'A Man of Spirit' – The Language of Vital Function in Galen's Time

1914

ANIMAL SPIRITS.

Our Vital Functions as They Were Known In Galen's Time.

"Few persons even stop to consider when they speak of 'a man of spirit' that they are unwittingly employing the language of the days of Galen," says the Journal of the American Medical Association. "Yet this is evidently the survival of the old doctrine of spirits. We may believe that Galen had a conception of the nerve trunks as conductors of something — he called it spirits — to and from the brain and spinal cord.

"The natural spirits were that undefined property which gave to blood the capacity of nourishing the tissues of the body. The vital spirits were acquired in the heart, and when at last the blood with its vital spirits went to the brain and experienced a sort of refinement for the last time the animal spirits were separated from it and carried to the body by the nerve trunks."

Such was the idea of the vital functions in the second century. Today, after 1,800 years, we know that there are no "spirits" in our blood or nerves, but we still speak of being in "high spirits" or "low spirits," of being full of "animal spirits," of a "spirited answer" or a "spirited horse."