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BOOK THREE
PART 15
[p. 323]vein
which is inserted into the lungs
This "vein" (really the pulmonary artery) was supposed to be the channel by which the lungs received nutriment from the right heart. cf. p. 121, note 3.
suggests that not all the blood which the vena cava gives to the heart is driven away again from the heart to the lungs. Nor can it be said that any of the blood is expended in the nourishment of the actual body of the heart, since there is another vein
the coronary vein.
which breaks up in it and which does not take its origin nor get its share of blood from the heart itself. And even if a certain amount is so expended, still the vein leading to the lungs is not to such a slight extent smaller than that inserted into the heart as to make it likely that the blood is used as nutriment for the heart: the disparity is much too great for such
an explanation. It is, therefore, clear that something is,taken over into the left ventricle.
Galen's conclusion, of course, is, so far, correct, but he has substituted an imaginary direct communication between the ventricles for the actual and more roundabout pulmonary circulation, of whose existence he apparently had no idea. His views were eventually corrected by the Renascence anatomists. cf. Introduction, pp. xxii.-xxiii.
Moreover, of the two vessels connected with it, that which brings pneuma into it from the lungs
He means the left auricle, considered as the termination of the pulmonary "arteries" ; cf. p. 314, note 3.
is much smaller than the great outgrowing artery
The aorta, its orifice being circular, appears bigger than the slit-like mitral orifice.
from which the arteries all over the body originate; this would suggest that it not merely gets pneuma from the lungs, but that it also gets blood from the right ventricle through the anastomoses mentioned.
Now it belongs to the treatise "On the Use of Parts" to show that it was best that some parts of the body should be nourished by pure, thin, and vaporous blood, and others by thick, turbid blood, and that in this matter also Nature has overlooked nothing. Thus it is not
desirable that these matters should be further discussed. Having mentioned,
