De Motu Locali Animalium

The bright light of William Harvey's discovery of the nature of the blood's circulation usually outshines his other contributions, notably the important studies on the embryology of the chick and the deer. However, the Exercitationes de generatione animalium at least was published (1651). Now Dr. Whitteridge, at the invitation of the Royal College of Physicians, has made accessible a virtually unknown, previously unpublished, and exciting series of notes by the great physiologist, his Of local movement in animals. It appears that Harvey planned a treatise on the movement of muscles even while he was preparing the De motu cordis. Anything that he might have written on muscles was thought to have been lost until his notes were discovered in the British Museum in 1847. The notes, mostly in Latin, are handwritten and nearly illegible except to the specialist, as is evident from the facsimile reproduction of a page which serves as frontipiece in Mrs. Whitteridge's book. Her difficult task, which she has completed with great skill and scholarship, was to decipher the notes, to translate their Latin, to supplement the translation with explanatory phrases, and to annotate, edit, and integrate the whole. The thoroughness which the editor, Archivist of St. Bartholomew's Hospital (where Harvey was once a member of the staff), has devoted to her work has extended to examination of the original by ultraviolet light in search of undiscovered text (there was none), dating of the paper through the water mark, and reading the books which Harvey read and on which he comments. Latin and English versions face each other from opposite pages. There is a foreword by Sir Russell Brain, an introduction by the editor, and a bibliography, appendix, and index. Harvey's notes first recount Aristotle's ideas about movement in animals-why it is necessary, the different kinds of movement in terms of direction, motion on land, in the water, and in the air, the varieties of bodily movement , the control of movement by higher centers, and the anatomical structures involved. There is a review of classical opinion as to which elements-nerve, flesh, ligament, or tendon-are actually responsible for movement. Then Harvey presents and supports his own views, still in the outline form which was to be the basis of his book. They are based largely on painstaking observation rather than on experimentation. He was, of course, handicapped by the seventeenth century's lack of histological knowledge, as Brain …