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.