Tag: Santorio Santorio
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Measure of the heart: Santorio Santorio and the pulsilogium
Richard de GrijsDaniel VuillerminBeijing, China The heart is a musical organ. The irregularity of one’s inhalation and exhalation of air defies musicality, while the involuntary rumbling of moving gas in the intestines is embarrassingly analogous to the timbre of the tuba or trombone. Biomedical terminology and poetry are seemingly antithetical, but of the heart they…
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Giovanni Alfonso Borelli: De Motu Animalium, an iatromathematic and mechanical understanding of the body and health
Philippe Campillo France Portrait of Borelli by Pierre-Roch Vigneron. Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia. Public domain. Iatromathematics, also known as iatromechanics or iatrophysics, is above all a designation applied to a school of thought or to a sect of physicians. It claims to be able to subject all living phenomena to the rigors of computation,…