CAPUT II.

ON INVENTIONS.

(a) Sanct. Aph. 2. S. 1.

I find three August figures of the most wholesome art (not that I would detract from the praises of others): Hippocrates, Harvey, and Sanctorius. If we imagine ourselves lacking their labors and inventions today, we look for medicine in itself; for if you remove Hippocrates, you will stifle the art, newly born in its primary cradles, and leave it blind, deprived of the light of most beautiful observations and chaste reasons. Remove Harvey, and you will deprive the art of the most true invention of the circulation of the blood. Finally, take away Sanctorius, and medicine will lack that foundation from which the attentive industry of practitioners successfully deduces the causes and origins of most diseases, and draws out both diagnostic and prognostic signs, whose ignorance or neglect makes the entire science of healing fallacious (a) and dangerous.

(b) Aph. 5. S. 1.

The argument of perspiration, therefore, is the invention of Sanctorius, by which he does not mean the exhalation and subsequent re-imbibition of the internal viscera, but calls only the external perspiration of the body itself, while he says: (b) insensible perspiration occurs either through the pores of the body, which is the whole perspiring surface and has the skin as a surrounding net, or it occurs through respiration made through the mouth, which usually amounts to about half a pound in a single day, and is observed on a mirror, if it is placed to the mouth, in the manner of droplets. From which it is clear that perspiration is best divided into cutaneous and pulmonic. I omit here what Keill in Britain and Gorter in Holland have left behind concerning this matter.