and the iatrophysical or iatromechanical). The iatrochemists described digestion as an act that is essentially chemical in character, a form of fermentation; and by the latter term the more advanced members of this school—François Deleboë Sylvius (1614-1672), who was born in Hanau, Prussia, of Dutch parents, and who took his doctor's degree in Basel in 1637, and Thomas Willis of London (1622-1675)—understood something quite different from our modern conception of fermentation. Their interpretation was as follows: "An internal chemical movement of matter which is set agoing and continued in action in the stomach and intestinal canal through the agency of certain chemical reagents." (Haeser.) They attributed an important influence to the saliva, the pancreatic juice and the bile in effecting the changes mentioned. The iatrophysicists, on the other hand, and more particularly Archibald Pitcairn of Edinburgh, Scotland (1652-1713), and Giorgio Baglivi of Ragusa, Italy (1668-1707), described digestion as a purely mechanical breaking up of the elements of the food partaken—a "trituration." As to the further fate of the resulting chyle (its mode of reaching the blood, for example) the two schools were in perfect accord.
Sprengel mentions it as an actual fact that, during the seventeenth century, there were several physicians who combined the two careers of teacher of medicine and hydraulic engineer (iatrophysicists or iatromathematicians).[1] Several events conduced to the formation, in Italy and in Great Britain, of a distinct iatromathematical school. Among them may be mentioned, first and foremost, Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood; second, the spread of the doctrines taught by Descartes favored in a marked degree the union of medicine and mathematics (physiology, the iatromathematicians claimed, was only a branch of applied mathematics); and, third, the formation at Florence, in the middle of the seventeenth century, of an association of the pupils of Galileo. The objects of this
- ↑ The iatrophysicists and the iatromathematicians constituted apparently two kindred branches of the same school.
