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Thesis ID: CBB001562284

Jean Pecquet (1622--1674) and the Thoracic Duct: The Controversy over the Circulation of the Blood and Lymph in Seventeenth-Century Europe (2003)

Lewis, Sarah Janvier (Author)

Yale University
Holmes, Frederic Lawrence

Publication Date: 2003
Edition Details: Advisor: Holmes, Frederic Lawrence
Physical Details: 299 pp.
Language: English

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In 1651, Jean Pecquet, a Parisian medical student, published his Experimenta Nova Anatomica, that both confirmed William Harvey's theory of the circulation of the blood and challenged the foundations of medicine itself. Based on his experiments, Pecquet argued that food was not transformed into blood in the liver. Instead, it traveled through the lacteal veins to a receptacle in the mesentery, then rose through a duct to the subclavian veins and to the heart. The heart, not the liver, was thus responsible for the fabrication of blood. In a dramatic divergence from contemporary medical writers, Pecquet aligned himself with a new school of scientific argument and demonstrated his claims by applying principles taken from physics and chemistry. This dissertation studies the ensuing scholarly attention. Historians have tended to devote their attention to scientific developments in England during this period. After a chapter on physiology prior to Pecquet, I set Pecquet's life and treatise in context. I then follow the controversy chronologically until its end, which more or less coincides with Pecquet's death in 1674. In this controversy, dozens of doctors and other savants throughout Europe reacted to Pecquet's work. In their letters and treatises, his ideas were pulled in multiple directions---partially adopted, partially rejected, partially ignored---until the medical community arrived at an uncertain consensus, accepting the anatomical changes, while asserting that practical medicine remained unaltered. Pecquet's ideas, however, would have a wide influence outside medicine on both the iatrophysical and iatrochemical schools of physiology that were inspired in part by his work. From this study of the Pecquet controversy emerges a deeper understanding of a complex period, in which discoveries, new styles of argumentation and approaches to investigation challenged the foundations of medical and scientific knowledge.

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Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 64 (2003): 1051. UMI order no. 3084332.

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