The Piltdown Hippocrates

I am indebted to Dr Edwin Clarke for suggesting the title of this paper.

Bayon H. P. , “William Harvey, physician and biologist”, Annals of science, iii (1938), 59–118, 435–56, p. 439.

Cournand A. , “Air and blood”, in Fishman A. P. and Richards D. W. (editors), Circulation of the blood: Men and ideas (New York, 1964), 5–6.

Diller H. , “Die Lehre vom Blutkreislauf, eine verschollene Entdeckung der Hippokratiker?”, Sudhoffs Archiv, xxxi (1938), 201–18.

Communicant autem omnes venae, et confluunt inter se mutuo, et aliae quidem sibiipsis per se committuntur ac coincidunt, alie verò per venulas à venis extensas. Quae autem carnes nutriunt, ea parte inter se confluunt ( Cornarius J. (ed.), Hippocrati opera (Lyon, 1567), 80).

Mihi quidem videtur principium corporis nullum esse, sed omnia similiter principium, et omnia finis. Circulo enim scripto principium non reperitur. Similiter etiam morborum in toto corpore (ibid., 79).

Vene per corpus diffuse spiritum et fluxum ac motum exhibent, ab una multe germinantes. atque hec una unde oriatur et ubi desinat, non scio. Circulo enim facto principium non inventur (ibid., 74).

Radicatio venarum hepar. Radicatio arteriarum cor: Ex his aberrant in omnia sanguis et spiritus, et calor per haec meat (ibid., 143). Although at first sight this does not seem very promising material, Anthony van der Linden took it as the subject for a disputation on 5 July 1662. In order to prove that it implies a knowledge of the circulation of the blood, he glossed the second sentence as follows: This is the phrase for whose sake we have selected the passage. If in it each word means what it says, what can and must the whole mean and show if it be not that it asserts the circulation [circuitus] of the blood, and with the blood, the spirit, and with both heat? For what indeed is circuire if it be not to go out from one place, to pass through diverse places and to return whence it started, and to do this again and again and to go over the self-same ground? How then could he be ignorant of the fact that the blood circulated [circumire sanguinem] when he described its perpetual motion in such words which can mean nothing except a circular motion? But, as can be seen, the word circumire does not appear in Cornarius's text. To serve his own ends, Van der Linden has mistranslated the Greek verb which denotes movement, but not movement in a circle.

Hi fontes sunt humanae naturae, et hîc flumina sunt quibus totum corpus irrigatur: Atque hi etiam vitam homini conferunt, et ubi resiccati fuerint, homo moritur (Cornarius, p. 66).

Littré M. P. E. , Hippocrate: Oeuvres complètes (10 vols, Paris, 1839–61), viii, 592.

T. B. Macaulay's essay on “Mr Robert Montgomery's poems”, in Critical and historical essays (2 vols, London, 1877), i, 281.