Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/400

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hardly left the premises with the great collection of specimens for which he had paid such a fabulous price, when Ruysch began the making of a new collection; and at this task he worked so diligently that in less than ten years he was able to deliver to John Sobieski, King of Poland, the greater part of the new collection (for which he received the sum of 20,000 florins). Then followed a period of about three years during which he continued active work as a teacher of anatomy, death alone seeming to possess the power to arrest his extraordinary energy.

Ruysch's only published works are the following: Catalogue of the Specimens contained in his Museum, Amsterdam, 1691; and a Thesaurus Anatomicus, in 10 volumes, Amsterdam, 1701-1715.

In reading over the account which I have given of the discoveries made in gross anatomy and in physiology during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I find that I have omitted some that may just as appropriately be mentioned in this section as in that which I intend to devote to work done in the domain of minute anatomy. I shall therefore refer to them briefly now, and then pass on to the consideration of the latter branch of my subject.

Eustachius, the famous Italian anatomist, deserves special credit for the experimental methods which he devised and employed in his efforts to gain a better knowledge of the anatomy and physiology of the kidneys. Moritz Hofmann of Fürstenwald discovered in 1641, in the turkey gobbler, the outlet duct of the pancreas, and a short time afterward George Wirsung, a Bavarian, discovered the same structure in the human being. Then, in 1651, Olaus Rudbeck, Professor of Anatomy in the University of Upsala, Sweden, discovered the lymphatics of the intestines, and established (at a later date) the fact that they are a separate system from that of the chyle ducts. Francis Glisson (1597-1677) of Cambridge University, England, one of Harvey's pupils, made two series of anatomical investigations of a most creditable character—the first concerning the relationship which exists between the intestinal lymphatics and the alimentary canal, and the