John Mayow

Infobox Scientist
name = John Mayow
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caption = John Mayow
birth_date = 24 May 1640
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death_date = October 1679
death_place = London
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nationality = England
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field = chemistry
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known_for = pneumatic chemistry
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John Mayow FRS (1641 - 1679) was a chemist, physician, and physiologist who is remembered today for conducting early research into respiration and the nature of air. Mayow worked in a field that is sometimes called pneumatic chemistry.

Life

There has been controversy over both the location and year of Mayow's birth, with both Cornwall and London claimed, along with birth years from 1641 to 1645. Proctor's extensive research led him to conclude that Mayow was born in 1641 near Morval in Cornwall and that he was admitted to Wadham College, Oxford at age 17 in 1658. [cite book | author = Proctor, Donald F. | title = A History of Breathing Physiology | year = 1995 | location = New York | publisher = Marcel Dekker, Inc. | url = http://books.google.com/books?id=1YTaHPKHonkC&printsec=titlepage&dq=john+mayow+birth&source=gbs_toc_s&cad=1#PPP1,M1 | access-date = 2008-02-11 ] A year later Mayow became a scholar at Oxford, and in 1660 he was elected to a fellowship at All Souls. He graduated in law (bachelor, 1665, doctor, 1670), but made medicine his profession, and became noted for his practice - therein, especially in the summer time, in the city of Bath. In 1678, on the proposal of Robert Hooke, Mayow was chosen a fellow of the Royal Society. The following year, after a marriage which was not altogether to Mayow's content, he died in London and was buried in the Church of St. Paul, Covent Garden. [cite book | author = Wood, A. A. |title = Athenae Oxonienses. An Exact History of all the Writers and Bishops who Have Had Their Education in the University of Oxford | publisher = FCJ Rivington | place = London = volume III | year = 1817 | page = 1199]

Scientific work

Mayow published at Oxford in 1668 two tracts, on respiration and rickets, and in 1674 these were reprinted, the former in an enlarged and corrected form, with three others "De sal-nitro et spiritu nitro-aereo", "De respiratione foetus in utero et ovo", and "De motu musculari et spiritibus animalibus" as "Tractatus quinque medico-physici". The contents of this work, which was several times republished and translated into Dutch, German and French, show him to have been an investigator much in advance of his time.

Accepting as proved by Boyle's experiments that air is necessary for combustion, Mayow showed that fire is supported not by the air as a whole but by a more active and subtle part of it. This part he called "spiritus igneo-aereus," or sometimes "nitro-aereus", for he identified it with one of the constituents of the acid portion of nitre (now called potassium nitrate, KNO₃) which he regarded as formed by the union of fixed alkali with a spiritus acidus. In combustion the particulae nitro-aereae – either pre-existent in the thing consumed or supplied by the air – combined with the material burnt; as Mayow inferred from his observation that antimony, strongly heated with a burning glass, undergoes an increase of weight which can be attributed to nothing else but these particles.

Mayow argued that the same particles are consumed in respiration, because he found that when a small animal and a lighted candle were placed in a closed vessel full of air the candle first went out and soon afterwards the animal died. However, if there was no candle present the animal lived twice as long. He concluded that this constituent of the air is absolutely necessary for life, and supposed that the lungs separate it from the atmosphere and pass it into the blood. It is also necessary, Mayow inferred, for all muscular movements, and he thought there was reason to believe that the sudden contraction of muscle is produced by its combination with other combustible (salino-sulphureous) particles in the body; hence the heart, being a muscle, ceases to beat when respiration is stopped. Animal heat also is due to the union of nitro-aerial particles, breathed in from the air, with the combustible particles in the blood, and is further formed by the combination of these two sets of particles in muscle during violent exertion.

