What the Doctors Ddon’t Kknow

Imagine the year is 1600. In England Queen Elizabeth I is on the throne and Shakespeare has just written “Hamlet”, and the population of England and Ireland was around five-and-a-half million people. Now let us meet William Harvey, a twenty-two year old Englishman studying medicine in Italy. He went there because that was the place where all the great doctors were discovering the structure of the human body. Harvey directed his attention towards solving the mysteries of the heart and circulation. By 1615 he had all the evidence he needed to demonstrate the way the blood circulates round the body. As a result of his studies in 1628 he wrote “An Anatomical Study of the Motion of the Heart and of the Blood in Animals,” describing how blood is pumped throughout the body by the heart, and then returns to the heart and recirculates. Although this book later became the basis for modern research on the heart and blood vessels at the time it was printed his discoveries were met with indifference. Part of the problem was that there were no obvious practical applications for his findings. Neither Harvey nor anyone else had any idea about the symptoms of heart failure. It would take another two hundred years before the clinical value of his findings became clear.

Too Many Bystanders!

The death of Kitty Genovese outside her own home in 1964 led to a serious piece of research. This death was tragic not just because Kitty had been stabbed but also because so many of her neighbors saw the incident and did nothing to help. Kitty’s neighbors knew her and were all decent people, so their lack of response caused horror. The newspaper criticized their indifference that apparently allowed them to watch this young girl being attacked and do nothing. Two researchers; Bibb Latane and John Darley, however, believed there must be more to it than that and so they investigated why people did or did not help others.

Who’s in Charge?

Human beings wish to believe that they are the masters of their own fate. It is a natural desire to want to feel that we are controlling what direction we go in and that the plans we make will happen. But even while we mock those people who are frightened by sounds in the dark and imagine that someone or something is out to get them, this mockery is based on the desire to feel that these fears are ridiculous, even while we know in our inner hearts, that there may be an element of truth to them. Is safety merely an illusion? Are the homes we have created really a bastion to shelter us from the dangers of the world? Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian captain of the international team that sailed the Kon-tiki raft from Peru to Tahiti, explained, that when he or the crew contemplated the potential dangers they were faced with, they would go and sit in the small cabin they had built from wood. The walls gave them comfort, a sense of security. But the Kon-Tiki raft was an imitation of one built in 1000 BC, in other words it was made of very basic material, and hence the feeling of insecurity that the crew felt at regular intervals was valid. And that little hut, in reality, provided no real protection.