Parks Rd, Oxford OX1 3PN, United Kingdom
Mayow matriculated at Wadham College, Oxford, on 2 July 1658 and was received as a commoner and admitted scholar on 23 September 1659.
Oxford OX1 4AL, United Kingdom
On 3 November 1660, Mayow was elected to a fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. He graduated Bachelor of Common Law on 5 July 1670 and obtained the further privilege of studying medicine.
Parks Rd, Oxford OX1 3PN, United Kingdom
Mayow matriculated at Wadham College, Oxford, on 2 July 1658 and was received as a commoner and admitted scholar on 23 September 1659.
Oxford OX1 4AL, United Kingdom
On 3 November 1660, Mayow was elected to a fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. He graduated Bachelor of Common Law on 5 July 1670 and obtained the further privilege of studying medicine.
John Mayow was a Fellow of the Royal Society.
https://www.amazon.com/Medico-Physical-Workd-John-Mayow/dp/B00HXSAM0U/?tag=2022091-20
1674
chemist physician physiologist scientist
John Mayow was born on May 24, 1640, in Looe, Cornwall, Kingdom of England. He was the second son of Phillip Mayowe, a member of the well-established, substantial, and multibranched Mayow family of Cornwall. His grandfather Philip acquired the manor of Bray in 1564; he was one of the nine charter burgesses of East Looe when the town received its charter of incorporation from Queen Elizabeth in 1587.
Mayow matriculated at Wadham College, Oxford, on 2 July 1658 and was received as a commoner and admitted scholar on 23 September 1659. On 3 November 1660, he was elected to a fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. He graduated Bachelor of Common Law on 5 July 1670 and obtained the further privilege of studying medicine.
After leaving Oxford in 1670 John Mayow entered medical practice, at least during the summer season at Bath. In the 1670’s he seems to have spent considerable time during the fall and winter months in London. Robert Hooke records several meetings with Mayow in his Diary from 1674 through 1677. On Hooke’s recommendation, Mayow was elected fellow of the Royal Society on 30 November 1678.
Mayow is best known for his studies on the interrelated problems of atmospheric composition, aerial nitre, combustion, and respiration. He has occasionally been regarded, usually uncritically, as an unappreciated precursor of Lavoisier. In fact, Mayow’s work was vigorously scrutinized - both in a friendly and in a hostile spirit - in his own time and again in the late eighteenth century after the discovery of oxygen. In the last several decades, the question of his originality and importance has been a subject of scholarly debate.
Mayow’s first publication, a thin volume entitled Tractatus duo, was printed at Oxford in 1668. The two tracts, the first on respiration and the second on rickets, demonstrated his involvement in the scientific and medical issues and literature of his day. In “De respiratione,” Mayow specifically cited the work of his English contemporaries Robert Boyle, Nathaniel Highmore, and Thomas Willis, and of the Italian Marcello Malpighi. He also took note of experiments on the inflation of the lungs “recently performed at the Royal Society” by Robert Hooke and Richard Lower, and textual nuances suggest that he may likewise have been familiar with such recent publications as Swammerdam’s Tractatus de respiratione usuque pulmonum (Leiden, 1667), reviewed in the Philosophical Transactions for October 1667. Mayow’s second essay, “De rachitide,” shows a familiarity with Francis Glisson’s De rachitide, sive morbo puerili (London, 1650), although Mayow departed sharply from Glisson by offering a highly abbreviated account of the symptomatology and therapeutics and a more iatromechanical version of the etiology of rickets.
The real interest and importance of the Tractatus duo lies in the striking originality of Mayow’s juxtaposition of contemporary physiological ideas in “De respiratione.” Thus, after describing with some novelty the mechanics of thoracic dilatation and pulmonary inflation, Mayow argued that respiration serves principally to convey a supply of fine nitrous particles from the air to the blood. This “nitrous air” is necessary to life, for when it is missing from the mass of inspired air, respiration does not produce its usual good effect. The nitrous particles are needed to react with the “sulphureous” parts of the sanguinary stream, and this reaction causes a gentle and necessary fermentation in the pulmonary vessels, the heart, and the arteries. Moreover, the nitrous air is also essential to the beating of the heart. Like other muscles, the heart contracts macroscopically because an “exptosion” occurs microscopically within its fibres. The exptosion, which inflates the muscles, results specifically from the violent interaction of the “nitro-saline” particles of the inspired air with the animal spirits fashioned from the “volatile salt” of the blood.
Mayow was here fusing in a very original way two recent Oxford physiological traditions. First, he adopted the “nitrous pabulum” theory originally advanced by Ralph Bathurst in Oxford lectures of 1654 and later remembered by Robert Hooke and improved in his Micrographia of 1665. Second, Mayow endorsed Willis’ essential ideas about the explosion mechanism for muscular contraction. But whereas Willis had attributed explosive inflation to the violent, gunpowder-like interaction of the ’“spirituoussaline” animal spirits with the “sulphureous” parts of the blood, Mayow contended that the blood and spirits could not possibly react explosively, for if they could they would already have done so before the spirits were distilled from the blood in the cortex of the brain. Mayow was thus able to avoid apparent contradiction and to account for the otherwise perplexing fact that death follows so suddenly upon the cessation of respiration. Failure to inspire fresh supplies of nitrous panicles mixed with the larger bulk of air could now be understood to lead instantaneously to the stopping of heartbeat, and stoppage of heartbeat immediately curtails the distribution of animal spirits throughout the body. Since Mayow asserted, the life of animals consists in the distribution of animal spirits, death quickly follows upon the cessation of respiration.
