Biographical encyclopedia
[147] GESNER GESNER [147]
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[147] GESNER
GESNER [147] ventricle of the heart to the other through invisible pores in the wall of muscle separating those ventricles. How ever, the truth of the matter was begin ning to dawn on Servetus [142]. Toward the end of Vesalius’ life, he too grew to doubt Galen in this respect. Vesalius was opposed to the view of Aristotle [29] that the heart was the seat of life, mind, and emotion. Vesalius believed that the brain and nervous sys tem represented that seat, and no one has doubted it since. Vesalius’ work came to a halt with the publication of his book. Perhaps an noyed at the furore it aroused and the opposition to it (led by his old teacher at Paris), he quit research. It had made him enough of a reputation, however, to earn him the post of court physician to Charles V, and later to Charles’s son, the Spanish king Philip II. When Henry II of France was fatally wounded in a tour nament in 1559, Vesalius attended him, taking precedence over Paré [139]. As he became more prominent his en emies accused him of heresy, body snatching, and dissection, and for a while it looked as though he might be executed. But his royal connections stood him in good stead, and the sentence was commuted to a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. This, however, represented but a short reprieve. On the way back from his pilgrimage, his ship was battered by storms off the coast of Greece and Vesa lius died shortly after the ship managed to land at Zante. [147] GESNER, Konrad von (guess'ner) Swiss naturalist
The late Middle Ages brought to the attention of Europeans the zoological and botanical works of Aristotle [29] and Theophrastus [31]. In addition, the explorations of the fifteenth century in troduced Europe to hordes of plants and animals of which the ancients had been ignorant. A new group of writers on nat ural history arose, and among these the most prominent were Gesner and Fuchs [136].
Gesner, the son of a furrier killed in the religious wars, and the protegé of the Protestant reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, was a physician by profession. He obtained his medical degree at the University of Basel in 1541 and served as town physi cian in Zürich during the last decade of his life. However, he was a Renaissance man with interests ranging from Greek through comparative phüology to natural history. He used the collection of rare mountain species of plants as an excuse for indulging in the then newfangled hobby of mountain climbing and it is difficult to say which interested him more. He was the first to present ülus- trations of fossils, but he had no suspi cion that they represented remnants of past life. He considered them simply stony concretions. In his wide-ranging interests, his cre dulity, and his absolute compulsion to work, he resembled Pliny [61] and, in deed, has been known as the German Pliny and as a “monster of erudition.” He wrote a “Universal Library,” for in stance, in which he listed all known books in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, with summaries of each. Between 1551 and 1558 he wrote similarly exhaustive vol umes designed to describe all known ani mals and replace the earlier and less complete work of Aristotle. He also col lected at least five hundred plants not known to the ancients. Gesner was still working feverishly when in 1565 a plague struck Zürich. He refused to abandon his patients and died of plague. Although there is some attempt at classification in his works, Gesner be longs, by and large, to the old school of purely descriptive natural history. Other naturalists, of a more analytical turn of mind, such as Alpini [160] and Belon [148], were oriented more in the direc tion of the future, but they were less influential in their own time. The attempt to make deeper sense out of the realm of life through rational classification had to wait another century for Ray [213] and, above all, Linnaeus [276].
