Twentieth Century History of Findlay and Hancock County, Ohio, and Representative Citizens, Part 106

Author: Jacob Anthony Kimmell
Publication date: 1910
Publisher:
Number of Pages: 1189

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Owen received inspiration from the great Cuvier, whom he met in 1831. Owen was called " the British Cuvier."

Owen manifested a great love of chess, of music and of gardening. He was an accomplished 'cellist.

The story of Owen's life has been admirably written by his grandson, the Rev. Richard Owen, M. A. It comprises two volumes. The data contained therein have been largely gleaned from about 1200 of his own letters, written chietilr to his wife and sisters, and from more than 15,000 letters which have been preserved from the voluminous correspond- ence which Professor Owen received during his long life.

DEGREES AND HONORS.

Professor Owen received four honorary degrees, including D. C. L. from Oxford and LL. D. from Cambridge. He ws awarded fourteen medals and was a member of eighty-three learned and scientific societies. These include the Royal Si- ciety, of which he was elected Fellow in 1834, and the Lin- næan Society.

OWEN AND EVOLUTION.

Professor Owen, being of deep religious convictions, was ? sworn foe of evolution. Owen's works teem with reference to the " Divine plan " and the "will of the Creator." But

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PROFESSOR OWEN AT THE AGE OF 22 YEARS.

ESSOR OWEN-AGED 73 YEARS-AND E SKELETON OF DINORNIS MAXIMUS.

PROFESSOR OWEN IN HIS PRIME-AGED 42 YEARS-AS HE LECTURED. HE HOLDS A BONE OF THE DINORNIS MAXIMUS.

PROFESSOR OWEN-AGED 85 YEARS-AND HIS GRAND- DAUGHTER.

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avancement of Science met in Oxford, England. That this ttle for evolution should take place at this time was a fore- ne conclusion.

But only one man in the whole world had the courage to enly oppose Professor Owen's views or dissent from his inions. This was a rising young anatomist twenty-one ars Professor Owen's junior. It was none other than that eat master-mind of the nineteenth century, namely, Thomas enry Huxley. Everybody knows who Huxley was. Huxley's .me is inseparably blended with the early history of this eat institution of learning; because it was Huxley's most mous pupil, Dr. H. Newell Martin, who organized the bi- ogical department in this university.

Huxley plead eloquently for the cause of evolution. Owen, presenting scientific England, and Bishop Wilberforce, rep- senting the church and the populace, as eloquently opposed

Bishop Wilberforce, in the course of his remarks, turned Huxley and asked him if it was on his grandfather's side on his grandmother's side that he was related to an ape. When Bishop Wilberforce had ended his speech, Huxley ose to his feet, and in his usual calm but earnest demeanor ade the following reply, which has become historical :

'I asserted, and I repeat, that a man has no reason to be named of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an cestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would be a In, a man of restless and versatile intellect, who, not content th an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges :o scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, ly to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the at- ition of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent pressions, and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.

However, later in life Owen's heart softened toward evolu- n and evolutionists. Shortly after Louis Agassiz's death, ich occurred December 14, 1873, Professor W. J. Stillman this country visited London and interviewed Professor en. Professor Owen spoke feelingly of Agassiz's death, I lamented the fact that our great naturalist had held out obstinately against evolution. Professor Owen's words e: " If I could have had half-an-hour's conversation with ussiz, I believe I could have convinced him of the truth of 'ution."

fter Owen's death in 1892, Huxley wrote a meritorious y on "Owen's Position in the History of Anatomical nce." It forms the closing chapter in Vol. II, " Life of n."

CLOSING YEARS.

n January 5, 1884, Professor Owen was knighted, and eforth we shall speak of him as Sir Richard Owen.

r Richard Owen's last days were spent at Sheen Lodge, beautiful home in the suburbs of London, presented to him Ter Majesty Queen Victoria, in recognition of his services. Richard Owen enjoyed reasonably good health, notwith- ling his excessive mental application. For twenty years ad suffered with chronic bronchitis. Early in 1890 he a stroke of paralysis, from which he never entirely re-

covered. Dut fe rallied from it in marvellous way. From this date on, his hearing became visibly affected.

