Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/114

98 gray matter of the brain. It was a hundred years later that scientists were to prove experimentally that Swedenborg's conclusions from deductions were correct. They were to name the oval bodies cells or neurons. Not one but many men were to take their place as famous in the annals of science for proving what one man had said must be so.

"I do not mean," Dr. Haggard guarded himself, "that he wrote modern physiology with prophetic vision. He did not. He saw the correlation of facts better by far than any other man, but he could not in science go beyond the factual information of his time. Thus, one of his discoveries concerned the vessels that supply blood to the heart. He was the first, as far as I can find, who pointed out that the heart was nourished from the blood, but . . . he had the blood flowing the wrong way."

Yet, "The indisputable truth is that Swedenborg had the intellectual insight that has been granted only to a few men. His was an intellect of synthesis."

Dr. Haggard said these things in an address on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of Swedenborg, in 1938, but before then other medical scientists of the twentieth century had come to appreciate their lay brother of the eighteenth. (Undoubtedly the prolonged lack of professional attention to Swedenborg's physiological discoveries was at least partly due to their having been made by a lay-man.)

The first was a Viennese, Dr. Max Neuburger, a medical historian. In a congress of scientists and physicians at Hamburg, 1901, he declared his profound astonishment at Swedenborg's discoveries in the physiology of the brain, thus giving the Swedes themselves a shove toward looking him up, since he was not much of a prophet in his own country and many of his scientific writings remained unpublished.6

Amends were made by the Swedish Professor Gustaf Retzius, who frankly confessed that his attention had been called to the subject by reason of Dr. Neuburger's assertions. Speaking to an international congress of anatomists at Heidelberg, 1903,7 he also deplored that he had not known of these works on the brain and the nervous system when he, together with Key, wrote a historical