Historical Notes
During the Renaissance period there was an upsurge of investigative endeavor all over Europe. In 1622, Gasparo Aselli, professor of anatomy and surgery in Pavia, a city in northern Italy, described the appearance of lymphatic vessels in the mesentery of a well-fed dog. Aselli not only observed distended lacteals in the mesentery, but, on pricking one of them, saw a "white liquid milk" gush out of it. In 1651, Jean Pecquet of France described the receptaculum chyli and the thoracic duct through which a "milky substance threw itself headlong into the whirlpool of the heart."1,2Almost at the same time, 1649 or 1650, Olaus Rudbeck of Vesteras in Sweden described the lymphatics of the liver and later of the other parts of the body.2Bartholini's contribution in 1653, apparently independent of Rudbeck's and Pecquet's discoveries, was the accurate and precise description of the lymphatic vessels of