Colombo, Realdo

(b. Cremona, Italy, ca. 1510; d. Rome, Italy, 15590, anatomy, physiology.

Relatively little is known of Colombo’s life; he is frequently given the first name Matteo, but this seems to be an error. He was the son of Antonio Colombo, an apothercary, and received his undergraduate education at Milan. For a short time he seems to have pursued his father’s trade but then to have become an apprentice to Giovanni Antonio Lonigo, a leading Venetian surgeon, with whom he remained for seven years. By 1538 he had gone on to study at the University of Padua, whose archives for that year refer to him as “an outstanding student of sugery.” While still a medical student he occupied a chair of sophitics at Padua for the academic year 1540/1541. He probaly received his degree in 1541, and by 1542 he had returned to Venice to assist Lonigo.

Late in 1542 Andreas Vesalius, the professor of surgery and anatomy at Padua, went to Switzerland to oversee the printing of his Fabrica (1543); and when he did not return in time for the annual anantomical demonstrations early in 1543, Colombo was appointed as his temporary replacement. Vesalius subsequently relinquished his chair at Padua, and it was given to Colombo on a regualr basis in 1544. At the invitation of Cosimo I de’ Medici, Colombo left Padua in 1545 to teach anatomy at Pisa. In 1548 he made an extended visit to Rome, where he engaged in anatomical studies with Michelangelo. Their intention was to publish an illustrated anatomy that would rival the Fabrica, but the artist’s advanced age prevented them from fulfilling this plan. Colombo returned to Pisa for a time; but later in 1548 he settled permanently in Rome, where he taught at the Sapienza. He gained favor at the papal court and performed autopsies on a number of leading ecclesiastics, including Cardinal Cibo and Ignatius of Loyola. He remained in Rome for the rest of his life.

Colombo is commonly said to have been a disciple of Vesalius; but in fact the details of his training in anatomy and his early relationship with Vesalius are unclear, largely because both men commented on this subject only after they had become bitter enemies. Renewed interest in human dissection at Venice and Padua preceded Vesalius’ arrival, and Colombo’s involvement in anatomy probably stemmed from this movement. He himself regarded Lonigo as his most important teacher, apparently in anatomy as well as in surgery, and Lonigo’s conducting a month-long course of human dissections at Padua in 1536 would seem to lend some credence to this view. During the same period an anatomical revival took place at Paris along more strongly Galenic lines. In the autumn of 1537 Vesalius, a student of the Parisian anatomists, came to Padua to complete his medical education, bringing with him a deep knowledge of Galen’s anatomical teachings and a flair for demonstrating them by dissections and drawings. After only a few months he received his degree and was immediately appointed professor of surgery, and in that capacity he began giving his own anatomical demonstrations.

Over the next few years Colombo attended Vesalius’ course of dissections several times, but he seems also to have carried on private dissections of his own. In a part of the Fabrica probably written in 1541, Vesalius refers to some observations that had been made “by my very good friend Realdo Colombo, now professor of sophistics at Padua and most studious of anatomy.” To judge from this statement, the relationship between the two men was that of friends and colleagues (Colombo was probably the older of the two) rather than that of master and disciple. Colombo undoubtedly undoubtdly learned a great deal from Vesalius; but it is probably not true that he owed all that he knew to him, as Vesalius later claimed. Nor can we assume that the influence was entirely one-sided, since the most important developments in Vesaliu’s thought took place some time after he came to Padua.

Later in 1541 Colombo made an unsuccessful bid to obtain one of the two chairs of surgery held by Vesalius; this may have marked the begining of friction between the two men, although the main falling out occurred in 1543. In his public demonstrations of that year Colombo pointed out some errors in Vesalius’ teaching, most notably his attribution of certain features of the cow’s eye to that of the human. Late in 1543 Vesalius visited Padua, and on learning of these criticisms he became quite incensed. He publicly ridiculed Colombo; and in his China Root Letter (1546) he denounced him as an ignoramus and a scoundrel, asserting that he himself had taught Colombo what little he knew of anatomy. This and a similar statement in Vesalius’ Examen (1564) have led to the belief that Colombo was a “disciple” of Vesalius or had even been his assistant, but this view seems inconsistent with Vesalius’ specific emphasis on the meagerness of Colombo’s formal training in anatomy.

Thus Colombo was the first anatomist to criticize Vesalius, not for his rejection of Galen’s authority but for his own anatomical errors. In his public lectures at Padua, Pisa, and Rome, Colombo presented numerous additional corrections and discoveries. As mentioned, the aim of his work with Michelangelo was to produce a new, more correct anatomy text that would supersede the Fabrica In 1556 Colombo’s friend and former student Juan de Valverde published a Spanish anatomy text. Historia de la composicion del cuerpo humano, which was avowedly based on the fabrica but also incorporated many of Colombo’s corrections and new discoveries. In 1559 Colombo published his own unillustrated text, De re anatomica, consisting of fifteen books. Of these he seems to have written the first four during the early 1550’s as a separate treatise on bones, cartilages, and ligaments. The next nine books, dealing with the remaining parts of the body, seem to have been added rather hastily in 1558, perhaps because Colombo anticipated his impending death. The last two books are devoted to vivisection and pathological observations, respectively. Colombo evidently died just as the book was being published, since in most copies his two sons replaced his dedicatory letter with one of their own mentioning his recent demise.

