The inside story of blood

• Autores: Simon Ings
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3165, 2018, pág. 44
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Affection and delight aren't qualities you would immediately associate with an exhibition about blood flow. But Ceaseless Motion reaches beyond the science to celebrate the man-17th-century physician William Harvey--who, the story goes, invented the tradition of doctors' bad handwriting. He was also a benefactor: when founding a lecture series in his own name, he remembered to bequeath money for the provision of refreshments. Before Harvey's 10 years of intense, solitary study bore fruit, physicians thought blood was manufactured in the liver and then passed through the body under its own volumetric pressure. Heaven help you if you made too much of the stuff. Luckily, physicians were on hand to release this disease-inducing pressure through bloodletting. Within 30 years, Harvey's realisation that blood pressure is controlled by the heart, and that this organ actively pumps blood around the body in a continuous circuit, had overturned the teachings of the 2nd-century Graeco-Roman physician Claudius Galen in European centres of learning.