On August 30, 1892, his old friend, Sir James Paget paid him a visit, and tried to converse with him; but Sir Richard, owing to his great prostration, was unable to sustain the effort long. In reply to the repeated inquiries of Dr. Palmer, his physician, Sir Richard invariably answered : " I feel no pain at all, but I have no desire to rise from this bed."

Towards the end of November Sir Richard grew gradually weaker, and began to take less and less nourishment. From the first week of December he never showed the slightest dis- position to rally. On December 16 he ceased to recognize those who were standing around him. His death occurred a little before three o'clock on Sunday morning, December 18, 1892.

Sir Richard Owen's death was not due to any definite dis-

SHEEN LODGE, RICHMOND PARK.

ease, but to a gradual decadence of all the vital functions. His days had been bounteously prolonged. He was in his eighty-ninth year.

The news of Sir Richard Owen's death, like that of Agassiz and of Darwin, created widespread regret throughout the civilized world. The people of all nations, regardless of race or creed, realized that a great figure, not only of the age but of the century, had passed away. Indeed, the world was made poorer by Sir Richard Owen's death, because it lost an untir- ing scientific worker and a most genial, kind-hearted man.

THE JOHNS HOPKINS HOSPITAL REPORTS.

Vol. XIII, Studies in Urological Surgery-605 pages, with 6 plates, 201 figures and 1 colored chart.

Vol. XIV, Studies in Hypertrophy and Cancer of the Prostate- 632 pages, with 97 figures. Price per volume in paper, net $5, in cloth, $5.50.

Orders and remittances should be made to

THE JOHNS HOPKINS PRESS, BALTIMORE, MD.

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JOHNS HOPKINS HOSPITAL BULLETIN.

[No. V.

A FLORENTINE ANATOMIST .*

By PEARCE BAILEY, M. D., New York.

It was the peculiar good fortune of Leonardo da Vinci to be sought after and applauded during his life and after it to attain what he thought most worth having, permanent fame. Few men whose names have grown greater with succeeding centuries have had such praise from their contemporaries. He was the divine genius, the second Appeles, the man who could do anything. Kings and Popes sought him for his personal charm quite as much as for his constructive genius. Francis I told Cellini that no mortal had ever known as much as Leonardo knew, not only in the arts but in everything else. " Nature had so endowed him," wrote his contemporary bi- ographer, Vasari,. " that whenever he put forth thought, will and effort he showed such divine achievement that no one has ever equalled him in readiness, activity, quality of product, amiability and grace."

It is not necessary to define the place posterity has ac- corded him in the art which is his chief glory. But Stevenson gracefully vouches for his personal qualities by counting him one of the two men he ever knew or heard of worthy of a woman's falling in love with; and as the beginnings of science are day by day being unearthed from old manuscripts, almost as many champions are coming forward now to prove him a pioneer genius as there were then who praised and loved him during his life. Great as are his works of art, the most im- pressive legacy he left are the evidences of the universality of his genius.

Philosophe, physicien Rimeur, bretteur musicien Et voyageur aerien.

He was all that, but far more. He caught from the blue ideas that had occurred to no one before, and now are every- body's. He made definite impressions on geology, astronomy, engineering, mechanics, botany, zoology, physiology, anatomy. He made no great discoveries. But he foreshadowed all dis- covery from the theory of cosmic unity to the rural free de- livery and the lighter than air machines. He is to be judged by his insight and the breadth of his conceptions rather than by his finished products. What he did produce was of such a high degree of excellence that it is impossible to imagine his doing anything badly.

He had the will to attack, without which no one can be first. In his note-books may be found frequent phillipics against alchemists, necromancers, astrologists and physicians, all of whom, in his day, were opposed to the scientific idea. A thinker who can twist a horseshoe with his hands as though it were lead is rarely one to keep his views to himself; and we may think of him as a noble figure with a long beard who wore a red cloak which reached to his knees; one who defied the fashions, a militant missionary of freedom of thought and

* Paper read before the Johns Hopkins Hospital Historical Society, October 24, 1910.

progress. Leonardo's love of nature and his profesion sculptor and painter early led him to a study of animal stru- ture. He made notes for a book on how birds fly, and ! another on the anatomy of the horse. And with the help ; chance association or his policy of thoroughness, he bert. the first to know how the parts of a man are welded togety: to make him a mechanical unit.

