In England in the 17th century people knew little about hygiene, germs & disease. A ridiculous theory based on four "humours" was used to determine how you would react to various diseases. The four humours were Blood/Sanguine, Phlegm,Yellow bile & Black bile. Because the church of the medieval times did not allow the cutting open of dead bodies it was difficult for scientists to study & investigate the human body. Secret dissections done by Vesalius of Brussels led to a very important guide for doctors and surgeons. His book was a medical manual called The Fabric of the Human Body, & included illustrations that were extremely accurate. Although this book was extremely helpful people still had to suffer horrible cures and medicines during this time of slow progress. The event that dominated 17th-century medicine and marked the beginning of a new epoch in medical science was the discovery of the circulation of the blood by the English physician and anatomist William Harvey. Harvey's Essay on the Motion of the Heart and the Blood established the fact that the heart pumps the blood in continuous circulation. The Italian anatomist Marcello Malpighi advanced Harvey's work by his discovery of the capillaries, and the Italian anatomist Gasparo Aselli gave the first adequate description of the Lymphatic System. By the end of the 17th century a return to Hippocratic medicine brought renewed interest in observing and talking with patients and thus laid the foundation for the much greater progress that was to be made in the next century.
