Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 590

ANTHONY VAN LEEUWENHOEK (1632-1723) Continuatio arcanorum naturae detectorum. Apud Henricum a Kroonevelt 1697 192 [8] pp., fold. plates. 19.1 cm.

To Antonio van Leeuwenhoek, of Delft, belongs the high merit of having been the first to use the microscope systematically and of having brought the construction of the simple microscope in his own hands to a high degree of perfection. . . . Self-taught and never having attended a university, ignorant of Latin and Greek and of the classical texts, he became one of the greatest and most expert microscopists, thanks to the sagacity of his observations and the perfection of his technique (Arturo Castiglioni, A history of medicine. New York, 1946. pp. 528-529). Leeuwenhoek was a master lens-grinder and, during his lifetime, constructed several hundred microscopes, grinding a new lens for each new investigation which he undertook. These volumes contain some eighty letters from among the several hundred in which Leeuwenhoek communicated the results of his microscopical investigations to the Royal Society in London and which were published in its Philosophical Transactions over many years. Though not a trained scientist and unable to follow up his hundreds of investigations, he opened up avenues of anatomy hitherto unknown and unseen, leading to accurate physiology and, in turn, to accurate therapeutics. One example is use of his perfected microscope by Malpighi (see No. 569) to define the ultimate structure of the capillaries, which closed the final link in Harvey's description of the circulation of the blood. Leeuwenhoek first described the individual plant cell, the individual striped muscle cell, spermatozoa, red corpuscles, and the crystalline lens of the eye. These works are richly illustrated with Leeuwenhoek's drawings, which are of fundamental importance to histologic anatomy.

See Related Record(s): 569 587

Cited references: Cushing L128; Garrison-Morton 98; Osler 1020, 1021; Waller 10876, 10877, 10880, 10882, 10884; Wellcome III, p. 477

Gift of John Martin, M.D.