One cannot appreciate what this meant in originality a :. daring without first knowing how little medicine was deft- oped before the Renaissance. If we look back to the ear .: growth of anatomy as an exact and special study, three lar : marks stand out clearly between the misty beginnings and th: time, in the third century, A. D., when rational knowlig. held in the bosom of the church, went to its long sleep.

These landmarks are Greece with Hippocrates tower; over everything, Alexandria with its famous school, and Ric- in the time of Marcus Aurelius, when Galen established a: tomical teachings which were to be blindly followed for thousand years.

Hippocrates (d. 380 B. C.) did little more for anatic; than to crystallize the vague conceptions of his predecessor: none of which were based on human dissections. The low of Greece required prompt burial of the dead, and that t: buried dead be left to sleep in peace. The few anatomic: facts, therefore, which Greek medicine separated from mit. and tradition were gleaned by such disclosures of anatomica structure as were made by the wounds and injuries of ms: by unburied bodies which had been separated into their i- tegral parts by the elements, and by sacrificial animals. !: a result, the anatomy of the times boasted few proved fax: It was a mixture of symbolism, conjecture and philosophic: speculation, too uncertain for rational medicine to build et

Eight years after the death of Hippocrates, a great chang in methods and results was worked at Alexandria. In the famous cosmopolitan center of learning, the home of The ocrates, of Euclid and Archimedes, light was thrown on inti- mate human structure for the first time. It was made p+ sible by the genius of the Ptolomies. These rulers not on." permitted dissection but encouraged it, and in order to remer, the odium which had hitherto attached to the desecration . the human temple, used the scalpel themselves occasionally.

The school flourished for three hundred years and lived a thousand. But the conquest by Rome brought Roman cu :- toms and traditions. With the fall of the Ptolomies, at aby: the beginning of the Christian era, dissection again fell inte discredit and disuse; and the burning of the library was s blow to the intellectual supremacy of Alexandria from which it never recovered. Anatomy, however, again saw the sun in Galen (200 A. D.). This man, perhaps the most virile figure in the history of medicine, worked with untiring industry. practiced, traveled, wrote and initiated many original mett- ods of experiment. His career was like that of many a Me-

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onanty survived his mortal death for many centuries. activity of his scalpel was limited to animals. His works, ch made no mention of human dissection, became weapons he church. They served as means of curbing the restless liry of science, as did the monastic interpretations of the ptures in suppressing those wishing to go deeper into the stion of man's spiritual welfare. When, in the beginning he Renaissance, earnest truth seekers, no longer content 1 the time-worn and erroneous teachings, began to clamor rational means of renewing and extending anatomical wledge, the church would answer : "Go to your Galen ; he written truly and all you need to know." Even after lan dissections had begun to show how widely Galen's comy of animals differed from human anatomy, new pro- ts, opponents of progress, would arise, who preached nst the innovations and upheld the thousand-year-old er- . The cry " back to Galen " was heard as late as the time 'ylvius in 1550.

alen was a Greek and wrote in his native language. The bians were the first to take over and elaborate his writings their own language. From the Arabic translations they e retranslated into Latin, in which form, garbled and ilated, they first became accessible to Italian students. y were widely copied in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. haps too wide circulation was the cause of their downfall. any rate, in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, human tomy began to be heard of again for the first time since the sandrine days. The school of Salerno ordered dissections the last half of the thirtenth century, and in 1308 the or council of Venice ordered the medical faculty to make w autopsies every year. But the name above all others ciated with the new movement was Mondinus, the little nondo, as he was affectionately called, who, as professor ader of medicine in the University of Bologna, performed irst human dissection in 1315. He could not push his ies far, but his 44-page compendium, which was first ed in MSS., and later printed in many editions, was ly used by the medical schools of Italy and Germany for years. Mondinus made no material advance on Galen's ings. Many of them he took over bodily without knowing it was animal and not human anatomy he was teaching. : heralded the science he could not found. Raising his against traditional authority, as he did in his preface, he said, "non observans stilum altum sed secundum alem operationum," he stands the John the Baptist of my. The fruits of his example were slow in ripening. prejudice against mutilation of the human body for any se died hard. The rights of the dead were held sacred, : soul, even of executed criminals, was supposed to be with the body. Anatomists, therefore, pursued their $ in the face of viligant opposition, and found them- becoming midnight marauders.

