Жак Дюбуа: Француз анатомы және оның дәрістері туралы әңгімелер

French anatomist (1478 – 1555)
the professor of literature

Jacques Dubois (Latinised as Jacobus Sylvius; 1478 – 14 January 1555) was a French anatomist. Dubois was the first to describe venous valves, although their function was later discovered by William Harvey. He was the brother of Franciscus Sylvius Ambianus (François Dubois; c. 1483 – 1536), professor of humanities at the Collège de Tournai, Paris. a small town near Amiens, the seventh in a family of fifteen. His father had been a weaver. At a young age he studied Ancient Greek with Hermonymus of Sparta and Janus Lascaris, The success of his lectures turned out to be so remarkable that the faculty of the University of Paris protested that he had not yet obtained a college degree. For this reason Sylvius went to the University of Montpellier, where he enrolled in November 1529. He received his M. B. in 1529 and his M. D. from Montpellier in 1530. Andreas Vesalius, who was his (frustrated) pupil, states that his manner of teaching was calculated neither to advance the science nor to rectify the mistakes of his predecessors. A human body was never seen in Dubois' anatomical theatre. The carcasses of dogs and other animals were the materials from which he taught. It was so difficult to obtain human bones, that Vesalius and his fellow students had to collect them themselves from the Cimetière des Innocents and other cemeteries. Without these, they must have committed numerous errors in acquiring the first principles. Though Jean Riolan (1577–1657) contradicted these comments and accused Vesalius of ingratitude, it is certain that the frustrations that Vesalius experienced were the basis for which he later traveled to Padua and became a famous anatomist himself. Only in Italy were the opportunities of inspecting the human body frequent enough as to facilitate the study of the science. Charles Estienne also attacked his old teacher and assured that Sylvius was greedy. Some other pupils of Sylvius defended his teaching and work, specially Louis Vasse and Michel de Villeneuve, the latter being considered by Johann Winter von Andernach (colleague and friend of Sylvius) the best galenist of Paris and second anatomist after Vesalius. Louis Vassé denounced the attacks of Vesalius and Estienne, and affirmed they had learnt all they knew by Sylvius' lessons. Vasse explains the nature of Sylvius' influence over his unruly audience this way:

"This depended not so much on his splendid use of the Latin tongue as upon the exceptional clarity of his thought. He was, moreover, never tired of teaching and so taught that none of his students ever tired of learning. He had an astonishing power of enabling them to grasp and see quite clearly that which a moment before had seemed impenetrable and terribly involved." This period was a time of fierce debate between Galenists and the new body of thought on anatomy. The conservative Riolan attacked William Harvey with equal fervour.

Sylvius made a valuable service by giving a name to the muscles, which until then had simply been referred to by numbers. These numbers were arbitrarily assigned by different authors. He was the first anatomist to publish descriptions of satisfactory pterygoid process and the sphenoid bone and clinoid bone tear. He gave a good description of the sphenoid sinus in an adult, but denied its existence in children. Sylvius also wrote about the vertebrae, but described incorrectly the sternum. Although the cerebral aqueduct (Aqueduct of Sylvius) and Sylvian (lateral) sulcus of the brain have been said to be his contributions to anatomy, the aqueduct was described by Galen nearly 1300 years before, albeit the name aqueduct in this context was first mentioned by another Sylvius (Franciscus Sylvius, 1614–1672), who apparently also described the sulcus which bears his name.