An Anatomical Exercise

Excerpts from De motu cordis by William Harvey

letterpress from metal type and polymer plates | 2″ x 10″ x 3/16″ (closed), 16″ x 10″ (open) | edition of 50 | 2018

An Anatomical Exercise

Connections between words within a phrase are usually represented in linguistics as abstract branching diagrams. In the physical world, there are numerous natural systems that have branching forms, one of which I used as the model for this project. In 1628, William Harvey published a landmark text concerning the circulation of blood in the body, Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus, usually called simply De motu cordis. Excerpts from this text are diagrammed here in forms suggestive both of blood vessels and of the syntax underlying the words that Harvey used to describe them:

In the body all the parts are nourished, cherished, and quickned [sic] with blood, which is warm, perfect, vaporous, full of spirit, and that I may so say, alimentative. / It doth go round, is returned, thrust forward, and comes back from the heart into the extremities, and from thence into the heart again, and so makes as it were a circular motion.