Honors speedily accumulated upon him. He was elected a member of the College of Physicians, "lecturer at the royal garden," was admitted among the number of those composing the Royal Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society at Berlin, and occupied the Chairs of Physic, Anatomy and Surgery at the University of Paris. He was noted among his fellows for his great industry and the splendid use which he made of exceptional opportunities for anatomical research-"opportunities the best that Europe could afford" are the words of a contemporary.* Among the most famous of his pupils was Haller, the physiologist, who has left it on record that Winslow owed his great fame more to his untiring industry than to his genius. However this may be, Winslow went down to the grave full of years and honors in his ninety-first year (1760), leaving behind him works which fully justify his inclusion among the Founders of Modern Medicine.

Winslow's most famous work, his Exposition Anatomique de la Structure du Corps Humain or "Anatomical Exposition of the Structure of the Human Body," is before us in the translation of G. Douglas, M.D. It is the fifth edition, corrected, published in two quarto volumes in London by J. Knapton and others, in 1763, and the volumes are from the collection of the Sheffield General Infirmary presented to the University College Library.

Winslow, in setting forth the aims and objects of the work, modestly intends it for "beginners and learners," but the work details the structure of the human body as he himself had found it by repeated dissections. It is probable that so careful and laborious a worker as our author (one, moreover, aiming at approximate perfection) might not have found even his long life long enough to finish such a work to his own satisfaction, but the pressure of his friends at last induced him to publish it in what he regards as a premature stage. "Several years ago," he says, "I was informed, that if I did not publish myself, what I had said and demonstrated in my courses of anatomy, especially in those given at my own house, where I often talk without the least reserve, I should have the mortification to find that some other person would do it for me." However, this reason influenced him but little, for he records with gratitude the fair treatment in general accorded him by his pupils and hearers. Indeed, in one instance he was helped not a little by one of the latter. A certain M. L'Archevêque collected in writing all he

*Dr. G. Douglas, his translator into English.

was able to take down of Winslow's course of lectures and demonstrations and placed the manuscript in his teacher's hands. Upon it was the inscription: Haec tua sunt "These are your property."

With some reluctance, Winslow consented to insert four of the plates of Eustachius though he had wished to wait for the completion of a series of figures drawn from life under his own direction.

In the translator's "Preface" occurs a sentence which the modern medical student will endorse as heartily as did probably the student of the eighteenth century. Speaking of Winslow's fondness for introducing new terms, Dr. Douglas mildly protests that it is not wise to "oblige students to learn a dictionary by heart; that is, to spend that time in the study of a language, which might have been more usefully employed in acquiring the knowledge of things."

Winslow begins his work with the statement that "The exact knowledge of the bones is the foundation of all anatomy"-an axiom with which few will be found to disagree. In his book, he observes the order followed by Vesalius in his De Humani Corporis Fabrica. The Bones are treated first, then the Muscles, Arteries, Veins, Nerves, Abdomen, Thorax, and Head, with the organs of sensation. The modern student would not go far wrong in the essentials of anatomy had he only Winslow's treatise to refer to.

A dissertation on anatomy pure and simple, as is the book before us, is somewhat of a literary desert, and a lengthy description of it would find a more congenial place in the department of the JOURNAL reserved for "Book Reviews." There are, however, at least two cases.

One of these is Winslow's description of the nature of the brain considered as a whole, which bears a striking analogy to that found in Willis and is, indeed, but little in advance of the latter. He argues* that there is "no room to doubt but that the brain is a secretory organ, or, as it is called by anatomists, a gland." It consists of an "infinite number" of "small secretory clusters" which strain from the blood supplied to them by the numerous fine ramifications of the vessels "an excessively fine fluid; the remaining blood being conveyed back by the same number of venal extremities, into the sinuses of the dura mater,

*Sec. X, 181, et seq.

and from thence into the jugular and vertebral veins." "This subtile fluid," he continues, "called commonly animal spirit, nervous juice, or liquor of the nerves, is continually forced into the medullary fibres of the white portion of the cerebrum, cerebellum, medulla oblongata, and medulla spinalis; and by the intervention of these fibres supplies and fills the nerves, which are a continuation of them."

