In the Seventeenth century medicine, botany does not restrict to the uses of simples and the fabrication of therapeutics, but also to the analogy between plants and animals. The study of plants work in the explanation of some specific living conditions, operations, and organs. In this paper, I especially focus on three different cases that reveal a common goal: Jean Riolan, William Harvey, and Marcello Malpighi.
In Les Œuvres anatomiques, Riolan repeats Galen’s claim that the foetus lives in the same way of plants at the beginning of generation, i.e., when neither arteries, veins, pulse, brain, nor the heart are formed. Riolan demonstrates his position on the ground of anatomical studies on the formation of the veins and arteries, but also works on plants in order to describe generation and details about the different stages of life. In Exercitationes de generationem animalium, Harvey deals with the seeds of plants to exemplify several issues of his study of eggs. He also stresses that the early stage of the life of foetus corresponds to the life of a plant, therefore equating plastic virtue to the formative faculty. In Dissertatio epistolica De Formatione Pulli in ovo, Malpighi stresses a similarity between animal eggs and the seeds of plants, whose study he considers a means to enter the secrets of living bodies. He especially focuses on the movement of sap and on the movement of blood, and he compares the hydraulic mechanism of filtration of specific organs to the structure of plants.