Colombo seems to have eschewed the deep Galenic learning shared by other leading contemporary anatomists, but to judge from the De re anatomica he more than compensated for this by his rich experience in dissection, vivisection, autopsy, and the practice of surgery. Quite naturally the Fabrica provided the main framework for his studies, and he made numerous improvements in Vesalius’ descriptions besides reporting a number of new discoveries of his own. The many pathological and anomalous observations he described likewise reflect his wide expderience and attention to detail. he also had a strong interest in physiology and seems to have been unsurpassed among his contemporaries in his skill at vivisection. colombo was not at all inclined to undersetimate his own achievemesnts and was sometimes careless in what he wrote. Nevertheless, he succeeded in giving a good account of human anatomy that was both brief and clear; these qualities probably explain the condiderable popularity of the De re anatomica during the later sixteenth century.

One man who was not pleased by the book, however, was Gabriele Falloppio, professor of anatomy at Padua, who found that Colombo’s new observations overlapped with his own on a number of points. In 1561 he published his Observationes anatomicae, at least in part to regain priority for himself. Falloppio said that he had written his own work four years prior to its publication, but this is belied by its numerous thinly veiled references to the De re anatomica. Falloppio insinuated that Colombo had plagiarized discoveries made by himself and other anatomists, including the levator palpebrae superioris muscle, which Falloppio claimed for himself, and the stapes, which he claimed for Ingrassia. In 1574 Falloppio’s student and friend G. B. Carcano explicitly charged Colombo with plagiarism; however, it is difficult to judge the validity of the charge because independent discovery is especially common in anatomy, and Colombo certainly had the capacity to make these discoveries on his own. The net result of Colombo’s unfavorable relations with Falloppio and Vesalius, as well as his lack of classical learning, was that he was held in low esteem by the Italian anatomists of the later sixteenth century, although his work was quite well thought of outside of Italy, especially in Germany.

Colombo is best known for his discovery of the pulmonary circuit, that is, the passage of blood from the righst cardiac ventricle to the left through the lungs. This idea was presented by Valverde in his Historia as well as by Colombo in the De re anatomica. Not until the late seventeenth century was it found that Michael Servetus had described the pulmonary circuit in his Christianismi restitutio a theological work printed in 1553 but almost totally destroyed by the censors prior to publication. In the early twentieth century A. D. Tatawi discovered that both men had been anticipated by Ibn al-Nafis, an Araqb of the thirteenth century. The resulting priority controversies have generated a voluminous literature, but it has yet to be shown that Ibn al-Nafis’ account was available in Europe during the Renaissance or that Colombo had knowledge of Servetus’ work. Moreover, there is good evidence in the accounts of Colombo and Valverde that Colombo actually made the discovery on his own through vivisectional observations Colombo’s more general understanding of the operations of the heart, lungs, and arteries was superior to that of the other two men.

In the Galenic physiology of the sixteenth century, the right cardiac ventricle was thought to receive blood from the vena cava and to send it into the pulmonary artery to nourish the lungs. The left ventricle was supposed to ventilate the innate heat of the heart by breathing in and out through the pulmonary vein. In addition, the left ventricle was thought to receive blood from the right ventricle through minute pores in the intervening septum. From this blood and from some of the air received from the lungs, the left ventricle generated vital spirits and arterial blood, which it distributed to the entire body through the arteries to preserve life.

In his treatise On the Uses of the Parts of the Body of man Galen had described anastomoses between the pulmonary artery and vein, and the passage of blood from the former to the latter, although he apparently did not conceive of this as part of a pathway from the right cardiac ventricle to the left. Vesalius, however, questioned Galen’s teaching that blood can pass directly from the right ventricle to the left through minute pores in the cardiac septum, and some historians have suggested that Vesalius’ doubts olus Galen’s description of the pulmonary anastomoses formed the main bases for the idea that blood passes from the right ventricle to the left through the lungs. This may have been true for Servetus, but it does not seem to have been so for Colombo. There is some evidence that Colombo, unlike Servetus, was not directly familiar with the relevant passages in the Uses of Parts. Moreover, Colombo did not posit direct connections between the two pulmonary vessles (as he might have done had he been influenced by Galen’s statements) but thought that blood oozes through the flesh of the lungs in passing from one vessel to the other. Finally, it appears that a desire to find an alternative to the Galenic septal pores did not provide the original motivation for Colombo’s investigations. Instead, he seems to have been troubled by the serious conflict between the commonly held view that the left ventricle inhaled and exhales vessel contains blood. He found that in live animals the pulmonary vein is completely filled with blood, which seemed to disprove the idea that the left ventricle breathes through it. He probably went on to try to determine the source of this blood and concluded that it comes from the lungs, and ultimately from the right ventricle, through the pulmonary artery.

