Male

‘The Penis is an Organ Contrived by the Author of Nature for the Ejection of the Seed, and Emission of Urine’.

                                    William Cowper, Myotomia reformata (London, 1694), p. 225.

William Cowper, Myotomia reformata (London, 1694), Tab. XII: muscles of the penis.

In his 1694 work on muscles, William Cowper (166/7–1710) includes an appendix specifically devoted to a ‘Description of the Penis, and the manner of its Erection’. Gray’s Anatomy describes the structure of the penis as follows: ‘the penis is composed of a mass of erectile tissue enclosed in three cylindrical fibrous compartments, Of these, two, the corpora cavernosa, are placed side by side along the upper parts of the organ; the third, or corpus spongiosum, encloses the urethra and is placed below’.[1] In Cowper’s Tabula XII above, which represents the back of the penis, he designates its parts as follows:

‘A, The Balanus. (i.e. the head of the penis, which we call the glans penis);

a, The Frenum;

B, The External surface of the Corpus Cavernosum Urethrae.

CC, Its Bulb cover’d with the Musculus Accelerator b The conjunction of its Right side with the Left, corresponding to the seam of the Skin in the Perinæum; cc Its two extremities embrasing the Corpus Cavernosum Urethrae, which terminate on the side of the Cavernous Bodies of the Penis itself.

D, Part of the Sphincter Ani.

EE, The Musculi Transversales Penis.

FF, The Directores or Erectores.

GGGG, The Corpora Cavernosa Penis.

HH, The Arteries ddd, Those Branches administering the Bloud to the Muscules; ee Two large Trunks of Them which are subdivided into Two more fg.

II, The Nerves of the Penis’.[2]

As Alessandro Riva et al. note, Giulio Cesare Casseri (1552–1616), better known for his work on the organs of sense and his understanding of the larynx, had been among the first to show that the corpus spongiosum (which Cowper calls the Corpus Cavernosum Urethrae), was separate to the corpora cavernosa (which run along the shaft of the penis).[3] Casseri’s plate depicting the penis and anal musculature was later used by his successor at Padua, Andriaan van den Spieghel (c. 1578–1625) and it is likely that Cowper was familiar with the work.[4]  Cowper notes of the Urethra that it ‘also has its Corpus Cavernosum differing very much in Figure from that of the Two Former; they being less at each End, and largest in the Middle, whereas this on the contrary is there Least, and Largest at its Two Extreams’.[5]

Cowper’s understanding of the anatomy of the penis was clearly primarily influenced by the physiological experiments of the celebrated Dutch anatomists such as Reinier de Graaf (1641–73), and Frederick Ruysch (1638–1731). Indeed, he specifically acknowledged their important work on the subject, highlighting De Graaf’s definition of the parts of the penis and Ruysch’s work on the structure of the glans. Though impressed by many of their findings, he was not averse to criticizing them (and others), explaining that his own work was the result of a ‘strict Enquiry on this Subject’.[6]

First in the line of fire was Galen who ‘not knowing the Circulation of the Blood, or that it past from the Arteries into the Veins¸ were extremely deceived in their Ideas of the Erection of the Penis’.[7] According to Galen, the corpora cavernosa played a vital role in erection due to their ability to attract ‘expanding pneuma’ but it was the work of anatomists like De Graaf and Ruysch who were able to demonstrate by their experiments in physiology that erection was dependant a) on getting blood to the penis, and b) on keeping it there.[8]

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, Epistolae ad Societatem Regiam Anglicam, et alios illustres viros (Leiden, 1719), portrait of Leeuwenhoek.

