Was Vesalius, Paré or Harvey the most in influential with their discoveries in Renaissance Times?

Galen urged that the knowledge of human anatomy should be based on dissection and not entirely on the works of Galen. He tried to encourage others to test Galen's ideas for themselves and during lectures carried out dissections giving students the chance to carry out dissections for themselves. He did try to put over the point that Galen relied for his information upon the dissection of animals. After the publication of his book the reliance upon Galens ideas slowly disappeared and people and people began to study the human body through careful dissection. This lead to a great development in the understanding of anatomy.

Ambroise Paré was born in France in 1510. He was an apprentice to his brother, a barber surgeon and then became a surgeon in Paris at the Hotel Dieu. In 1536 he became an army surgeon and spent twenty years on campaign, treating sword and gunshot wounds. In 1575 Paré published 'The Collected Works of Surgery which had important effects on the treatment of wounds, amputations and the setting of fractures. Paré also made artificial limbs and new tools or instruments for surgeons to use.

When Paré was in the army he watched many surgeons at work, watching them deal with serious wounds. Paré had never dealt with gunshot wounds before, although he knew how to treat them. He had read a book by Jean de Vigo called 'Of Wounds in General'. It said that gunshot wounds were poisonous and that the only way to stop poison from infecting the whole leg was to apply boiling oil to the wound. Paré heard the screams from the people having the procedure done and so he went to observe other surgeons to see if they had any other procedures. They all advised him to go ahead and use boiling oil. Paré decided to use the oil to cauterise the wounds. More and more injured soldiers came to Paré and he soon ran out of oil. Paré had no choice but to look for a new treatment, he could not just let his patients suffer. Paré quickly mixed an ointment of his own. It was made out of egg yolks, oil of roses and turpentine, which Paré knew had been used since Roman times to heal wounds. Paré convinced himself that when he went to the ward the next day, the patients that he had treated with oil would be alive and the ones that he had treated with his own ointment would be dead. When he arrived on the ward Paré found that the people that he had treated with his own mixture were alive and well while the soldiers that he had treated with oil were in a lot of pain and some had passed away in the night. Paré decided that he would never again use boiling oil to treat gun shot wounds. Instead he decided that he would in future use his own mixture and try to improve it.

Before Paré the treatment to stop bleeding was very painful. They would press a red-hot iron, called a cautery against the stump of the limb. This sealed the blood vessels and stopped the patient bleeding to death. This procedure was incredibly painful and Paré was sure that there must be better way to stop the flow of blood. Paré decided to tie silk thread around each of the blood vessels to close them up. These silk threads were called Ligatures and they provided a very affective way of stopping bleeding. This procedure was not new and many surgeons believed it was too much of a risk. Parés ligatures did stop the bleeding, but they were dangerous because the threads themselves could carry infection into the wound.

Eventually Paré retired from the army. He became a successful surgeon in Paris, treating three French Kings. In 1575 he published his book, 'Works on Surgery'. This was written in French and was translated into many other languages, spreading his ideas throughout Europe. Paré improved the treatment of wounds, his ideas of ligatures could result in infection but he was willing to take the risk if it meant a lot less pain. Paré used experimentation to improve ideas and observed the effects that they had on the patients. The idea of ligatures might have been more useful when disinfectants and antiseptics were invented, but ligatures did help reduce pain at the time.

William Harvey was born in Folkestone in 1578. He went to King's School, Canterbury and then Caius College in Cambridge. He studied medicine in Padua between 1599 and 1602 and then returned to London to practice as a doctor. In 1615 he was appointed to the Lumley Lectureship on Anatomy in the college of physicians. He wrote and published 'An Anatomical Account of the motion of the heart and blood in animals.

Before Harvey doctors still believed in Galen's idea that new blood was constantly being manufactured in the liver to replace the blood that burnt up in the body. Harvey discovered that the blood moves around the body and is carried away from the arteries and returns to the heart by the veins. Harvey also discovered that the amount of blood in the body never changes, it just goes around and around in a cycle. He also discovered that the heart is like a pump that pumps blood around the body. This idea had been suggested by Erasitratus eighteen hundred years earlier, but he had not been able to prove it, this is something that Harvey managed to do. He dissected cold-blooded animals so he could see the movements of each muscle in the heart. He tried to pump liquids past the valves in the veins but this failed. He also pushed thin rods down veins. This proved that the blood flowed in a one way system around the body. Harvey also measured the amount of blood moved by each heartbeat, and calculated how much blood was in the body. Harvey predicted that in-between arteries and veins there are tiny blood vessels that carry the blood. These were too small to see by the naked eye but Harvey insisted that they existed. Later on Harvey's prediction was proved.

Harvey discovered that blood flows around the body through veins and arteries and that blood is not burnt up. This may later influence future doctors to not use blood letting so frequently and this information may have been useful during surgery and encouraged other doctors and students to look closely at the heart and discover more about the body.

Both Vesalius and Harvey discovered valuable information about the anatomy of the body. This information was not very useful at the time but was very useful in the long run and encouraged many other doctors and students to look at the human body for themselves and experiment. The improvements would not of happened straight away but their ideas encouraged others to discover new things about human anatomy. During the Renaissance operations such as heart transplants did not exist but maybe because of their discoveries these sort of major operations were made possible. The question in this essay asks who was the most influential in Renaissance times. Because Harvey and Vesalius's ideas were not much use at the time, this does not so much apply to them. However Parés discoveries did cure many wounded soldiers during the Renaissance and encouraged others to use ancient treatments and make them better. So in my opinion Ambroise Paré was the most influential doctor during the Renaissance period.