Glisson, Francis, and the Irritable Life of Nature

Francis Glisson (1599–1677) was an anatomist and philosopher who held major positions in the academic and scientific life of seventeenthcentury England (president and consiliarius of the London College of Physicians, Regius Professor at the University of Cambridge, and fellow of the Royal Society). He was one of the leading lights of the post-Harveian physiology and wrote important works on the anatomy of the liver (Anatomia hepatis, 1654) and the abdominal organs (De ventriculo, 1677). He also published a philosophical treatise concerning the nature of living matter, De natura substantiae energetica (1672).