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THE GROWTH OF TRUTH

3i textbooks of the day. From no work of the period does one get a better idea of the current anatomical and physiological teaching in London than from Crooke’s Body of Man (1615 and 1631). Collected out of Vesalius, Plantinus, Platerius, Laurentius, Valverda, Bauchinus, and others, it is an epitome of their opinions, with the comments of the professor who read the anatomy lecture to the Company of the Barber-Surgeons. In the preface to the first edition he speaks of the contentment and profit he had received from Dr. Davies’s Lumleian Lectures at the College of Physicians. There is no indication in the second edition that he had benefited by the instruction of Dr. Davies’s successor. Galen is followed implicitly, with, here and there minor deviations. The views of Columbus on the lesser circulation are mentioned only to be dismissed as superfluous and erroneous. The Gresham Professor of the day, Dr. Winston, makes no mention of the new doctrine in his Anatomy Lectures which were published after his death, 1651, and are of special interest as showing that at so late a date a work could be issued with the Galenical physiology unchanged. In Alexander Reid’s Manual, the popular textbook of the day, the Harveian views are given in part in the fifth edition, in which, as he says in the preface, ‘the book of the breast’ is altogether new—an item of no little interest, since he was a man advanced in years, and, as he says, ‘the hourglass hasteneth, and but a few sands remain unrun.’ Highmore, the distinguished Dorsetshire anatomist, and a pupil of Harvey, in his well-known Anatomy published in 1651, gives the ablest exposition of his master’s views that had appeared in any systematic work of the period, and he urges his readers to study the de Motu Cordis as ‘fontem ipsum’ from which to get clearer knowledge. He quotes an