The Description of the Human Body The Description of the Human Body The Description of the Human Body () is an unfinished treatise written in 1647 by René Descartes (1596-1650). Descartes felt knowing oneself was particularly useful. This for him included medical knowledge. He hoped to cure and prevent disease, even to slow down aging. René Descartes believed the soul caused conscious thought. The body caused automatic functions like the beating of the heart and digestion he felt. The body was necessary for voluntary movement as well as the will. However, he believed the power to move the body was wrongly imagined to come from the
Edmund Alexander Parkes Exercise on the Elimination of Nitrogen". He confirmed independently the observations of Adolf Eugen Fick and Johannes Wislicenus, against Justus Liebig's theory that muscular work implies the destruction of muscular tissue by oxidation. Parkes suggested that the elimination of urea is not dependent on the amount of muscular exercise, but on the consumption of nitrogenous food; and that muscular tissue does not consume itself as a fuel doing work. His experiments on the effects of alcohol on the human body (in which he was assisted by Cyprian Wollowicz) were in three papers (in 1870, 1872, and 1874), on the "Effects