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). All kinds of roles were once ascribed to the heart. Some likened it to a furnace that generated heat for the body. Both Aristotle and Plato thought the heart housed the soul. The surgeon Galen had great influence on Western medicine for more than a millennium. But much of his dogma was erroneous. Leonardo da Vinci, anatomist Andreas Vesalius, and others set the stage for the paradigm-shifting work of William Harvey, who proved "the heart moved like a muscle and its essential function was to propel blood" in "a unidirectional circulation." 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 (such as Roman physician Galen's assertion that veins sprung from the liver). He describes scores of experiments--Leonardo da Vinci using a wine cask valve and live pig hearts to understand how the heart pumps blood, for example--and recounts historical controversies, such as whether the soul itself might be blood. 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 ("Eccentricity and a disregard for conventions were at no time un-sympathetic to him. Among the pleasing errors of his young mind was his opinion of his own importance," he writes of surgeon Realdo Colombo), and he's prone to platitudes ("In academics, as in love, it does not do to give oneself wholly"). Still, it's an impressive story; devotees of medical history will have plenty to enjoy. (June)