The edition
Every tour as an illustrated chapter, with the plates, the beliefs they overturned and a full bibliography. You get EPUB and PDF in one purchase. Edition 360f2c85, generated from the same verified content as the site.
Buy the edition · A$29 · coming soon
Contents
- The circulation of the blood: 11 sections
From Galen's arteries to Malpighi's capillaries, the long argument about where blood goes. It moves through Rome, Cairo, Padua and London, and it is full of half-right answers. - The brain and nerves: 8 sections
How the head became the seat of thought, how nerves were told apart from everything else, and how the nervous system turned out to be made of separate cells. - Seeing the invisible: 8 sections
What changed when anatomists could see below the naked eye, and why seeing a structure is not the same as understanding it. - Myths and "firsts": 9 sections
Six plates where the popular story is wrong, contested or more interesting than the legend. A tour for sceptics. - Beyond Europe: 7 sections
Egyptian, Indian, Chinese and Islamic-world contributions, told carefully, including one popular claim that does not survive scrutiny. Pair this tour with the Traditions lens.
Free preview: The circulation of the blood
From Galen's arteries to Malpighi's capillaries, the long argument about where blood goes. It moves through Rome, Cairo, Padua and London, and it is full of half-right answers.
The long view: a thousand years of half-right answers
The circulation of the blood is usually told as a single flash of insight: in 1628 William Harvey saw what nobody had seen before. The story in this chapter is longer and more interesting than that. It runs for fourteen centuries, it crosses three languages and at least four cities, and almost every step in it was taken by someone who got something important right and something else, just as important, wrong.
…
Tab. VI: Arteries carry blood
Galen of Pergamon was a gladiators' doctor, a court physician and the most prolific medical writer of antiquity. He was also a superb experimenter, and this is one of his cleanest experiments.
The followers of Erasistratus taught that arteries carry a subtle, air-like pneuma. If you cut an artery and blood spurts out, they said, that is because blood rushes in from the veins to fill the gap left by the escaping pneuma. It was a clever answer, and hard to refute by argument alone.
So Galen stopped arguing. In a treatise devoted to the question, he describes exposing an artery in a living animal and tying it off at two points.1 Nothing could rush into the stretch between the ties. When he opened it, it was full of blood.2
The arteries ink in fully on this plate: their contents, at least, were understood. But Galen's larger system, in which blood is made in the liver and seeps through invisible pores in the heart, would stand for more than a thousand years. You can see those beliefs in red ink.
The full chapter continues with the rest of the essay, 9 more sections and its sources.