The Wine-Dark Sea Within: A Turbulent History of Blood
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.
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The basic realities of blood — that it’s pumped by the heart, that it circulates throughout the body, that it carries nutrients vital to life — occupy a strange duality in the lore of human knowledge...For millennia, the basics of volume, production, and all of that pumping were known with intimate familiarity by every marketplace butcher, midwife, and battlefield soldier on the planet...And yet the actual mechanics that every school child and casual amateur knows today (a moviegoer ignorant of biology will instantly know if a bloody wound on-screen “looks real”) were mysteries to those front-line witnesses and to bookish theorizers alike...The story of that slow, piecemeal discovery is the subject of Dhun Sethna’s new book, The Wine-Dark Sea Within...Sethna, an academic cardiologist and contributor to a widely-used cardiology textbook, here takes readers on a brief and necessarily fast-paced tour of how humans learned about the fuel that makes their lives possible...But although other figures abound, the book’s real hero is William Harvey, the caustic, brilliant 17th-century English physician who was the great pioneer of understanding blood and the circulation of blood...Sethna’s portrait of Harvey is quick and frustratingly glib, and although he goes into greater detail as he brings the story down closer to the present day, the glibness sticks around at the same shrill radio-in-the-barber-shop volume...Some of those readers will doubtless opt out of The Wine-Dark Sea Within and drop it in favor of, for instance, Five Quarts by Bill Hayes...The ones who stick around will get some of the benefits of Sethna’s medical expertise, but they’ll have to hack their way through quite a bit of frothing exuberance to get to it.
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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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