Who Is Galenic Spirometry?

"The substance of the lung is dilatable and extensible like the tinder made from a fungus. But it is spongy and if you press it, it yields to the force which compresses it, and if the force is removed, it increases again to its original size." - Leonardo da Vinci, late 15th century.23
The beginning of accurate knowledge concerning the physiology of breathing dates back to the 17th century. Before that time, the ideas in vogue about why and how we breathe were mystical and strange. Hippocrates “counted air as an instrument of the body”. Galen, whose influence on medical thought and progress was immense for many centuries, enunciated the doctrine of Hippocrates and formed his own doctrine based on observation.
In the Galenic
John Abernethy, doctor and teacher of anatomy, physiology, and pathology explored the concept of oxygen depletion and thus made it to the list of early contributors to the practice of spirometry.25
In 1799, Humphry Davy, wrote an essay entitled on heat and light. 26 In this essay, he showed that blood was capable of carrying oxygen and carbon dioxide. He proposed that blood carried oxygen to the tissues, where energy was released and carbon dioxide was formed, and that the blood carried the carbon dioxide away. His observations owed much to Antoine Lavoisier and his textbook Traite Elementaire de Chimie, published 20 years earlier.
The average vital capacity found by him was 3.096 litres which was 73% of the average for the western men of the same height. According the study conducted by him, the vital capacity per centimeter of standing height was 18.52 ml and vital capacity per square metre of body surface area was 1960ml.49
Three eminent physiologists, Bhargava, Mishra and Gupta in the year 1973, carried out pulmonary function tests in 260 subjects of both sexes in the age group 16-65 years. They observed that all the values in case of males were higher than that of females except for the value of FEV1, where no significant difference was noted. They also observed a decline of all the values of spirometry with increase of age and highest value was recorded in the age group of 16-35 years.50 In 1960 American physiologists, Fry and Hyatt, in a landmark study of lung mechanics, replotted the data contained in the timed spirogram in the form of the flow-volume curve51 which is now universally accepted as the preferred method of graphically displaying spirometric data. The flow-volume curve is now available in almost all commercially available spirometers and is displayed in real-time as the patient performs the