It’s been suggested that Rene Descartes, in his significant contributions to western philosophy, saddled us with more problems than we might ever solve.
Dsecartes’ materialist views on physiology, birthing our current system of iatromechanical medicine, were heavily influenced by inferences drawn from observations on the hydraulic-animated statues at the royal gardens of Versailles; marvels of engineering in his day, animated by the flow of water.
Descartes surmised that living beings were similarly purely simple, tho perhaps exceedingly complicated, mechanical structures, animated by the direct intervention of the God of Roman Catholicism.
The evolving discoveries of Vesalius (general anatomy), Harvey (the heart & circulation), et. al.
appeared to support the notion that we might reasonably regard the bodies of living beings as purely mechanical structures, with operations fully describable according to the known laws of mechanics; the heart a simple 2-chambered pump, the kidneys a series of nested sieves, the nervous system a hydraulic structure with fluid-filled cranial ventricles & hollow nerve tubes extending to the periphery, &c.