The Galenic System
According to Galenic physiology, this subtle substance (Latin pneuma) was essential for life, carried by veins and the nervous system.
What is pneuma?
This English physician demonstrated that blood circulates in a closed loop pumped by the heart.
Who is William Harvey?
What are the four qualities that ancient physicians believed governed health?
What are hot, cold, dry, and moist?
What tool did Santorio create to explore the balance of intake and output in the body?
What is the static chair (or weighing chair)?
What invisible structures did Malpighi discover that completed Harvey’s theory of circulation?
What are capillaries?
In Galen’s model, this organ was the furnace producing innate heat and the source of “vital spirit.”
What is the heart?
Harvey’s 1628 book announcing his discovery was titled this.
What is De Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus?
According to Galenic theory, what caused disease in the human body?
What is an imbalance of humors or improper mixture of qualities?
What process did Santorio name that explained weight loss not accounted for by visible excretion?
What is insensible perspiration?
What organ’s structure did Malpighi clarify through frog dissection and microscopy?
What are the lungs?
Galen claimed that animal spirit was formed in this structure at the base of the brain.
What is the rete mirabile?
This concept — blood traveling out through arteries and returning by veins — overturned centuries of medical tradition.
What is blood circulation or circular motion of blood?
What did the word “temperature” mean before it referred to degrees of heat?
What is a mixture or balance of elements (especially humors)?
What did Santorio use to measure a patient’s pulse using a pendulum?
What is a pulsilogium (a pendulum pulse-measurer)?
What type of anatomy did Malpighi pioneer by studying insects and plants?
What is comparative anatomy?
In Galenic physiology, this organ processed digested food into venous blood and “natural spirit.”
What is the liver?
At Padua, Harvey studied under this anatomist, who had discovered one-way valves in veins.
Who is Fabricius ab Aquapendente?
Before instruments, how were temperature and heat chiefly perceived?
What is by qualitative sensation (hot vs. cold) rather than measurement?
What device did Santorio adapt to help measure internal temperature changes in the body?
What is the thermoscope (early thermometer)?
Which small organism did Malpighi study to publish the first detailed treatise on invertebrate anatomy?
What is the silkworm?
According to Galen, nerves carried this through hollow channels to animate limbs.
What is pneuma (animal spirit)?
Because microscopes did not yet exist, Harvey could not observe this small class of vessels — later discovered.
What are capillaries?
Before quantification, medical “diagnosis” often relied on this rather than numeric measures.
What are subjective qualities / physician judgment / qualitative assessment?
According to Boorstin, what did Santorio’s measurements ultimately do to Galenic medicine?
What is they helped make it obsolete or struck a “death blow” to it?
What is the name of the microscopic field Malpighi helped establish through his discoveries of glands, tissues, and papillae?
What is histology?