1661
Malpighi's capillaries
In 1661 Marcello Malpighi, professor of medicine at Bologna, looked at the lung of a frog through a microscope. He saw that it was made of tiny air sacs at the ends of the airways. In their walls he saw blood running through fine tubes from the arteries into the veins.
Marcello Malpighi, oil portrait by Carlo Cignani, 17th centuryWikimedia Commons, Carlo Cignani, Public domain (Marcello Malpighi by Carlo Cignani.jpg)
These were the capillaries, the vessels Harvey could not see. Malpighi sent his findings as two letters to his friend Giovanni Borelli in Pisa, printed the same year as De pulmonibus. With the capillaries found, the route of the blood was complete. It runs from the heart through the arteries, capillaries and veins, and back to the heart.
Sources
- Marcello Malpighi, De pulmonibus observationes anatomicae (Bologna, 1661).
- James Young, Malpighi's De pulmonibus, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 23 (1929): 1-11.
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