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An Astonishing Circle: The Discovery and Denial of the Circulatory System

An ingenious discovery, dismissed as a dangerous lie. In 1628, anatomist and physician William Harvey made a controversial claim: that blood circulated continuously through the body, pumping from the heart through the blood vessels into the tissues and then returning to the heart. His research contradicted many anatomy "experts" of the time. In the seventeenth century, European physicians did not go against the ancient Greek and Roman thinkers who'd created the foundations of Western medicine. But what if those foundations were wrong?