Background
Francis Glisson was born on October 14, 1597, in Bristol, United Kingdom.
United Kingdom
Francis Glisson
Gonville & Caius College, Trinity St, Cambridge CB2 1TA, United Kingdom
Francis was at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge.
anatomist educator physiologist scientist
Francis Glisson was born on October 14, 1597, in Bristol, United Kingdom.
Francis was educated in Rampisham, Dorset, and at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge. He received a Bachelor of Arts in 1620 and a Master of Arts in 1621. In 1634 he also completed his medical studies with the Doctor of Medicine degree.
Glisson’s academic career remained connected with Cambridge. He was appointed Greek lecturer in 1625. In 1636 he was appointed regius professor of physic, a position he held until his death.
With the possible exception of practice in Colchester during the Civil War, London remained the seat of his professional and scientific life. The College of Physicians made him a fellow in 1635, councilor from 1666 on, and president in 1667, 1668, and 1669. One of the scientific pillars of the College, he was also made a reader in anatomy and appointed to give the Gulstonian lecture in 1640.
Around 1645 a group of the fellows of the College began to exchange notes on rickets, thought to have but recently spread in England, and Glisson, G. Bate, and A. Regemorter were assigned to publish a book on the subject. The investigation of the essential nature of the disease fell to Glisson, who impressed his co-workers so much that they entrusted him with drafting the whole book, into which their own observations and possibly those of authors like Daniel Whistler were incorporated. De rachitide appeared in 1650 with Glisson as the author, Bate, and Regemorter as his associates, and with five additional contributors. It is hence hard to tell how much of the classic anatomical and clinical descriptions of the disease belongs to Glisson alone. He claimed originality specifically for chapters 3-14.
In De rachitide, as well as his other publications, Glisson incorporated empirical findings into a scholastic framework of reasoning, trying to lay a broad basis for argumentation while discussing any problem encountered on the way. Thus this work dwells on such subjects as regulation of the circulation of the blood, mechanisms of nervous function, and the nature of hereditary disease. An English translation of the book appeared in 1651, testifying to the interest it aroused.
Glisson’s second work, the Anatomia hepatis, rested largely on observations made in 1640 when he had lectured on the fine structure of the liver.
Glisson maintained that the first draft of the Tractatus de ventriculo et intestinis was written around 1662 but was set aside in favor of the Tractatus de natura substantiae energetica, published in 1672. The work attempts to prove there is life in all bodies. This philosophical work, even more than Glisson’s medical books, has a strictly scholastic form of argumentation.
Glisson denied the continuity of the branches of the portal vein into those of the hepatic veins. He contended that the branches cross, and that the blood carried in the portal vein was separated in the liver. Its bilious fraction was sucked up by the biliary vessels, because of an attraction which Glisson variously called similar, magnetic, or natural, and which did not differ essentially from Galen’s “attractive faculty.” The remaining blood was attracted by the hepatic veins. The ramifications of the portal vein, together with the bile ducts, were encased in fibrous tissue, which Glisson called capsula communis, now known as “Glisson’s capsule.”
Stimulated by ideas of his friend George Ent, Glisson elaborated a theory that the nerves carried a nutritive juice (succus nutritious) secreted by the brain between cortex and medulla from particles of the arterial blood. The psychic spirits were the “fixed spirits” of this juice, which serves nutrition rather than the function of body fibers. As a chemical substance, the psychic spirits could not flow fast enough to assure simultaneity of events in the brain and the peripheral parts. Nerve action was transmitted by a vibration of the nerves (caused by localized contraction of the brain), and the muscle fibers then contracted because of irritability, a property which they shared with all fibers of the body.
In March of 1660, Glisson became an early member of the Royal Society.
Glisson was married to Maria, daughter of Thomas Morgan.