Compare And Contrast Hardy And Harvey

With each passing moment, with each tick of the second hand on a clock, humans learn more about themselves and the natural world that surrounds them. In the past, knowledge was not always based on fact. Rather observation and cultural and religious influences dictated schools of thought. Over two thousand years ago, in the years between 460-377 B.C., ancient Greek physician and philosopher Hippocrates, developed the humoral theory of medicine. A theory that would shepard medicine for the next two millennia. It wasn’t until the beginning of the seventeenth century that English physician William Harvey, would radically reform the understanding of the human body. Although both Harvey and Hippocrates were concerned with the nature and function

Hippocrates was concerned with the external observation of the body and disease, while Harvey was intrigued with the inner workings of the human anatomy. “The Nature of Man” was the Hippocratic text in which Hippocrates introduced the humoral theory of medicine. This theory, revolved around the idea that the body was composed of four humors - phlegm, yellow bile, black bile, and blood, and that the balance and position of these humors determined one’s state of health. Hippocrates explained that “pain occurs when one of the substances presents either a deficiency or an excess, or [when] it is separated from the body and does not mix with the others” (43). The pain is experienced both from the site where the humor was discharged as well as where the substance originated internally. Hippocrates expressed that the four humors are always present in the body, but the amount of each substance is related to the time of year. He understood that the body was influenced by, and reflected its, external environment. Like the seed of a tree soaking up the contents of soil, the body, to some extent, absorbs what is in

Consumed by the mystery of how blood was moved throughout the body, Harvey meticulously dissected dozens of animals and examined countless cadavers to feed his curious mind. Harvey was a pioneer in the field and his findings refuted many popular beliefs on human anatomy at the time. He made four very important discoveries. The first, blood is circulated throughout the body in a recycling process. Harvey calculated the heart pumped “8,460 ounces [of blood] per hour” . This “forced [him] to conclude that the heart does not continually produce new blood but rather circulates or “recycles” it” (68). The Second, blood contains air. For many years it was believed that “arteries contained blood and blood alone, neither air nor spirits”, yet when Harvey cut off the access to air to the pulmonary vein in a dog but allowed for an incision to be made so that air entered the lungs, the beast could not survive. The evidence proved that air is somehow transmitted through the pulmonary vein to the heart. The third discovery was the pulse is not produced by the arteries pulling blood in, but rather by blood being pushed by the heart into the arteries, enlarging them. Harvey’s final major discovery was there are no vessels in the heart’s septum. All of the blood in the right ventricle goes to the lungs and then through the pulmonary veins to the left ventricle Similarly,