In his The Anatome of Humane Bodies (Oxford, 1698), which Worth likewise owned, Cowper drew attention to the chief anatomical discoveries of the age. Among these were, as Cowper notes in the ‘Introduction’ to his anatomical atlas, ‘the Ovaria in Females’, (a discovery by Reinier de Graaf (1641–73), discussed in the ‘Female’ webpage of this online exhibition), and ‘the Embriunculi in the masculine seed’, a discovery made in 1667 by De Graaf’s friend, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723).[9] The ‘Embriunculi’ in question were spermatozoa (a spermatozoon joins an ovum to form a zygote). Until Van Leeuwenhoek discovered them using his microscrope, they were unknown to anatomists. Worth was clearly very interested in Van Leeuwenhoek’s work as he collected a number of treatises by him. Worth would also have been familiar with Van Leeuwenhoek’s many discoveries of microorganisms from the many reports on them in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, a society of which both Worth and Van Leeuwenhoek were fellows.

Text: Dr Elizabethanne Boran, Librarian of the Edward Worth Library, Dublin.

Sources

Cowper, William, Myotomia reformata (London, 1694).

Cowper, William, The anatomy of humane bodies, with figures drawn after the life by some of the best masters in Europe, and curiously engraven in one hundred and fourteen copper plates, illustrated with large explications, containing many new anatomical discoveries, and chirurgical observations: to which is added an introduction explaining the animal oeconomy, with a copious index (Oxford, 1698).

Lane, Nick, ‘The unseen world: reflections on Leeuwenhoek (1677) ‘Concerning little animals’ Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 370, 1666 (2015), 1–10.

Pickering Pick, T. and Robert Howden, Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical by Henry Gray (New York, 1977).

Riva, Alessandro, et al., ‘Iulius Casserius (1552-1616): The Self-Made Anatomist of Padua’s Golden Age’, The Anatomical Record (New Anatomy), 265 (2001), 168–75.

Roberts, K.B.,  and J.D. W. Tomlinson, The Fabric of the Body. European Traditions of Anatomical Illustration, (Oxford, 1992).

Ruestow, Edward G., ‘Images and Ideas: Leeuwenhoek’s Perception of the Spermatozoa’, Journal of the History of Biology, 16, no. 2 (1983), 185–224.

Van Driel, Mels F, ‘Physiology of Penile Erection—A Brief History of the Scientific Understanding up till the Eighties of the 20th Century’, Sexual Medicine, 3, no. 4 (2015), 349–57.

[1] Pickering Pick, T. and Robert Howden, Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical by Henry Gray (New York, 1977), p. 1012.

[2] Cowper, William, Myotomia reformata (London, 1694), p. 255. Tables XIII, XIV,  and XV represent, in their turn, (XIII) an internal part of the Glans; (XIV) part of the urethra; (XV) ‘part of one of the Cavernous Bodies of the Penis’, while (XVI) represents part of a dog’s penis.

[3] Riva, Alessandro, et al., ‘Iulius Casserius (1552-1616): The Self-Made Anatomist of Padua’s Golden Age’, The Anatomical Record (New Anatomy), 265 (2001), 174.

[4] Roberts, K.B.,  and J.D. W. Tomlinson, The Fabric of the Body. European Traditions of Anatomical Illustration (Oxford, 1992), p. 261.

[5] Cowper, Myotomia reformata, pp 236–7.

[6] Ibid., p. 225.

[7] Ibid., p. 238.

[8] Van Driel, Mels F., ‘Physiology of Penile Erection—A Brief History of the Scientific Understanding up till the Eighties of the 20th Century’, Sexual Medicine, 3, no. 4 (2015), 349–57. See also Roberts, K.B., and J.D. W. Tomlinson, The Fabric of the Body. European Traditions of Anatomical Illustration (Oxford, 1992), p. 261.

[9] Cowper, William, The anatomy of humane bodies, with figures drawn after the life by some of the best masters in Europe, and curiously engraven in one hundred and fourteen copper plates, illustrated with large explications, containing many new anatomical discoveries, and chirurgical observations: to which is added an introduction explaining the animal oeconomy, with a copious index (Oxford, 1698), Sig. b1r.