Inaugural Medical Dissertation on Blind and Open Hemorrhoids

IV. However, by the new decree of the Anatomical Council of today, by which veins no longer serve for the nutrition of parts or to carry away [humors] for evacuation, but only carry them back to the source, namely the Heart—[a fact] discovered by autopsia direct visual examination itself—all that duty (and thus also in this hemorrhoidal excretion) is deferred to the ARTERIES. Whence it is now necessary for us to be solicitous also about the origin and progress of the hemorrhoidal Arteries, if we desire to know the nature of the thing more exactly.

Indeed, the descending trunk of the Great Aorta, granting arteries to the lower belly for the sake of nutrition and for carrying blood, is parted by sight and pen into two major arteries, which accompany the branches of the Gate vein and the hollow vein described a little while ago. The former extends forward as the Splenic, Celiac and Mesenteric Artery, each of which luxuriates still further with various little arteries. The last, however, the inferior Mesenteric (so called from its position), arising in the anterior part of the trunk of the aorta, before it divides into the iliac branches, near the sacral bone, with various offshoots—surrounded on both sides by the Fallopian plexus of nerves—besides the lower part of the mesentery and the left part of the colon, also irrigates the rectum, in the extremity of which it finally constitutes the internal Hemorrhoidal Arteries so-called: the private use of which, or rather abuse (from Harveian circulatory principles), is that nature, with these opened, might deposit feculent blood and thus prevent melancholy, dissolve black bile, heal an hardened spleen, and indeed even relieve diseases of the chest by their opportune flow in the act of cure and preservation. If, however, it does not deposit it, [it sends it] through its associate Vein (which is united to it by frequent anastomoses connections between vessels), which crawls through the mesentery, [sending it] back to the gate, and thus remits it to the source.