Thomas Wharton's Adenographia (review)

In 1656 Thomas Wharton, M.D. (1614–73), published Adenographia in Latin. In 1988, one of Wharton’s eighth-generation descendants, Christopher Wharton, M.D., commissioned Stephen Freer to translate Adenographia into English; Oxford University Press published the translation in 1996 with an introductory essay by Andrew Cunningham on its historical context. A compendium of six lectures given by Wharton at the London College of Physicians in 1652 or 1653, Adenographia was the first European book devoted entirely to the glands. Previously, anatomists had not considered glands important in understanding the functioning of the body. For example, both Galen and Vesalius noted various glands, but they did not consider them as a separate topic and their treatment is cursory. A 1559 text by the Italian anatomist Realdo Columbo, De re anatomica, devoted one of its fifteen “books” to the glands, but the “book” consists of two pages. Wharton’s extended presentation of glands as classes of related natural objects changed this; consequently, for several decades after its initial publication, Adenographia was considered a basic reference on the subject. In addition to discovering the duct of the submandibular (salivary) gland, Wharton named (but did not discover) the thyroid gland.

Wharton’s accomplishment speaks to the role of serendipity in early modern natural philosophy. In the 1640s and 1650s the London College of Physicians, which he joined as a fellow in 1650, self-consciously promoted research in medical natural philosophy, partly for political reasons but also to encourage its members to emulate William Harvey. Harvey’s testamentary exhortation to members to “search and study out the secret of Nature by way of Experiments” (p. xxxii; citation to Geoffrey Keynes, Life of William Harvey [1978], p. 404), redolent of Francis Bacon’s goal for the researchers of his fanciful Solomon’s House, was partly realized in another College program that obliged one of its junior fellows to give a lecture series on anatomy in relation to disease. While the records suggest that delivery of these lectures may have been observed more in the breach than in practice, in 1652 the College president selected Wharton to work up a lecture series on the glands.

Although the sponsor of the lectures, Theodore Gulston, M.D., specified in the early 1630s that their emphasis should be primarily on a particular disease and secondarily on the organs it affected, by the 1640s lecturers concentrated on an organ system rather than a disease. This shift, while subtle, illustrates a new emphasis in European medicine in the mid-seventeenth century on the structure and actions of solid parts of the body in preference to its humors. The international success of Harvey’s work on the heart simultaneously reflected and promoted this new sensibility. For Wharton, the more immediate influence may have come from Francis Glisson, whose 1641 Gulstonian lectures on the liver formed the basis of his 1654 Anatomia hepatis, the first book devoted to the liver.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that Wharton’s characterization of the glands anticipated subsequent portrayals. Wharton, a self-proclaimed Aristotelian, adopted scholastic modes of presentation in Adenographia. Also, for him (as for his mentor Glisson) various kinds of matter had specific qualities and affinities, not just the properties of mass, extension, and motion: different bodily fluids ended up in the right places because of an attraction of like for like. Wharton did not use a microscope and disparaged the virtuosi among whom the microscope was popular. In contrast, contemporary mechanist anatomists, such as Marcello Malpighi, used the microscope to discover fine structures, which they then related to the behavior of particles and substances. By the later seventeenth century, mechanical analyses that emphasized structure/function relationships and denied the possibility of special properties were displacing scholastic accounts, and Adenographia began to lose influence.

In addition to a useful biographical note, Stephen Freer provides an admirably clear translation of Wharton’s straightforward Latin. Andrew Cunningham’s essay of approximately six thousand words provides a fine commentary on Adenographia in the context...