The other oasis is a reprint, in Section X, of Steno's "Dissertation on the Anatomy of the Brain," delivered in 1668. This is a deeply interesting and philosophic discourse in which Steno undertakes the Socratic task of convincing the anatomical world of ignorance. Though not strictly within the limits of our subject we cannot forbear quoting one passage of the essay: "There are but two ways of coming at the knowledge of a machine; either to be taught the whole contrivance by the maker, or to take it quite to pieces, and to examine each by itself, and as it stands in relation to the rest. These are the only true ways of learning the contrivance of any machine, but the generality of inquirers have thought that they had better guess at it, than be at pains to examine it thorougnly To make the necessary enquiries for the discovery of truth, a man's whole time. must be taken up Physicians and surgeons cannot comply with this, because of their practice; nor professors, because of their public demonstrations. Whole years may sometimes be necessary to discover what may afterwards be demonstrated to others in the space of an hour."

Winslow also published many other anatomical works, but chiefly in the form of papers buried in the transactions of academies and societies.

NOTE ON THEOPHILUS BONETUS AND THE "SEPULCHRETUM."

(A.D. 1620-1689.)

The Sepulchretum of Théophile Bonet (to drop his Latin appellation) must always have attaching to it more than ordinary interest, if for no other reason than that it was the work which, by inspiring Morgagni's famous De Sedibus, both directly and indirectly helped the reduction of pathological anatomy to a science. An apology, therefore, is scarcely needed for including a name, of which probably many have never heard, among the Founders of Modern Medicine. Morgagni, it is true, is the bright star of a systematised Morbid Anatomy, but inseparably associa

ted with him, like the dark companion of some shining star, is the little known and all but forgotten physician of the Duc de Longueville-Bonetus. Morgagni himself, no blind reader of the Sepulchretum, admits freely that Theophilus Bonetus "deserved well" of mankind for his attempt, imperfect though it

was.

This work, published three years before Morgagni's birth, was, we believe, the very first sustained effort towards a complete systemisation of the lessons of the dead-house. It was with pleasure, therefore, that we found the first volume of this work in the collection presented by the Sheffield Royal Infirmary, and it occurred to us that a brief note thereon might prove acceptable to the readers of these articles.

The author of the Sepulchretum was born at Geneva, March 5, 1620. After visiting many European academies he was admitted to the degree of M.D. at Bologna in 1643, and soon after became physician to the Duc de Longueville. His special bent was towards pathological anatomy and he is stated to have carried out many anatomical researches to discover the seats of diseases. An accident rendering his hearing defective, he retired from practice and spent the last ten or twelve years of his life in fashioning voluminous treatises, mainly compilations, his reading being prodigious.

A very special interest attaches to yet another of the works. of Bonet, for in 1682 a folio of his was published with the title Mercurius Compilatitius Sive Index Medico-Practicus, giving under the name of every disease where cases and observations might be found and what authors had written on them. There is nothing new under the sun (which has been written rather often), and the Index Medicus can thus trace its ancestry farther back than perhaps its worried editors are aware.

The volume of the Sepulchretum on our desk is the first tome of the edition published at Geneva in 1700, under the editorship of Johannes Jacobus Mangetus, M.D., chief physician to the Elector of Brandenburg. There is an interestingly quaint full-page plate as frontispiece (See Plate 3), where the author, sitting at a table strewn with the numerous works of his untiring pen, is putting the word "Finis" to the Chirurgia Universalis-a sufficiently ambitious performance. In his left hand is an hour glass which he is apparently in the act of reversing. Behind him are well-stocked shelves filled with tall folios. Peeping in at a halfopen door, through which a rocky landscape is revealed, is a