Thus, in 1668, Mayow wrote as a product of and a participant in the Oxford physiology to which he was thoroughly exposed as a student and fellow. His ideas were interesting, although his contemporaries considered them fundamentally unexceptional; they were well-reviewed and apparently well received. The Tractatus duo was accorded the lead review in the November 1668 number of the Philosophical Transactions where Mayow’s theories were clearly summarized in considerable detail with no suggestion of skepticism or hostility.
Between 1668 and 1674, perhaps encouraged by the initial reception of his views on respiration, Mayow attempted a clarification, expansion, and refining of his ideas, both on physiology and on chemistry. He may well have been influenced by the publication of several closely related books and essays: Richard Lower, Tractatus de corde (1669); Malachi Thruston, De respirationis usus primario (1670); Thomas Willis, De sanguinis accensione (1670) and De motu musculari (1670); and Robert Boyle, Tracts … Containing New Experiments, Touching the Relation Betwixt Flame and Air (1672) and Tracts … About Some Hidden Qualities of the Air (1674). Meanwhile, Hooke continued to report to the Royal Society about experiments on combustion, respiration, and the action of the air and of nitrous compounds. In 1674 Mayow referred directly to several of these efforts, and allusions suggest a familiarity with the rest. In any case, by 1674 Mayow, aware of contemporary developments, had expanded his Tractatus duo into Tractatus quinque by the addition of three new essays: “De sal-nitro et spiritu nitro-aereo”; “De respiratione foetus in utero et ova” and “De motu muscular et spiritibus animalibus.”
In the first essay, by far the longest and most important, Mayow offered a chemical history of nitre and nitro-aerial spirit. His primary intention seems to have been to distinguish between these two distinct substances, which the vague vocabulary of his contemporaries (and his own) had previously confused. Nitre (saltpeter) is a triply complex salt. It consists of spirit of nitre (nitric acid) combined with a fixed salt of the earth; spirit of nitre is in turn derived from the “ethereal and igneous” nitro-aerial spirit of atmospheric air (oxygen?) in combination with the “Salinometallic parts” of common “Terrestrial sulphur,” It is the nitro-aerial spirit, harbored in turn in the spirit of nitre and in common nitre, that is the active and “igneous” substance in nitrous compounds, It is the chemical agent responsible for sustaining combustion and producing fermentation. Flame consists essentially in nitro-aerial spirit thrown to brisk motion by interacting with sulphureous particles, whereas fermentation is the general effervescence of nitro-aerial particles reacting with salino-sulphureous ones. Moreover, the caustic qualities of acids derive from the active and igneous nitro-aerial particles within them.
Having clarified the respective roles and chemical relations of the several nitrous substances, Mayow next explores a wide range of problems to which he makes the nitro-aerial spirit relevant. His exploration ranges from meteorological fantasies about thunder and lightning quite happily and deliberately modeled on Descartes’s Principia philosophiae, through speculations on the role of nitro-aerial spirit in transmitting the pulse of light, to - most significantly ingenious experimental investigations of the role of nitro-aerial spirit in combustion and respiration, In pursuit of this latter problem, Mayow dexterously employed a variety of experimental techniques that represented subtle though important improvements on contemporary practice, notably that of Boyle. For example, Mayow was able to transfer gases collected over water more neatly than did Boyle, who had to use two air pumps for this operation.2 Mayow also experimented with animals and candles breathing or burning over water, using cupping glasses, water troughs, and bell jars. He always carefully adjusted water levels with a special siphon arrangement, and with this apparatus he was able to observe the breathing of an animal in a ctosed space. He was thus able to test his earlier assertion that there are nitrous particles diffused in a larger bulk of otherwise useless air, an assertion that Hooke had repeated, unverified, to the Royal Society early in the 1670s. Mayow now observed the gradual rise of water into the space occupied by the breathing animal. The rise of water continued until there was a diminution of one-fourteenth of the original volume of air. Mayow explained this diminution as the result of the passing of nitro-aerial particles, which normally account for the elasticity of atmospheric air, from the air through the lungs and into the blood. There, finally, the nitro-aerial particles fermentatively interact with sulfurous particles, producing animal heat in the process and changing the blood from dark purple to light scarlet.
Mayow contended that embryos require nitroaerial particles as surely as do respiring animals. The umbilical arteries convey the appropriate particles either from the maternal bloodstream or from the albuminous humor of the egg, whence they are temporarily collected from the nitro-aerial particles supplied by the heat of the incubating fowl. Mayow somewhat revised his 1668 views on muscular contraction. Aware of Steno’s recently published findings on the action of muscles, Mayow contended that muscles contract by “contortion” rather than by inflation. The active agent, however, is still nitro-aerial particles, which were now said to be the very substance of animal spirits; and these spirits produce the necessary effervescence when they come in contact with the salino-sulfurous particles of the blood in the muscular fibrils.
John Mayow was a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Quotes from others about the person
"Some learned and knowing men speak very slightly of the quinque Tractatus of John Mayow and a particular friend of yours and mine told me yesterday, that as far as he had read him, he would shew to any impartial and considering man more errors than one in every page." - Henry Oldenburg, a friend of Boyle and secretary of the Royal Society in a letter to Boyle of July 1674
John Mayow married in 1679. The marriage was not altogether to his content.