87 [149] FALLOPIUS PORTA
[148] BELON, Pierre (be-lohn') French naturalist
Belon, the son of poor parents, was recognized as a promising youth by the local bishop, who made it possible for him to study medicine. Belon obtained his medical degree at the University of Paris and had King Francis I as patron. He was sent east in 1546, accompanying diplomatic missions. This gave him a chance to study plant and animal life in countries bordering the eastern Mediter ranean and he was the first to notice the similarities of basic plan in the skeletons of the various vertebrates from mammals to fish. These homologies (a first step to ward comparative anatomy) were an im portant impulse in the slow development of evolutionary theories over the next three centuries. He also studied the por poise embryo and initiated researches, in this way, that were to lead to the science of embryology. Belon introduced the cedar tree to France and founded two botanical gar dens. Having survived his travels without trouble, he was so indiscreet as to go out to gather herbs in the Bois de Boulogne, in the heart of Paris, and there he was waylaid by robbers and killed. [149] FALLOPIUS, Gabriel (fa-loh'- pee-us) Italian anatomist Born: Modena, 1523 Died: Padua, October 9, 1562 Fallopius entered the church when his father died, leaving the family impover ished. He was canon in the cathedral of Modena for a time, but when the finan cial situation took a turn for the better, he abandoned the religious life to prac tice science. He succeeded his teacher Vesalius [146] as the most important anatomist, rising eventually to a professorship at Padua in 1551 as successor to Colombo [140]. He is best known today for his de scriptions of the inner ear and of the or gans of generation. He described the tubes that lead the human ovum from the ovary, where it is formed, to the uterus where, if the ovum is fertilized, the embryo develops. It is in these tubes that fertilization takes place. Fallopius did not know the function of the tubes because the mammalian ova, or egg cells, were not discovered for nearly three centuries after his time. Nevertheless, the organs today are known as the Fallopian tubes. He coined the term “vagina” and de scribed the clitoris. He died before his fortieth birthday of that great killer of young people in those days—tuberculosis. [150] PORTA, Giambattista della (pawr'tah) Italian physicist Born: Vico Equense, near Naples, October 1535 Died: Naples, February 4, 1615 Porta was the son of a small govern ment official and may have been largely self-taught. His most important work was a quite serious discussion of magic and how it could be used to control the environment —all quite worthless, of course. Yet he cannot be dismissed. He founded the first of the modem scientific “academies,” those associations for the intercommunications of scientific re search. This was the Academia Secre- torum Naturae in 1560. It was suppressed by the Inquisition, but he then reconstituted it as the Accademia dei Lincei in 1610 and that remained. (Perhaps lynxes, for all their legendary sharpness of sight didn’t seem as threat ening to the clerics as investigating the secrets of nature would.) Porta also worked with the camera obscura or pinhole camera, in which light entering an enclosed box through a small hole forms an inverted image in side. It lacked the essentials of a modern camera—the lens and the photosensitive film; but that would come eventually with the work of Niepce [384] and Da guerre [467] a little over two centuries later. 8 8
[151] FABRICIUS AB AQUAPENDENTE VIETA
Most important, Porta was the first to demonstrate the heating effect of light. It was a small step, but a step, toward the recognition of the unity of energy. [151] FABRICIUS AB AQUAPEN DENTE, Hieronymus (fa-brish'- ee-us)
. Italian physician Born: Aquapendente, Papal States, May 20, 1537 Died: Padua, May 21, 1619 Fabricius obtained his M.D. at Padua in 1559 and in 1565 became a professor of surgery there. He has two chief claims to fame. First, he was the teacher of Harvey [174]. Second, he discovered the one-way valves in the veins and de scribed them accurately in a book pub lished in 1603. However, he failed to see their significance. Fabricius was a pupil of Fallopius [149], whom he had succeeded at Padua, in 1565 so that the line from Vesalius [146] to Harvey, via Fallopius and Fa bricius, covers four student generations. Fabricius corrected Vesalius in one re spect. Vesalius, for some reason, placed the lens in the center of the eyeball. Fabricius correctly described its location near the forward rim. Fabricius also published an exhaustive study of the chick embryo in 1612, re storing the subject to the point where Aristotle [29] had left it and paving the way for future advance. [152] CLAVIUS, Christoph (klah'vee- oos) German astonomer Born: Bamberg, Bavaria, 1537 Died: Rome, Italy, February 6, 1612
