Kardel T
Acta Anat (Basel). 1997;159(1):61-70.
The dispute on the movement of skeletal muscles in 1667 between Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, who maintained the ancient movement caused by inflation theory, and Niels Stensen (Nicolaus Steno), who proposed the first recorded theory of fibre contraction, had far reaching implications for understanding the relation between muscle morphology and function. A dialogue is reconstructed from citations from the two authors' main works. They had a similar dispute on the movement of the heart along the lines of the debate in the 1630s between William Harvey favouring contraction and René Descartes favouring swelling. Evidence is provided for the delayed general acceptance of fibre contraction in both heart and skeletal muscles. It is shown that the inflation interpretation of muscular mechanics elaborated by Borelli, Johann Bernoulli, his son Daniel, and by others, was maintained from ancient authors and Descartes in part due to a conceptual block resulting from the mechanical philosophy that denied any force of attraction in nature. The alternative theory, that of fibre contraction, was thought of as self-motion, which violated an accepted mechanical principle and therefore was rejected. In the mid-18th century, Albrecht von Haller recorded no microscopic structures in support of inflation. He adopted the view that contraction in fibres of muscles is generated through an 'irritability'. Research on this entity has taken place ever since with a clear preponderance of studies on single fibre properties and subcellular structures. Haller did not, however, refer to the original contribution of Stensen on fibre contraction. Haller even rejected Stensen's functional architecture of skeletal muscle. This structure, now called the unipennate, or semipennate, actuator, was overlooked and had to await confirmation by anatomical rediscovery and pragmatic demonstration through successful applications in computer models of muscular contraction in the 1980s.
1667年，乔瓦尼·阿方索·博雷利坚持古代的充气理论所引发的肌肉运动学说，与尼尔斯·斯滕森（尼古拉·斯泰诺）展开了争论，后者提出了首个有记载的纤维收缩理论。这场争论对于理解肌肉形态与功能之间的关系产生了深远影响。通过引用两位作者的主要著作，本文重构了他们之间的对话。他们在心脏运动问题上也有类似的争论，这与17世纪30年代威廉·哈维支持收缩说、勒内·笛卡尔支持膨胀说的那场辩论如出一辙。文中提供了证据，表明心脏和骨骼肌的纤维收缩理论在当时迟迟未被广泛接受。结果显示，博雷利、约翰·伯努利、他的儿子丹尼尔以及其他人所阐述的肌肉力学的膨胀解释，部分源于机械哲学所导致的概念障碍，这种哲学否认自然界中存在任何吸引力。而另一种理论，即纤维收缩理论，被认为是自我运动，这违反了公认的力学原理，因此遭到了摒弃。18世纪中叶，阿尔布雷希特·冯·哈勒并未发现支持膨胀说的微观结构。他采纳了这样一种观点，即肌肉纤维的收缩是由“应激性”产生的。从那时起，人们就对这一概念展开了研究，其中对单纤维特性和亚细胞结构的研究占了绝大多数。然而，哈勒并未提及斯滕森对纤维收缩的最初贡献。哈勒甚至还否定了斯滕森提出的骨骼肌功能结构。这种结构如今被称为单羽状或半羽状促动器，当时被忽视了，直到20世纪80年代通过解剖学上的重新发现以及在肌肉收缩计算机模型中的成功应用所进行的实际论证，才得以确认。