In effect, therefore, Mayow – who also gives a remarkably correct anatomical description of the mechanism of respiration – preceded Priestley and Lavoisier by a century in recognizing the existence of oxygen, under the guise of his "spiritus nitro-aereus," as a separate entity distinct from the general mass of the air. Mayow perceived the part "spiritus nitro-aereus" plays in combustion and in increasing the weight of the calces (oxides) of metals as compared with metals themselves. Rejecting the common notions of his time that the use of breathing is to cool the heart, or assist the passage of the blood from the right to the left side of the heart, or merely to agitate it, Mayow saw in inspiration a mechanism for introducing oxygen into the body, where it is consumed for the production of heat and muscular activity. He even vaguely conceived of expiration as an excretory process. Using bell-jars over water Mayow showed that the active substance that we today call oxygen constitutes about a fifth part of the air.

Parts of Mayow's work seems to agree with modern ideas regarding air and combustion. Mayow noted, as had others before him, that some materials gain weight on strong heating. Antoine Lavoisier (1743 - 1794) and others later interpreted this gain in terms of a reaction with a gaseous material (oxygen) in the air. See Holmyard [cite book | last = Holmyard | first = Eric John | coauthors = | title = Makers of Chemistry | publisher = Oxford University Press | date = 1931 | location = Oxford | pages = 154 – 158 ] and others [cite book | last = Hudson | first = John | title = The History of Chemistry | publisher = Chapman and Hall | date = 1992 | location = New York | pages = 44 – 46 ] for critiques of Mayow's work and comparisons to modern chemical thought.

Honours

* Fellow of the Royal Society (1678)

References

Further reading

*Citation
id = PMID:13366533
url= http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/13366533
last=PARTINGTON
first=J R
publication-date=1956 Sep
year=1956
title=The life and work of John Mayow (1641-1679)
volume=47
issue=149
periodical=Isis; an international review devoted to the history of science and its cultural influences
pages=217–30
*Citation
id = PMID:14430648
url= http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14430648
last=PARTINGTON
first=J R
publication-date=1959 Sep
year=1959
title=Some early appraisals of the work of John Mayow
volume=50
issue=
periodical=Isis; an international review devoted to the history of science and its cultural influences
pages=211–26
*Citation
id = PMID:13870464
url= http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/13870464
last=BOEHM
first=W
publication-date=1962 Mar
year=1962
title= [John Mayow and Descartes.]
volume=46
issue=
periodical=Sudhoffs Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften
pages=45–68
*Citation
id = PMID:15050753
url= http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15050753
last=Sternbach
first=George L
last2=Varon
first2=Joseph
publication-date=2004 Mar
year=2004
title=Resuscitation Great. John Mayow and oxygen
volume=60
issue=3
periodical=Resuscitation
pages=235–7
doi = 10.1016/j.resuscitation.2003.12.013
journal=Resuscitation
*Citation
id = PMID:5329985
url= http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/5329985
publication-date=1966 Aug 1
year=1966
title=John Mayow (1641-1679)
volume=197
issue=5
periodical=JAMA
pages=364–5
month = Aug
author = ,
issn = 0098-7484
pmid = 5329985
journal = JAMA : the journal of the American Medical Association
doi = 10.1001/jama.197.5.364b
*

*

*: - The above originally was published in 1674.

*: - See especially chapters 7 - 9 on Mayow's life, work, and influence.

* cite journal | last = Sternbach | first = George L. | coauthors = Joesph Varon | title = John Mayow and Oxygen | year = 2004 | journal = Resuscitation | volume = 60 | issue = 3 | pages = 235 – 237 | url = http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T19-4BT1DGN-3&_user=2744497&_coverDate=03%2F31%2F2004&_rdoc=2&_fmt=summary&_orig=browse&_srch=doc-info(%23toc%234885%232004%23999399996%23490878%23FLA%23display%23Volume)&_cdi=4885&_sort=d&_docanchor=&_ct=24&_acct=C000058690&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=2744497&md5=941a13d88c4d955f4b2789a957c4a815
accessdate = 2008-03-02 | doi = 10.1016/j.resuscitation.2003.12.013

*