The FitzPatrick Lectures ON GREEK MEDICINE IN ROME: Delivered at the Royal College of Physicians of London
Authors: T. C. Allbutt
Journal: BMJ (1910)

PRECSIDENT ANiD FELLoWs,-My last lectura' ended with an allusion to the poislon lore of the anciei*s, a literature in itself; with an allusion therefore I had to be content, for time presses, and we must turn to other and less sinister isubjects.And none in this period isi of greater historical interest than the pulse doctrines.Pulse Doctrine,-Broadbent, in the introductory chapter of his treatise on the pulse, set forth the Galenic doctrines sufficiently for his own purpose; but on this occasion we may fitly endeavour to trace more fully and particularly the researches on the circulation of the blood from more ancient times, from Praxagoras of Cosi, in t-he succession of Diodles, through Athenaeus down to Galen, to whom we are chiefly indebted for what we know of the subject.That to feel the pulse was a common practice we note incidentally in such comparatively early passagesi: Tango, miser, venas, *nil calet hic.(Pers., Sat.IV.)and Et peragit soliti vensa tenoris iter (Ovid in Letter X. to Flaccus, speaking of cold and languor without fever).Galen wrote many essays on the pulsie, and from his fourth, fifth, eighth, ninth, and nineteenth books, in which he gives a summary and a criticism of the various pulse doctrines from Herophilus to Archigenes, especially in the rlcpi r&-o4(v-yp.Wv and the flept 8tacfrpiir 7rwv orS5y1A&v (IVth Book); and from some other sources, as in a certain pseudo-Galenic pneumatist treatise, from a pseudo-Soranic tract published by Rose (Anecdota Gr.II), and especially from the treatise on the pulse usually attributed to Rufus of Ephesus, a fairly definite reconstruction of the pulsie-lore of the ancients has been attained.Galen's mnain sjource was a lost treatise-nREPI aoq4vyp(tv-of Archigenes,!some fragments of which he quotes; thoug the first treatise on the pulsae (relEp wdahpav) was written byAegimius; of Elis, of the period of Hippo- crates.But I may take Praxagoras as the first physiician to give the pulse its due place in dagnosis and thEra- peutics.Unluckily Praxagoras taugh that the arteries were air channels only a dogma which provoked grievous dissensions, errors, and abuses through later ages.It would seem that Chrysippus also had emphasized the value of the pulse as a criterion of fever.In the next place, we come to Erasistratus, who de.scribed the valves of the heart, the chordae tendineae, and the several regions of the arteries and veins in heart aind liver more accurately than Herophilaus, whose atten- tion was directed rather to the anatomy of the brain.Erasistratus showed by experiments that the arteries con- tained blood, and he recognized the function of the heart as the prime mover of the circulation.This great master got very near the truth of the circulation-to a point of view too soon to be perverted by pneumnatist and other notions for-which he himself was not altogether without responsibility; or indeed to be lost sight of in that empirical indifference to anatomy to which I have referred.This insight of Erasistratus (c. 340-324B C) iE of much historical importance; for, as we have seen in respect of Praxagorasi, before his time the'arteries duri.nglife were supposed to contain air only-thin air, breath.