Scientist of the Day - Richard Lower
Portrait of Richard Lower, oil on canvas, by Jacob Huysmans, undated, Wellcome collection (wellcomecollection.org)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Richard Lower, a British physician and physiologist, was born Jan. 29, probably in 1631, in Cornwall. Lower was the second-most famous medical man in 17th-century England, after William Harvey. Both men built their reputations on the study of the heart and blood, Harvey discovering blood circulation, and Lower doing the first blood transfusion experiments, and discovering the role of the lungs in infusing arterial blood with air.
Lower attended Christ Church, Oxford, and worked there until 1666. He served as an assistant to Thomas Willis, who studied cardiac function, and Lower first got the idea of transfusing blood from one dog to another in the early 1660s, communicating his thoughts to Robert Boyle in London. Lower appears to have done some simple transfusion experiments using hollow quills as vessels, and made his first successful blood transfusion from one dog to another in the winter of 1665. When Willis moved to London in 1666, Lower followed, and he was quickly introduced to the members of the new Royal Society of London by Boyle.
The silver tubes used for transfusion experiments, Tractatus de corde, by Richard Lower, plate 7, 1669, Wellcome Collection (wellcomecollection.org)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Image brightened for clarity
Boyle and Lower were so interested in transfusion experiments because they wondered to what extent disposition lay in the blood, and whether the blood of a timid animal might quiet the passions of a fierce one, or the blood of a healthy dog might cure the ails of a mangy dog. Since Lower was the expert, he took the lead in the Royal Society experiments. He moved from using quills for conveying blood to thin silver tubes, which were inserted into veins and arteries and bound in place with ligatures. The experiments were generally successful, in that the dogs lived, although their dispositions do not seem to have changed as a result.
A Frenchman heard of Lower’s experiments and did the first animal-to-human transfusion in 1667. The Royal Society was more than a little irritated, since the man had adopted Lower’s techniques without acknowledgment, and quickly moved to make their own attempts at animal-to-human transfusion, achieving success (the patient lived) in December of 1667. However, human blood transfusion raised serious theological issues, and the practice was forbidden by Parliament (and in France) in 1669. There would be no more blood transfusions involving humans until the 19th century.
Lower’s other major contribution to physiology was to come closer to understanding why arterial blood looks different from venous blood. The view of investigators like Willis was that the heart served as a kind of fermentation chamber, allowing the venous blood to “cook” and ferment and transform into a redder, more active kind of blood. Lower did many experiments both at Oxford and in London on the relationship between the heart and the lungs, for example, shutting off air intake to the lungs to see what effect that had on the blood, and observing closely the nature of blood in the pulmonary artery and pulmonary vein, and he concluded that the blood did not change color until it had journeyed to lungs that were breathing air. Without air, the blood remained dark. Oxygen was as yet unknown as an entity, but Lower came as close to discovering oxygenation of the blood by the lungs as one could in the 17h century.
Title page, Tractatus de corde, by Richard Lower, 1669, Wellcome Collection (wellcomecollection.org)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Image brightened for clarity
Lower described his experiments on transfusion and blood physiology in a book, Tractatus de corde (1669), which might be second in importance in 17th-century physiology only to Havey’s De motu cordis (1628). We do not have either work in our collections, since they are not really in scope, although a case could certainly be made for either. We show the title page of the Tractatus and one of the plates, illustrating the silver tubes used for transfusion, from the copy in the Wellcome Collection in London. It is often not noted by cataloguers that volume 9 of Robert Gunther’s Early Science in Oxford (1920-45) contains not only a facsimile reprint of the first edition of Lower’s Tractatus de corde, but an English translation as well. We have that set in our Library.
Lower’s career as a physiologist seems to have ended by 1669, when he began to concentrate more and more on his medical practice, becoming one of the most sought-after physicians in London. He died on Jan. 17, 1691.
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.