Colombo realized that his discovery had eliminated the need for the Galenic septal pores, but it was also clear to him that the pulmonary circuit is an important phenomenon in its own right. He particularly emphasized that it is in the lungs, rather than in the heart, that the venous blood is mixed with air and converted to arterial blood. The arterial blood was thought to preserve the life of all parts of the body, and the unique ability to generate this important substance had been one of the traditional attributes of the heart. By transferring this power to the lungs Colombo was quite consciously diminishing the status of the heart, whose main task was now to distribute the arterial blood rather than to generate it.

Through his studies in vivisection Colombo also made considerable progress in understanding the heartbeat. His predecessor had generally thought that the heart functions like a bellows whose main action is a strenuous dilation, by which it draws materials into its two ventricles; contraction was considered a less vigorous expulsion. With few exceptions what they took to be cardiac dilation is actually contraction, and vice versa. Thus, they thought that the heart and arteries dilate and contract at the same time and that, like the heart, the arteries pulsate actively. Colombo’s observations convinced him that the traditional designation of the phases of the heartbeat should be reversed and that contraction, by which the heart expels materials, is more strenuous than dilation, by which it receives them. Thus the arteries dilate when the heart contracts; and Colombo may even have thought that the arterial pulse is actually caused by the impulsion of materials from the heart, although he was not entirely clear on this point.

Colombo maintained the traditional view that nutritive blood flows outward from the liver through the venous system, but otherwise his work represents a significant advance in understanding the operations of the heart, lungs, and arteries. The idea of the pulmonary circuit was moderately well received prior to the publication of Harvey’s De motu cordis (1628). Over twenty favorable reactions to the discovery of the pulmonary circuit were published during this period, although it was also opposed by some important authorities. Less attention was paid to Colombo’s observations on the hearbeat; but it appears that they formed the actual starting point for Harvey’s vivisectional studies on the heart, which eventually led to th discovery of the circulation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works, De re anatomica (Venice, 1559) was Colombo’s only publication, Quite a few reprintings appeared during the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. That of 1593 (Frankfurt) included a commentary by Joannes Posthius. Anatomia (Frankfurt, 1609) was a German translation by Johann Schenck.

II. Secondary Literatur. The most complete summary of what is known of Colimbo’s life is given in E. D. Coppola, “The Discovery of the Pulmonary Circulation: An New Approach,” in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 21 (1957),

44–77, esp. 48–59; his article is a condensed ersion of his unpublished M.D, Thesis, “Realdo Colombo of Cremona (1515?–1559) and the Pulmonary Circulation” (Yale School of Medicine, 1955), which contains additional informaion and an extensive bibliography. See also G. J. Fisher, “Realdo Colombo,” in Annals of the Anatomical and Surgical Society of Brooklyn, 2 (1880), 279–284; and H. Tollin, “Matteo Realdo Colombo,” in Pflüger’s Archiv für die gesamte physiologie des Menschen and der Tiere, 22 (1880), 262–290. For new information about Colombo’s studies at Padua, see F. Lucchetta, II medico e filosofo Bellunese Andrea Alpago (Padua, 1964), pp. 60–62. For a general analysis of Colombo’s anatomical work, see M. Portal, Histoire de l’anaomie et de la chirurgie, II (Paris, 1770), 540–559; on his pathological and anomalous observations, R. J. Moes and C. D. O’Malley, “Realdo Colombo: “On Those Things Rarely Found in Anatomy,’ an Annotated Translation from the De re anatomic (1559),” in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 34 (1960), 508–528. For a survey of literature on the priority controversy over the pulmonary circuit, see J. Schacht, “Ibn al’Nafis, servetus and Colombo,” in Al-Andalus, 22 (1957), 317–336. For a judicious argument in support of Colombo’s independence in this discovery, consult L. G. Wilson, “The Problem of the Discovery of the Pulmonary Circulations,” in Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 17 (1962), 229–244. Walter Pagel, William Harvy’s Biological Ideas (Basel-New york, 1964), pp. 154–156, 163–169, 216–218, discusses Colombo’s observationson the heartbeat in addition to his work on th pulmonary circulation. The present analysis of Colombo’s work is based largely on my unpublished doctoral dissertation, “Cardiovascular Physiology in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries” (Yale graduate school, 1969) esp. chs. 3, 6, and 7.

Jerome J. Bylebyl