Decisiones praecipuorum aliquot aporēmatōn iatrophilosophikōn

Book On the Dissection of the Matrix, it appears. Which also the blankets i.e., membranes/linings tōn artēriōn of the arteries show, with the Holy Scriptures also testifying. For then the veins of the kotulēdonōn cotyledons/cup-shaped vessels are not worn down, so that we say nothing of the future, if it were otherwise, in the womb, especially of girls, of blood thrombois clots, just as it happens after birth. For the hymen in all virgins not corrupted, behind the insertion of the neck of the bladder internally, even without dissection, with legs spread, is seen as a passage open by a transverse slit, but a rather narrow one, which could easily prevent the rhoon gunaikeion feminine flow at its exit.

Are the umbilical vessels formed in the first brephogonia embryogenesis?

Although infants soon after birth cast out mucous bile from the intestines, it is not to be established that nourishment is sucked by the mouth from the fetus, as Hippocrates (Book On the Nature of the Child) and Galen (Book On Whether the Animal is an Animal while Contained in the Womb, speaking of the breasts) surmise, or that it is carried to the child's stomach and prepared there, as Volcher Coiter, among the Moderns, deems in his Anatomical Lectures on Fallopius. But the umbilical vessels being formed, the fetus stretches its hands, as it were, into the uterus, so that it may receive blood and spirit for fostering life from there (Galen, Book 1 On Semen, ch. 6 & 8). In which sense also the passage of Aristotle (2 On the Generation of Animals, ch. 4) is to be taken: "The soul," he says, "as the vegetative principle, husteron ek trophēs poiei tēn auxēsin, chrōmenē hoion organois, thermotēti kai psuchrotēti afterwards makes growth from nourishment, using as if they were tools, heat and cold," and in the same way hē energeia the activity, by which ex archēs from the beginning it formed to phusei gignomenon that which is born by nature from the various parts of nourishment. Furthermore, the umbilical vein in the fetus is a branch of the stem of the portal vein, which necessarily is joined and continued with the vena cava by orifices, on account of the diadosin distribution of nourishment into the body: arising from the portal vein, when it has first emerged from the hollow of the liver, like a significant mesenteric vein: which, descending through the hollow of the liver, rests upon the inner surface of the peritoneum, until it has reached the seat of the navel. But the umbilical arteries, creeping forth from the aorta of the same, alongside the loins and the higher seat of the sacral bone, lead a bifurcated origin: which, with various windings above the fundus of the bladder, are bound to the peritoneum.