was among the first to demonstrate that the sympathetic nerves consist mainly of small, medullated fibers from the sympathetic and spinal ganglia. Volkmann's canals, arterial channels within the compact bone, which connect the capillaries within the Haversian canals and carry blood to the bone from the periosteum, are named after him. His son, Richard von Volkmann, was a distinguished surgeon.

Lazzaro Spallanzani

Lazzao Spallanzani
Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729 - 1799) Italian biologist of varied interests, who did important experiments in animal reproduction, human physiology, origin of life, and also other fields like volcanoes and weather and natural history. He was also a Catholic priest, and an indefatigable traveler and collector. His experiments on biogenesis, and the spontaneous origin of life paved way for Louis Pasteur's final and complete denunciation of the debate. Spallanzani was the first to carry out artificial insemination on a dog, and he proposed that for fertilization to occur, both sperm and ovum are essential. He was also the first to describe echolocation in bats, and carried out experiments on digestion, suggesting that digestion was more chemical in nature than just mechanical trituration. Louis Pasteur highly regarded the work of Spallanzani and had his portrait, along with that of Agostino Bassi, in his office. Spallanzani died of bladder cancer, and his bladder was removed by his colleagues and admirers for study after his death, and displayed at a museum in Pavia, where it remains to this day. It is one of the most famous preserved body parts in history.

Girolamo Fracastoro

Girolamo Fracastoro
Girolamo Fracastoro (1478 - 1553) Italian physician, poet, and scholar, an example of the Renaissance man. He was one of the first to propose that epidemic diseases were caused by tiny transferable particles, spreading from one person to another by means of direct or indirect contact, though he did not believe the particles themselves were alive. The name Syphilis for the disease comes from his poem "Syphilis sive morbus gallicus (Syphilis, or the French Disease)" about a shepherd boy named Syphilis, who by angering the sun god of Haiti, bought upon himself the dreaded infection. The poem also suggested mercury and guaiaco as a cure for the illness. after his death, a marble statue on an arch was erected in his honor at his native town of Verona. Legend has it that, the stone ball that he holds in his hand, symbolizing the world, would fall on the first honorable man who walks by it. Needless to say, it has not yet fallen!

Agostino Bassi

Agostino Bassi
Agostino Bassi de Lodi (1773 - 1856) Italian entomologist, who preceded Louis Pasteur in propounding that diseases can be caused by minute living organisms. He made this assertion from his observations of the muscardine disease (mal de segno) of the silkworm, which is caused by a parasitic fungus. He was related to the famous biologist Spallanzani, and the physicist Laura Bassi, who is famous for being the first woman teacher in Europe. His discovery of the cause of muscardine disease and methods for control were responsible for rescuing the silkworm industry in Europe which was almost abandoned due to the ravages of the disease. Bassi won instant recognition and fame for this particular work. Louis Pasteur was much influenced by his work, and had his portrait hung in his office.