Jean Riolan the Younger  

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Jean Riolan (the Younger) (1577 – 1657) was a French anatomist who was an influential member of the Medical Faculty of Paris. His father, Jean Riolan (the Elder) (1539-1605) was also a noted French anatomist. The younger Riolan was a one-time personal physician to Marie de' Medici (1553-1642).

Riolan is remembered for his traditional views towards medicine, and was a major proponent of the teachings of Galen. He held a differing viewpoint in regards to William Harvey's (1578-1657) theory involving the blood's circulatory system. Riolan calculated that blood traveled through the blood vessels to the body's extremities and returned to the heart only two or three times a day. He also postulated that blood often ebbed and flowed in the veins and that it was taken in as nourishment by different parts of the body. Riolan also did not believe that the heart propelled the blood, instead he proposed that the blood kept the heart in motion, analogous to a stream moving the wheel of a water mill.

Riolan had other disagreements with Harvey, such as the role of the liver as a blood-manufacturing organ. Riolan was an opponent to the practice of vivisection, asserting that violent and painful deaths suffered by research animals, placed them in an unnatural condition that led to incorrect assumptions about the functionality of healthy animals.

Riolan's best known written works are l'Anthropographie (1618), which was a treatise on human anatomy and Opuscula anatomica (1649), where he criticizes Harvey's views of the circulatory system. The eponymous anastomosis of Riolan is named after him, which is the mesenteric arterial connection between the superior and inferior mesenteric arteries. Marginal fibres of the palpebral part of the orbicularis oculi muscle is known as Riolan's muscle. The cremasteric muscle is also eponymously named after Riolan.




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