tas probably more to stop grave robbing than to further Idy of anatomy that in 1405 the University of Bologna authorized students of the third year to witness two

demonstrations. Both students and masters alike were for- bidden to dissect without permission. In 1442 another decree provided the rector of the university with two bodies a year, but no bodies of any one dying nearer than thirty miles of Bologna. So that in the middle of the fifteenth century, when Leonardo da Vinci was born, in the most celebrated university in Europe, it was practically impossible for students to learn how the machine they were to care for was put together. They were not permitted to dissect, they had no books, and such anatomical drawings as were in existence were of no more use than the title page of our Farmers' Almanac. This was all changed by Vesalius of Brussels. His treatise on anatomy, de Fabrica humani corporis, which Dr. Osler, in the copy of the original edition he presented to the New York Acad- emy of Medicine, calls "the greatest medical work ever printed, the one from which modern medicine dates its be- ginnings," has for all time crowned Vesalius as the founder of anatomy.

But between the prophecy of Mondinus and the achieve- ment of Vesalius came a man who cannot be overlooked in the history of anatomy, though most of such histories overlook him. A man who inaugurated modern anatomical methods; who studied voraciously, saw keenly and drew with matchless skill what his scalpel brought in sight. This was a man who could give only a small fraction of his time to anatomy, Leo- nardo da Vinci. Vesalius' book was published in 1543. The great Italian's notes and drawings, made not later than 1510, lay unknown for centuries.

He did his work in Florence and Rome, but probably most of it in Milan. In 1842 he left Florence for the Lombardy capital either to contribute to the gaiety of the court with his famous rhymes and allegories, or to construct the Sforza equestrian statue, or to play on the horse's head-shaped silver lute he had made himself. There, although occupied with the canalization of the rivers and with painting The Last Supper, he found time to carry on dissections. Perhaps he owed his opportunities for the latter to de la Torre, the professor of anatomy at the near-by University of Pavia; perhaps the opportunity came to him by reason of his popularity and charm of manner. " He was so godlike and of such power of persuasion," writes Vasari, " his reason and memory aided him to such a degree, and he could make his views so clear by means of his drawings, that he could convince and con- found the most obstinate with his proofs and conclusions." To such a personality all doors fly open and much is forgiven. By virtue of it access to anatomical material was doubtless easier to him than to others, and it is not difficult to believe that many an indulgence was accorded the versatile artist who persisted in pursuing studies in defiance of the sentiments of the times. That he made many dissections is proved by the work he left. Somewhere in the note-books he gives the number as ten. But de Beatis, writing of him when he was an old man living at Amboise under the protection of Francis I, says: " This gentleman has written of anatomy with such wealth of detail, illustrating by his art both limbs and muscles, nerves, veins and ligaments of the inward parts, and of all

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that may be demonstrated in the bodies of men and women, in a way that has never been equalled by anyone else. And this we have seen with our own eyes, and he has also told us that he has dissected more than thirty bodies of men and women of different ages."

Leonardo pushed his investigations far beyond the necessi- ties of art; to depict beauty did not satisfy his inquiring mind; he must unravel the very secrets of her being. He sawed the bones lengthwise, to see their internal structure; he sawed the skull in various directions, and was the first to discover the cavities in its walls; he cut through the verte- bræ and showed the spinal cord, the link between the brain and the nerves. His restless scalpel exposed the hidden and in- accessible parts and organs of the body. His methods of work were the technical methods of an anatomist, not those of an artist studying anatomy for the benefit of his art. He pre- pared the vessels for dissection by injection and used a variety of instruments. In the few anatomical sketches left by Ra- phael and Michael Angelo, the evidences of personal and skilful dissection, unmistakable in all of Leonardo's work, are entirely lacking. They studied anatomy as did the Greeks; Leonardo studied it as does every medical student to-day. He made his drawings of the dissections on loose leaves, on the margins of which he wrote (left-handed) explanations of the drawings, together with notes and suggestions of various kinds. He quotes Galen and Avicenna and proves Mondinus wrong; he tells how many dissections of each part are necessary for proper description, draws diagrams for mannikins arranged with strings, for a proper understanding of the action of the muscles, makes observations on various scientific and philo- sophical subjects.

