Palla Ákos szerk.: Az Országos Orvostörténeti Könyvtár közleményei 13. (Budapest, 1959)
Dr. I. CSILLAG and Dr. H. JELLINEK: From primitive Haemostatic Methods to Modern Vascular Surgery
the fundaments of which had been laid down by Galen. The statements of Galen held fast for one and a half thousand years, his works were translated into all the civilized languages and his theses directed the work of both physicians and charlatans as a gospel truth. Galen's respect was so great that when Vesalius, the remarkable anatomist declared some of Galen's anatomical descriptions to be incorrect, the physicians were rather wdling to suppose the anatomy of the human organism to have changed since the time of Galen than that he could have erred. The enriched anatomical knowledge brought great changes in surgery as well. Paré (1517—1590), the father of modern surgery, son of a barber, achieved among great difficulties to become chirurgeon, 2nel class. He again elaborated the method of vascular ligation. When amputations were needed he explored arteries and veins and applied a joint ligature on them. Since Paré ligated the vessels without isolating them from the nerves, his method tailed to become general due to the intolerable postoperative pain, moreover, his antagonists were agains vascular ligation itself and rather recommended compression. It was William Harvey (1578—1057) who gave a decisive push to vascular surgery stagnating for a great many centuries. In his work published in 1628 he demonstrated on the basis of animal experiments the untenableness of the dogma associated with the belief of pneuma. After exhausting observations and dissections performed in about 80 animal species and after a great number of animal experiments Harvey discovered in 1010 the law of blooel circulation. In his unique experiment he exploreel under w r ater the artery of a dog in vivo and discovered not air (pneuma) but blood to escape from the vessel. He kept his great discovery for 12 years in secret. Finally, in 1028 he made up his mind to let his discovery print but no printing house in England was willing to publish his work which was then published in Frankfurt: ,,Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus. (Dissection studies in animals on the movement of the heart and the blood). The book was a bolt from the blue and the uproar of the Church and of the scientific world was so great that no similar example
