“It could be seen more clearly in Unreasonable Animals than in Humans”: The Representation of the Rete Mirabile in Early Modern Anatomy (2009)
In the Western medical tradition the rete mirabile is one of the most enigmatic organs. It used to be a central structure in Galenic anatomy and physiology which extracted the animal spirits from the blood. The denial of the existence of a rete mirabile in man by Berengario da Carpi and Andreas Vesalius in the sixteenth century has by historians of medicine often been regarded as an indicator for the shift towards modern anatomy. However, anatomists continued to discuss the form, structure and appearance of the rete mirabile throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Even today the term is still used to describe a pathological structure which is linked to brain haemorrhages. This paper discusses the changing early modern assumptions about the existence and nature of the rete mirabile. It is based on anatomical handbooks and treatises as well as illustrations of the structure and shows how anatomists struggled to clearly identify the rete mirabile. This paper also shows how new approaches to anatomy of the second half of the seventeenth century led to the notion of the rete mirabile as a deficient structure and how the separation of anatomy and physiology at the end of the eighteenth century made it impossible to accommodate the rete mirabile in human anatomy any longer.
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