Clavius entered the Jesuit order in 1555 and attended lectures at the Uni versity of Coimbra in Portugal. He lec tured at the Collegio Romano in Rome beginning in 1565 and remained there for the rest of his life with incon siderable exceptions. His contribution to astronomy is the rather negative one of being one of the last important astronomers to be a die hard opponent of Copernicus’ [127] doc trine. He very carefully pointed out the various Biblical quotations that showed that God himself declared Copernicus to be absurd. Somehow that didn’t stop the steady shift of scholarly opinion toward Copernicus. On the other hand, Clavius was the first astronomer since Sosigenes [54] to reform the calendar. The Julian calendar set up by Sosigenes had been gaining three days on the sun every four hun dred years, as had been pointed out by Roger Bacon [99]. By Clavius’ time, the calendar was eleven days ahead of the sun and it marked the vernal equinox eleven days after the sun did—with seri ous effects on the calculation of Easter. An astronomical conference was held in Rome and Clavius’ proposal was ac cepted. Eleven days were dropped so that the day after October 4, 1582, was October 15, 1582, and thereafter, the century years not divisible by 400 were not leap years. Pope Gregory XIII es tablished this, so Clavius’ reform is the “Gregorian calendar” that is used virtu ally throughout the world today. Naturally, the Protestant nations ob jected and refused for quite a while to accept the reform. Surprisingly, there was opposition from some scientists (Protestant, to be sure) such as Vieta [153] and Scaliger [154], [153] VIETA, Franciscus (vyay'tuh) French mathematician Born: Fontenay-le-Comte, Poitou, 1540
Died: Paris, February 23, 1603 Vieta (François Viete), the son of a lawyer, was educated in law at Poitiers and received his degree in 1560. He oc cupied high administrative office under Henry IV. This may have come about because for a time he was a Protestant as Henry had been before he became king. When Henry turned Catholic, Vieta did likewise. Perhaps the most dramatic of Vieta’s
[154] SCALIGER
GILBERT [155] feats involved his capacity as a skilled cryptanalyst. Working for the French government in 1589, he deciphered the code that Philip II of Spain was using. This worked to the great disadvantage of the Spanish armies then at war with France. Philip II could explain the leak age of what he thought were inviolable secrets by no means other than sorcery and he accused the French of that crime to the pope. Vieta engaged himself in mathematics only as a hobby and yet accomplished great work in algebra and trigonometry. In fact, it was he who first used letters to symbolize unknowns and constants (vowels for the former and consonants for the latter) in algebraic equations, so that a book he wrote in 1591, lsagoge in artem analyticam, is the first that a mod ern high-school student could look at and recognize at once as a book on alge bra. For this reason, he is called the fa ther of modern algebra, although great men in the field such as Cardano [137] preceded him. Oddly enough Vieta repudiated the word “algebra,” which was Arabic and not Latin, and preferred the term “analy sis.” In fact, the title of his book, in En glish, is Introduction to the Analytic Art. As a result, the term “analysis” is now used for algebraic methods of solving problems, though the term “algebra” is still retained for that branch of mathe matics that deals with the rules govern ing the manipulation of equations. In one respect, Vieta was formidably geometric. He made use of Archimedes’ [47] method for calculating pi through polygons of many sides. Vieta used poly gons of 393,216 sides in his calculation and obtained a value of pi accurate to ten decimal places—the best value up to that time. [154] SCALIGER, Joseph Justus (skal'- ih-jer)
French scholar Born: Agen, Lot-et-Garonne, Au gust 5, 1540 Died: Leiden, Netherlands, Janu ary 21, 1609 Scaliger was a monumental scholar who had been inhumanly driven by his scholarly father into an encyclopedic knowledge of Latin and Greek authors at an early age. Young Scaliger took to the task with avidity, but his proficiency in the classics did not blind him to other matters. He studied at Bordeaux first and then, in 1559, traveled to Paris. He was converted to Protestantism in 1562 and had the good sense to leave France for Geneva in 1572, just before the dreadful St. Batholomew’s Day Mas sacre of Protestants. In 1593 he took a professorial position with the safely Prot estant University of Leiden and re mained there the rest of his life. He did not consider Greek and Roman history the only history that counted but urged that the records of the various Oriental empires be studied. In a book published in 1606, he studied every scrap of record he could find and care fully compared the various chronologies in the light of the astronomic learning of the day. His hope was to bring them all into some agreement and to deduce a single line of history. He is the founder of modern chronology. In addition he founded the system of the Julian Day. He set January 1, 4713 b . c .,
equal to Day 1 and numbered all the days from that. (Thus, January 1, 1982, is Julian Day, 2,444,970.) This freed astronomers from the vagaries of changing calendars, and the system is still used to this day. The word “Julian” is Scaliger’s hom age to his intellectually slave-driving fa ther, Julius Caesar Scaliger. It was an undeserved homage, for the father had filled his son’s ears with tales of noble birth that the son innocently boasted about. When the stories were proved lies, Scaliger was utterly humiliated. He wilted and died. [155] GILBERT, William English physician and physicist
1544
Died: London, November 30, 1603 9 0
[155] GILBERT
BRAHE [156] Gilbert took his medical degree at Cambridge in 1569, then traveled through Europe, unhampered by family, since he remained a lifelong bachelor. He settled in London about 1573 and gained considerable renown as a physi cian, becoming president of the College of Physicians in 1600. In 1601 he was appointed court physician to Queen Eliz abeth I, at the usual salary of £100 per year.
