Glisson examines child with rickets as the mother looks on. Two more children with rickets play in the background and bones deformed by rickets hang on the wall. Francis Glisson (1599-1677) was a English physician, anatomist, and writer on medical subjects. He did important work on the anatomy of the liver, and he wrote an early pediatric text on rickets. An experiment he performed helped debunk the balloonist theory of muscle contraction by showing that when a muscle contracted under water, the water level did not rise, and thus no air or fluid could be entering the muscle.