8 - Medicine and meteorology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2009
Summary
Two aspects of Wren's interest in the biomedical sciences – his experiments on intravenous injection and his collaboration with Thomas Willis on the anatomy of the brain – are already well known. Their particular fame is explained by subsequent developments in medicine, but other work was no less important to Wren.
The conceptual background to Wren's injection experiments lies in William Harvey's theory of the blood's circulation, and his most direct link with Harvey was Charles Scarburgh. Scarburgh had known and worked with Harvey in Oxford during the 1640s. The immediate stimulus, however, may have been the injection of poisons in nature. Dean Wren, in an extended note to Browne's Pseudodoxia epidemica, discussed the poisonous bite of the scorpion. The note shows how reflecting on this natural injection might lead to the idea of an artificial one. Its last paragraph reads:
Oyle, by nature, abates & duls, & retundes ye feircenes, & spreading of Poyson injected, into vs, by venimous creatures, where wee may come to applye itt: But being dull of itt selfe, & not able to follow ye swift spreading of the Scorpions Poyson, through soe small a Puncture, as ye Scorpion makes; Itt was happilye discouered, that ye. Spirit of ye dying Scorpion, receiued in oyle Oliue, (& wth itt chafte upon ye. Puncture, as soone as itt is felt;) followes ye Poyson injected, by ye same waye; & soe making way for ye Oyle, wherein itt is caryed, caryes ye. Balme, that kils & deades, ye Killing Poyson, before itt can seise, on our Vitall spirits, to destroy them: And noe doubt, but ye Oyle wherein Hornets are drowned would cure yeir. Punctures, alsoe; A thing worthe ye Tryall.
Bodleian Library, 0.2.26 Art. Seld., p. 178.- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Mathematical Science of Christopher Wren , pp. 77 - 86Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1983