English physician William Harvey continued the tradition of Andreas Vesalius – the 16th century father of modern anatomy – by analyzing and describing the working of the body’s circulatory system in 1628.
The empirical movement had galvanized physiology and this was given further impetus by the gradual improvement of the compound microscope that was first built in the late 16th century and improved by various parties in the early 17th century. In 1665 the Englishman Robert Hooke identified the cell and ten years later the Dutchman Antonie van Leeuwenhoek observed the first microorganism.
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek source: sapaviva.com
There
were other positive progressions as well. Francesco Redi dealt a serious blow
against the Doctrine of Spontaneous Generation in 1669 while Jan Swammerdam (in
1668) was able to describe epigenesis in insects (the development of the adult
insect from an egg via cell
differentiation). At around the same time Nicholas Steno established the
science of stratigraphy by making the case that fossils were the remnants of
organic material embedded in sentiment.
Carl Linnaeus source: newscientist
A
significant development in biology occurred in 1735 when the Swede Carl
Linnaeus devised a system for Taxonomic classification. This would serve as
a foundation for efforts to catalogue
the web of life in the future. Following
on from his work Georges Cuvier (1796) would then advance the notion of extinction as
a fact of life. This as well as the Principles of Uniformitarianism, Deep
Time (Old earth) and Plutonic Geology set forth by the Scot James Hutton in
1785, would later underpin Charles Darwin’s thinking around evolution by natural selection.
In 1796 the Science of Immunology was born when another English doctor Edward Jenner demonstrated the
efficacy of the cowpox vaccine as a tool against smallpox. Also of note in the annals of 18th
century medicine was the first use of digitalis (taken from the foxglove plant)
by William Withering in the treatment of Edema. It is used today to treat heart rhythm problem.
Edward Jenner source: theguardian.com
Advances in Chemistry were also expedited during the Age of Reason and the later Enlightenment. In
1615 Jean Beguin became a pioneer in using chemical equations and the science continued to move ahead with the work of Jan Baptist van Helmont who wrote a foundational
text in 1648 and established the field of pneumatic chemistry.
In 1766 the Englishman Henry Cavendish
discovered Hydrogen and six years later oxygen was likely identified by Swedish chemist Carl Wilhem
Scheele although most give credit to Joseph Priestley (he published before
Scheele). Priestley did make the case that the air we breathe consists of a
variety of gases. Oxygen in Priestley’s view was a highly reactive gas that he
called ‘dephologisticated air’.
Joseph Priestly source: sciencehistory.org
He was
also responsible for developing the method to carbonate liquids that has
influenced both the sodas and champagne industries of today. Carbon dioxide
used in carbonation was discovered much earlier by Joseph Black in 1754 who
described it as ‘fixed air’
The
Father of Chemistry though is Frenchman Antoine Lavoisier who linked oxygen as the key
gas involved in combustion. This ended the Phlogiston Theory that made the case
that a fire-like element known as Phlogiston was responsible for combustion,.
Antoine Lavoisier is credited with developing a central tenet of chemistry –
The Law of Conservation of Mass.
Antoine Lavoisier source:newscientist
18th century chemistry though was very much concerned with chemical identification and in this regard a debt of gratitude goes to Scheele who identified molybdenum. tungsten, chlorine, barium and manganese.The Scot Daniel Rutherford is worth mentioning as he isolated nitrogen in 1772.
However
other avenues were growing in parallel. In 1800 Italian Alessandro Volta
discovered the electrochemical series and went one step further by building the
first chemical battery.
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