Scientist of the Day - George Ent
Portrait of George Ent, engraving by Robert White, 1679, National Portrait Gallery, London (npg.org.uk)
Geoge Ent, an English physician and anatomist, was born on Nov. 6. 1604, in the Netherlands; his father had fled England for religious reasons. Ent attended the school of Isaac Beeckman in Rotterdam in the early 1620s. Beeckman was one of the first "mechanical philosophers” in the Netherlands. Under his influence, Ent became sympathetic to the idea that there were no attractions in nature – the only acceptable force was impetus. René Descartes had been similarly convinced by Beeckman five years before Ent.
Ent returned to England to matriculate at Sidney Sussex College at Cambridge, where he received his MA in 1631. Then he was off to Padua to study medicine, Padua being the foremost medical school in Europe at the time. Ent spent 5 years there, receiving his MD in 1636. William Harvey had attended Padua 30 years earlier, and while at Padua, Ent heard a great deal of criticism of Harvey's advocacy for the circulation of the blood, which he had announced in 1628. Ent met Harvey in Italy in 1636 (some say in Rome, some say in Naples), and the two became friends, even though Harvey was some 26 years older that the 32-year-old Ent.
Title page of Apologia pro circulatione sanguinis, a defense of William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood, by George Ent, 1641, Lyon Public Library (books.google.com)
Back in England, Ent decided to defend his new old friend from scholarly attack, and he wrote Apologia pro circulatione sanguinis (Apology for the Circulation of the Blood), which was published in 1641 in London (second image). We do not have his book in our collections, allegedly because it is a medical work and thus out of scope (we do not have Harvey’s book either, for that same reason), although, as we shall see, one could make a good case for Ent's book being very much in scope. For Ent may have been a physician, but he was also a mechanical philosopher, one of the first in England, and he justified blood circulation in accord with that philosophy. In Galen's ancient physiology, things move in the body because they are attracted to certain places or tissues, or are trying to avoid a vacuum, or they have “faculties” that dispose them to certain actions. Ent found such arguments unacceptable as explanations. In his version of Harvey's system, blood was pushed through the arteries and back through the veins by the heart, a mechanical pump, while air was brought into the lungs, and thence to the heart, mechanically. Interestingly, Harvey himself was not at all a mechanical philosopher. I do not know what Harvey thought of Ent’s book, although I am sure that, battered as he had been by critics, he would have welcomed support of any kind.
I do not know what impact Ent's book had – I have not seen a discussion of the matter, although one can note that the book went through several editions, so someone was buying it. Ent as an anatomist and instructor was quite popular; he gave lectures at the Royal College of Physicians, some of which King Charles II attended after the Restoration, and was so impressed that he knighted Ent on the spot (well, in a nearby spot, the chapel of the College).
Ent's other great service to Harvey was to convince him to publish his book on the generation of animals, which he had written and rewritten some years earlier. Harvey gave him the final draft in late 1648, and Ent wrote a prologue and saw the manuscript through the press in 1651, when it was published as De generatione animalium. We do not have this book either, an acquisition that we could more easily justify, if a copy came along for sale.
Ent is little-known today; I am not aware of a single essay or article devoted to his work. He does make an appearance in biographies of Harvey (of which there are dozens) or in studies of 17th-century physiology. The best discussion I know of Ent is in Roger French's book, William Harvey’s Natural Philosophy (1994), where Ent’s mechanical philosophy and its compatibility with Harvey’s circulation theory merit a ten-page discussion.
Ent was one of the founding fellows of the Royal Society of London (although he never published in their Philosophical Transactions, to my knowledge) and a high officer numerous times in the Royal College of Physicians. He died on Oct. 13, 1689, at the age of 84 years. If there is a statue or commemorative plaque in his honor anywhere, I have not run across it.
William B. Ashworth, Jr., Consultant for the History of Science, Linda Hall Library and Associate Professor emeritus, Department of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Comments or corrections are welcome; please direct to ashworthw@umkc.edu.
