17th Century Medical Inventions and Achievements

(Last Updated On: April 16, 2021)

17th-century medical inventions were quite significant in terms of importance as two great achievements came out during this period. In this article, I am going to share about the 17th-century medical achievements and inventions.

17th-century medical inventions

Let’s find below the 17th-century medical inventions

Summary of 17th-century medical inventions:

1628	William Harvey published his thesis report on An Anatomical Study of the Motion of the Heart and of the Blood in Animals, where he mentioned how blood is pumped throughout the body by the heart, and immediately returns to the heart and recirculates. The research work was very controversial but becomes the basis for modern research on the heart and blood vessels in the time afterward.
1656	Blood circulation between two dogs took place, English architect Sir Christopher Wren is the first to administer the process and whole medications intravenously thorough an animal bladder attached to a sharpened quill. Sir Wren also experimented with dog blood transfusions (however, the process was not successful as one dog died, the safe human blood transfusions only became feasible after Karl Landsteiner develops the ABO blood-typing system in 1900, yet it was a beginning to think).
1670	Anton van Leeuwenhoek tunes the microscope and developed more than 500 models. With the help of a microscope, the discovery of blood cells and observance of animal and plant tissues and microorganisms took place.

17th-century medical inventions: discussions

With the rise of the center class and modern innovations just like the woodcut press for pictures and the printing press for textual content, the 17th century exploded with new info of each type.

The discipline of medication started to develop when physicians questioned the accepted theories of medicine from Galen, Hippocrates, Aristotle, and different traditional lecturers.

Bringing their observations of biology and physiology collectively in exact research of human anatomy (quite than anatomies of animals similar to canine and apes), physicians started to make the most of the scientific method for brand spanking new medical strategies.

The most frequent use of the surgeon’s knife is to open sufferers’ veins for blood-letting, also referred to as bleeding.

This is the therapy most frequently prescribed by the discovered physicians, as a result of Galen has pronounced that fevers and apoplexy outcome from an extreme build-up of blood within the system.

However there may be one space the place surgeons are more and more in demand from the 16th century, and the place they quickly study and purchase new expertise – on the battlefield.

The arrival of artillery and muskets alters the character of wounds. Instead of the clear lower inflicted by sword thrust or pike, there at the moment are gaping holes of torn flesh and shattered bones.

The best surgeon of the 16th century, Ambroise Paré, rises from the standard standing of a barber’s apprentice to turn out to be surgeon to the kings of France and does so mainly via data acquired within the therapy of warfare wounds. You may also love to read about the spinning jenny.

In 1603, Girolamo Fabrici research leg veins and notices that they’ve valves which permit blood to circulate solely towards the heart.

Harvey and the circulation of the blood: 1628

A guide is printed in 1628 which supplies one of many best breakthroughs within the understanding of the human body – certainly maybe the best till the invention of the construction of DNA within the 20th century.

The guide consists of simply fifty-two tightly argued pages. Its textual content is in Latin. Its title is Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus (‘The Anatomical Function of the Movement of the Heart and the Blood in Animals’). Its creator is William Harvey.

In this guide, he demonstrates past any cheap doubt a wholly new idea. Blood, he exhibits, doesn’t drift within the body in any type of random ebb and circulate. Instead, it’s pumped endlessly spherical a really exact circuit.

After a lot of initial opposition, Harvey’s argument ultimately convinces most of his contemporaries.

But there are two lacking components. His idea implies that there has to be a community of tiny blood vessels bringing the blood from the arterial system to the venous system and finishing the circuit. But his dissections usually are not satisfactory to reveal this.

It will not be until 4 years after his death that Marcello Malpighi observes the capillaries.

And Harvey is unable to clarify why the guts ought to flow into the blood. That rationalization should await the invention of oxygen.

Malpighi and the microscope: 1661

Marcello Malpighi, a lecturer in theoretical medication at the University of Bologna, has been pioneering using the microscope in biology.

One night in 1661, on a hill close to Bologna, he makes use of the setting solar as his mild supply, shining it into his lens via a skinny ready part of a frog’s lung. In the enlarged picture, it’s clear that the blood is all contained inside little tubes.

Malpighi thus turns into the first scientist to watch the capillaries, the tiny blood vessels during which blood circulates via flesh.

They are so tremendous, and so quite a few, that every one of our bodies comprises greater than 100,000 kilometers of those microscopic ducts.

Blood transfusion: 1665-1670

In 1670, the first blood transfusion between two individuals was carried out efficiently. Although it was solely carried out one further time earlier than the collection of experiments was typically deserted.

However, the process was inspirational proof to many contemporaries that the medical discipline was edging into a brand new realm of discovery. It grew to become a picture within the public consciousness of the ability of science.

Earlier, at a gathering of the not too long ago established Royal Society in London, on 14 November 1665, an experiment is made in transferring blood from one canine to a different.

The artery of a small mastiff is joined by a quill to the vein of a spaniel. Another of the spaniel’s veins is opened to set free an equal quantity of its personal blood.

The mastiff bleeds to death in front of the Society. The spaniel is produced on the equal assembly per week later and is discovered to be in tremendous well being.

Two years later, in France, a way more bold step is taken alongside these similar traces. Jean Baptiste Denis, the royal doctor to Louis XIV, conducts a daring experiment in 1667 in Paris.

In a try to avoid wasting the lifetime of a 15-year-old boy, weakened by an excessive amount of blood-letting, he inserts into his veins, via a quill, about half a pint of the blood of a lamb.

Contemporary stories say that the situation of the boy is vastly improved.

Later in the same year, following this spectacular instance from Paris, the Royal Society in London turns into more daring in its experiments.

Arthur Coga, a divinity pupil from Cambridge who is alleged to be barely ‘frantic’, is employed for a transfusion.

Half a pint of sheep’s blood is handed into his vein. The scientists hope that this can cool his personal blood and thus make him much less frantic.

Following his success in 1667, Jean Baptiste Denis has given blood to a number of different sufferers with perseverance with success.

But in 1668, after a 3rd transfusion, certainly one of his sufferers dies. Denis issued by the widow. He loses the case, although he’s cleared of homicide.

In 1670 a regulation is handed in France making blood transfusion unlawful. For one other two centuries, no more is heard of it anyplace –

till it’s once more tried pretty repeatedly in mid-19th century England, now often with human blood. But it stays a hazardous process till the invention, in 1900, of the human blood teams.