1651

In his Experimenta Nova Anatomica, Jean-Pierre Pecquet reported discovery of thoracic chyle duct (thoracic duct) during dissection of a dog (Suy et al., III, 390-92). In 1652, the Dutch researcher Johannes van Horne, dissecting various animals in Leiden, made the same discovery. Ditto the Swede Olof Rudbeck, dissecting a calf carcass in 1651 and published his dissertation in 1652. He endorsed his predecessors’ belief that blood was not formed in the liver. Also in 1652, Thomas Bartholini, working in Copenhagen, published his observations, which included two human dissections, on the chyle vessels and the thoracic duct. Bartolini differentiated the milky chyle originating in the small intestine mesenteric vessels from the clear fluid circulating into systemic vessels; he named the latter for the first time ‘lymphatics’, confirming the correct lymph circulation. The new term appeared in the title of a second book, published in 1653 (Natale, 422). Bartholini too became convinced that all chyle and superfluous serous liquid were evacuated to the heart. “The discovery of the thoracic duct for drainage of chyle and lymph to the subclavian vein(s) and thence to the heart was, next to Harvey’s theory on blood circulation (De Motu Cordis, 1628), the most important milestone by far that would turn established medical thinking on its head” (396). But none of the four proposed an alternative function for the liver. From 1653 on, priority dispute between Bartholini and Rudbeck over discovery of the serous lymph vessels = “lymphomania at its worst” (395).