2017/05/19 by Raphaël Suy, Raphael Suy, Sarah Thomis +1 · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Historical and Literary Studies #Renaissance Literature and Culture
paper · doi:10.1080/00015458.2017.1326658
crossref issued 2017/05/19 · crossref published 2017/05/19 · crossref published-online 2017/05/19 · openalex publication_date 2017/05/19 · crossref created 2017/05/19 · crossref published-print 2017/07/04 · crossref deposited 2025/03/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/07 · crossref indexed 2026/07/30
A controversy over the transport of chyle and lymph started a few weeks after the publication of Pecquet's Experimenta Nova Anatomica. There are records of nearly seventy people who had an active interest in this matter. Three issues were discussed: the purpose of the liver and especially its haematopoietic function, the capacity of the thoracic duct to transport all chyle, and the purpose of the lymph vessels. The controversy over the use of the lacteals and the lymph vessels subsided about 20 years after the first publication of the new theories. In this contribution, we focused on the ideas of William Harvey, since his ideas were close to the real configuration of the lymphatic system, and on the peculiar anatomical set-up of Louis De Bils (ca 1624-1669), an obscure French-Flemish non-professional anatomist, who was the initiator of a heated controversy in the Netherlands with his original ideas.