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Sanctorius, whose name is celebrated in physics for the invention of the thermometer, held it as a principle that a healthy man gained two pounds' weight at the beginning of every lunar month, which he lost toward its completion. This opinion appears to have been founded on experiments made upon himself, and affords another instance of a fortuitous coincidence hastily generalized.
He was soon lost to medicine, but in 1625, Santorini, known to science as Sanctorius, published a curious book, called "Commentaries on Avicenna," in which he figured a variety of similar instruments, called "pulsilograms." We owe to him some of the first accurate studies of diet, and also the discovery of the insensible perspiration, but his pulsilogram was soon forgotten.
Great attention has been given to this subject. Sanctorius, a celebrated medical writer, weighed himself, his food, and his excretions, daily, for thirty days. He inferred from his experiments that five pounds of every eight, of both food and drink, taken into the system, pass out through the skin.
There comes a time for every book in a library when it is wanted by somebody. It is but a few weeks since one of the most celebrated physicians in the country wrote to me from a great centre of medical education to know if I had the works of Sanctorius, which he had tried in vain to find.
It is said, no man can write but one book; and if a man have a defect, it is apt to leave its impression on all his performances. If she create a policeman like Fouché, he is made up of suspicions and of plots to circumvent them. "The air," said Fouché, "is full of poniards." The physician Sanctorius spent his life in a pair of scales, weighing his food.
Sanctorius worked with a pulsilogue devised for him by Galileo, with which he made observations on the pulse. He is said to have been the first to put in use the clinical thermometer. His experiments on insensible perspiration mark him as one of the first modern physiologists. Dannemann: Die Naturwissenschaften in ihrer Entwickelung..., Vol. II, p. 7, Leipzig, 1911.
These schools of medicine lasted until the end of the seventeenth century, when they were finally overthrown by Sydenham. Sanctorius discovered the fact that an "insensible perspiration" is being given off by the body continually, and was amazed to find that loss of weight in this way far exceeded the loss of weight by all other excretions of the body combined.
I at length studied my self into a Complication of Distempers; but accidentally taking into my Hand that Ingenious Discourse written by Sanctorius, I was resolved to direct my self by a Scheme of Rules, which I had collected from his Observations.
It has a sort of valetudinarian longevity; it lives in the balance of Sanctorius; it takes no exercise; it exposes itself to no accident; it is seized with an hypochondriac alarm at every new sensation; it trembles at every breath; it lets blood for every inflammation: and thus, without ever enjoying a day of health or pleasure, drags on its existence to a doting and debilitated old age.
The study of the temperature of the body was, as I have said, a mere matter of the touch until our same Galileo applied a thermometer to learn more accurately its changes. Sanctorius again followed in his steps, and has left us in his works curious drawings of forms of thermometer applicable to medical uses.
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