Leonardo bequeathed his anatomical note-books to his friend Melzi, who took them with him to Milan. They later had a checkered career, some were lost and some scattered, the largest collection being that at Windsor, which has recently been reproduced in Paris and Turin.

The note-books as we find them are much the same as an anatomist, preparing a book, might draft to-day. The draw- ings are not arranged in order and the notes are entirely in- sufficient to serve as a text. But it was Leonardo's intention to write a treatise on anatomy in one hundred and twenty volumes-and the note-books were without doubt the founda- tion of this project. He prized illustration in everything, and the drawings were the permanent part of the work. This treatise was never finished ; perhaps it was never systematically begun. "It is neither avarice nor negligence that has hin- dered me," he wrote, "but lack of time." So in anatomy, as in almost everything else he did, we are losers in that he did not go further. He left fewer finished works than any other great artist of the Renaissance. But the wonder is that he finished anything. He set himself the highest standards of perfection in execution. And everything he touched aroused in him a seething mass of ideas, speculations and insistent thoughts, which are too often the foes of constructive effort. The world for him was a circus with a hundred rings. He must not only see what was going on in all of them, but must

know the details and the causes. He must know for hire " Who relies on authority for argument," he writes, "; his memory, not his reason." The dissection of the ils vessels of the scalp stimulated him to inquiry as to the car- of respiration, of the movement of the heart, of comiz: of how food descends to the stomach and how it is eraecra. how man swallows, why he coughs, yawns and sneezes, wl: t. legs go to sleep, and what makes the sensation of tiekle- Any one of these problems could keep a physiologist bus a life time. But for Leonardo such questions were only at of those pressing forward for answer.

Flaubert said that Michael Angelo trembled when he ca: near marble. Leonardo must have trembled in every wain, moment, for no circumstance was too trivial to stir the alt. tric excitability of his mind. His execution could no mer keep pace with his idea than sound can with light. Hex sponded too freely to stimuli to permit of many finister products. But the high order of his mind is plain frem to fact that in spite of his many occupations, everything he ch showed the hand of the master craftsman, and every scajz was enlightened by his thinking about it. Although he gained little glory from it, he was easily the first man : acquire an accurate knowledge of descriptive anatomy. L: the history of a science the place assigned to those who study it is determined by their influence on the development of ti science rather than on what they know themselves. It : doubtful if Leonardo's work was familiar to many of be contemporaries, and there is no evidence that his drawing ever were of use to anatomists of his day or later. A Nie contention that Vesalius secured Leonardo's drawings as changed them for his own use is too absurd to receive nit .: The merit which is certainly his and the respect in which is entitled to precedence over Vesalius, is that he used by great talents to break down the barriers which impeded medit progress, and that he inaugurated modern methods of anates- ical investigation. A mention may be found in the note-boks of a speech to be made to students, probably de la Torre'i, z which he urges them to greater zeal in learning from dise. tion, which even the students were superstitiously afraid d. rather than to rely on authority. He made long-range gur- and catapults, and devices for destroying strongholds and i" defending them. With the self-confidence which is a part genius, he submitted to his patrons the most pretentious plass for all military operations. Yet he hated war, calling it : bestial frenzy. And I fancy that he was taking a fling at ma :- tial practice when, in his defense of dissection, he compare: the morals of the anatomist who reveres human beauty, to th- morals of those who aim to destroy it. Throughout he shows- the spirit of independence and inquiry, which always mest: originality of thought, and in those days meant personal (ou!"- age as well. "Study science first," he notes, " for without : practice is nothing." He urges solitude, to permit the inde- pendent working of the mind. He practiced it as far as Elli: a man can. He had no country, no family, and no woman: name was ever associated with his.

All his anatomical work reveals the painstaking thorough-

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Twentieth Century History of Findlay and Hancock County, Ohio, and Representative Citizens, Part 106

Author: Jacob Anthony Kimmell Publication date: 1910 Publisher: Number of Pages: 1189

Author: Jacob Anthony Kimmell
Publication date: 1910
Publisher:
Number of Pages: 1189