Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 630

JOHN MAYOW (1640-1679) Tractatus duo, quorum prior agit de respiratione: alter de rachitide. Apud Cornelium Driehuysen [et] Felicem Lopez de Haro 1671 57 pp., 2 plates. 15.5 cm.

Graduating from Oxford in 1670, Mayow was educated as a lawyer but made medicine his profession. Few details of his later life are known and no record of his medical studies has been found. He is said, however, to have practiced medicine during the summers at Bath, and he made a chemical analysis of its salt springs. The present work, his first publication, appeared in 1668 and includes an account of his experiments on respiration and his tract on rickets. Mayow visualized the heart as a muscular pump which circulates the blood and carries a substance he called spiritus nitro-aereus throughout the body. A century later Lavoisier identified spiritus nitro-aereus as oxygen. It was only after Lavoisier and Priestley made their discoveries that the significance of Mayow's work began to be recognized. His tract on rickets was only the second on the subject by an Englishman. In it he gives a clear description of the clinical symptoms of the disease and makes several useful suggestions concerning its management.

Cited references: Osler 3358 (1668 ed.); Russell 565; Waller 6391

Gift of John Martin, M.D.