Muscular System

What Scientists are Responsible for some of the Discoveries of the Muscular System?

Discovery of the muscular system was a gradual process forged by scientists and artists. One of the earliest instances of documentation about the muscular system was "Commentary on the Anatomy of Mondino," written by Jacopo Berengario da Carpi in 1521. The late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were an era of great fascination with musculature.  Leonardo da Vinci, like many Renaissance artists devoted a good portion of his life to the drawing of male nudes in motion.  His images suggest the implicit appeal of examining muscles by combining observations of the living with dissections of the dead.
 


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One of Leonardo da Vinci's sketches of the muscle.
Scientists want to know more about the functioning of sarcomeres, but viewing them usually requires removing live muscle tissue. Now, Scott L. Delp, Mark J. Schnitzer and others at Stanford University have devised a far less invasive way to look at sarcomeres in action. They use laser light and a microendoscope, a needle-shaped lens just 350 microns in diameter that can be inserted into muscle tissue without causing damage.

Dr. Schnitzer said the technique took advantage of the fact that when single-frequency light from a laser illuminates a material that is highly structured and directional, the material emits a harmonic, at twice the original frequency. “In the case of muscles, we have a highly ordered arrangement with directionality,” he said. So when a sarcomere is illuminated by flashes of laser light through the endoscope, the harmonics travel back through it to a photodetector. The data is digitally assembled to create an image.

Hippocrates
"By appropriate massage, passive and resistive movements, atrophied muscles, tendons, and ligaments would have their circulation accelerated and increased, and consequently their nutrition and innervation improved, so that they would become larger and firmer, thus binding closer a joint too lax and making it stronger. By the same means involuntary tension of the muscles, adhesions, effusions, and hyperplastic tissue may be removed, so that a joint stiff from such causes would become more flexible.

"Therefore, the saying of Hippocrates, that anatripsis will bind closer a joint that is too lax and relax a joint that is too rigid, is not so paradoxical as it seems. These remarks also in part refer to the fact that 'rubbing can make flesh and cause parts to waste' in its local application; but in its general application the same effects have been observed and much more fully referred to by S. Weir Mitchell in Fat and Blood, and How to Make Them. People who have a normal quantity of adipose tissue sometimes lose much of it, to their detriment, by the excessive use of massage.

"But even this feature can sometimes be utilized to advantage in cases where fat is super-abundant, soft, and flabby, with a want of tone and tension in the areolar tissue, and in these it will be found that hard rubbing binds. 'Soft rubbing loosens' not only abnormally tough and matted conditions of the skin and superficial fascia, but also involuntary tension of muscles, both of which conditions, if looked for, may often be found generally as well as locally in overtaxed and debilitated people.



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A photo of Hippocrates