| Summary: |
"The Wine-Dark Sea Within offers a revisionist retelling of the history of Western medicine, centered on the quest to understand the nature of blood. Physician Dhun Sethna masterfully weaves together a global story, beginning 3,000 years ago in ancient China and India, continuing through ancient Greece and Rome, the Renaissance, and the Age of Enlightenment. Blood has always been central to our understanding of how the body sustains life. And without a doubt, the most influential description of blood came from Greek physician Galen, who saw health as a function of a person's virtue. In his system, blood ebbed and flowed in the body according to one's behavior. For 1,500 years, the Galenic model of medicine, favored by the Church, reigned supreme. Then, in 1628, an English physician named William Harvey proved that blood does not ebb and flow but rather circulates around the body in a single direction. This discovery is often overlooked, but Sethna argues that it completely changed the course of medicine. Suddenly it was possible to talk about the body in purely secular terms, mechanically, as a system of pumps and pipes. With this insight, Sethna shows that blood circulation paved the way for the foundation of immunology, cardiology, biochemistry, transplant science, and metabolic science. It even influenced the development of thermodynamics and plant respiration. The Wine-Dark Sea Within is above all a story of great ideas, a story of bitter feuds and historical collaborations, backstabbing, deadly heresies and perseverance, featuring some of the world's most famous thinkers in its cast of characters: Homer, Leonardo, Descartes, Lavoisier. It is a richly detailed and provocative history, told by a stunning new voice in popular science"-- |
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