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The Wine-Dark Sea Within: A Turbulent History of Blood
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About This Book
A revisionist history of medicine, in which blood plays the starring role Inspired by Homer's description of the ebb and flow of the "wine dark sea," the ancient Greeks conceived a back-and-forth movement of blood. That false notion, perpetuated by the influential Roman physician Galen, prevailed for fifteen hundred years until William Harvey proved that blood the heart pumps blood in one direction through the arteries and it returns through the veins. Harvey's discovery revolutionized the life sciences by making possible an entirely new quantitative understanding of the cardiovascular system, a way of thinking on which many of our lifesaving medical interventions today depend. In The Wine-Dark Sea Within , cardiologist Dhun Sethna argues that Harvey's revelation inaugurated modern medicine and paved the way for groundbreaking advances from intravenous therapy, cardiac imaging, and stent insertions to bypass surgery, dialysis, and heart-lung machines. Weaving together three thousand years of global history, following bitter feuds and epic alliances, tragic failures and extraordinary advancements, this is a provocative history by a fresh voice in popular science.
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"Knowledge of the heart's function is now so basic that even elementary school children grasp it...But the road to understanding the workings of the heart, blood vessels, and circulation was difficult, long, and sometimes dangerous for investigators...Knitting together history, biography, and physiology, cardiologist Sethna reviews how scientific and medical advances were pitted against the oppressive forces of tradition and theology (particularly Catholicism)...There are some sluggish passages, but Sethna presents a useful and intriguing work of scientific history and appreciation of the arduous path to cardiac discovery."
"Cardiologist Sethna debuts with a comprehensive if clunky medical history of the circulatory system...Covering milestones including the early Greek thinkers who first recognized the heart as 'a distinct organ' and English physician William Harvey's 1628 discovery of how blood circulates, Sethna details a millennium of advancements as well as a few wrong turns...While Sethna does a great job explaining how each discovery contributed to the modern understanding of how the heart works, his writing can be distracting, and he's prone to platitudes...Still, it's an impressive story; devotees of medical history will have plenty to enjoy."
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