ORIGINALS Digestive Disease : The Changing Scene *

William Harvey published De Motu Cordis in 1628 and the De Generatione Animalium in 1651, two of the greatest books of observation and experiment ever written. During many of the active intervening years he was dissecting the abdomen, lecturing on digestion, and planning to write a treatise on nutrition. In his Lumleian lectures he constantly directed his listeners to the practical aspects of their profession, and in his work on the circulation he studied the fire-pump for inspiration rather than the writings of Galen and Hippocrates. This was regarded by many Fellows of the College as a "strange presumption" (Aubrey), and, as Bacon said, it seemed as if the College was "kept back by a kind of enchantment, from progress in the sciences, by reverence for antiquity," believing that experience without classical learning was useless. It is unlikely that these influences at Amen Corner can explain how Harvey seems to have accepted so fully the classical teaching on digestion and why he did not turn to practical experiments to test Galen's theory that food was concocted or cooked by heat in the stomach. Those parts of the body concerned with its nourishment, he wrote, "must possess the power of retaining food (for time is necessary for concoction), the power of digesting the concocted food, for which reason it boils it, and lastly the power of expelling the excrements."' Bad concoction led to corruption of the viscera and to death, indigestion being due to too little innate heat or to too much food which "overwhelmed and choaked the heat and therefore accumulated many crude and raw humours."