The year before, he had published a book, De Magnete (“Concerning Mag nets”), which established his reputation as a physicist. Gilbert might be viewed as merely re peating the work done earlier by Peter Peregrinus [104]. Peregrinus’ work, how ever, had been mostly forgotten. Also, Gilbert went much further than Pere grinus. Gilbert, like Galileo [166], was a pioneer of experimentation and refuted many superstitions by direct testing. In deed, Galileo considered Gilbert the chief founder of experimentalism. Gil bert showed that garlic did not destroy magnetism, as it was believed to do, by smearing a magnet with it and demon strating that the magnet’s powers re mained unimpaired. Gilbert further showed not only that a compass needle points roughly north and south, but also that if it is suspended to allow vertical movement it points down ward toward the earth (“magnetic dip”). A compass needle also shows a dip in the neighborhood of a spherical magnet, and at the magnetic poles of the sphere it points vertically. Gilbert’s great contri bution was to suggest that the earth itself is a great spherical magnet and that the compass needle points not to the heavens (as Peregrinus believed) but to the mag netic poles of the planet. Gilbert believed this situation was fixed—that at any point on the earth the magnetic needle held constant. This idea was corrected a generation later by Gellibrand [184], (Because Gilbert was a pioneer in the study of magnetism, magnetomotive force is measured now in units called “gilberts.”) Gilbert studied other attractive forces in the universe. It had been known since ancient times that amber, when rubbed, acquired the power of attracting light objects. This differed from magnetism in that magnetism involved iron only, whereas the amber attraction could be felt by any light object and Gilbert was the first to point out this difference clearly. (According to the Greeks it was Thales [3] who first studied this effect of rubbed amber.) Gilbert extended knowledge in this field by discovering that substances other than amber, as, for example, rock crystal and a variety of gems, showed the same attractive force when rubbed. He grouped all such substances under the name of “electrics,” from the Greek word for amber (elektron). He also elaborated notions on the structure of the universe that were both advanced and daring for his time. He ac cepted the views of Copernicus [127] and was the first important Englishman to do so. Also, he followed Nicholas of Cusa [115] in believing that the stars were at varying, but enormously large, distances from the earth and that they might themselves be circled by habitable planets. Finally, he was the first to spec ulate on what might keep the planets in their paths if the celestial spheres first in vented by Pythagoras [7] two thousand years before his time proved, after all, not to exist. Coming down heavily on his own specialty, Gilbert decided it was a form of magnetic attraction. Galileo and Kepler [169] came to no better conclu sion. When Elizabeth I died, Gilbert was reappointed court physician by James I. He died within the year. Gilbert left his books, instruments, and other memorabilia to the College of Phy sicians, but they were destroyed in the Great Fire of London sixty years later. [156] BRAHE, Tycho (ty-ko brah'uh) Danish astronomer Born: Knudstrup, Scania (south Sweden, then part of Denmark), December 14, 1546
Czechoslovakia), October 24, 1601
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