Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [37]
Barber-surgeons “breathed veins” to treat all serious maladies and any number of lesser complaints, from asthma and bone fractures to drunkenness and pneumonia. Women were bled to reduce menstrual flow and “lunatics” were drained to treat mental illness. Even drowning victims were bled!
In modern times, with the remarkable medical advances that we see on an almost daily basis, it’s easy to overlook the fact that in many ways medical research was relatively stagnant from the time of the ancient Greeks until the first decades of the twentieth century.
One of those responsible for attempting to revive experimental medicine was Andreas Vesalius. Born into a family of Belgian physicians, Vesalius received his doctorate in 1537 from the University of Padua, where he soon became the chair of surgery and anatomy. There, as in the other early medical schools, Galen’s massive literary output served as the basis for all relevant courses and their syllabi. But rather than blindly accepting Galen’s well-worn teachings, Vesalius took a new and dangerous approach. He employed dissection in his classroom and preached a hands-on approach to his students. Fortuitously, a sympathetic judge gave Vesalius access to the corpses of executed criminals. The young anatomist not only studied their anatomy but also produced a set of remarkable and highly detailed anatomical diagrams, which were included in his seven-volume On the Fabric of the Human Body. It was his masterwork and it hammered Galen’s inaccurate and erroneous views on anatomy into the ground like so many tent pegs. Using cadavers, Vesalius disproved Galen’s concept of invisible pores in the heart. He also demonstrated that the human heart had four chambers (not three) and that half of the body’s major blood vessels did not originate in the liver (as described by Galen). Additionally, Vesalius clearly showed that the liver itself was not the five-lobed organ that Galen claimed it was.
Understandably, Vesalius (who was not yet thirty) upset many of the Galen faithful by dismantling so many of their master’s long-held claims. One outraged Galenite went so far as to publish a paper in which he asserted that the work of Vesalius didn’t prove Galen wrong, it simply indicated that the human body had changed since Galen’s time.
Vesalius died in 1564, after his ship was wrecked returning from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. A long-held rumor that he had fled to the Mideast to escape the Inquisition (after dissecting a “corpse” whose heart suddenly started beating) has been discredited.
Blood is a very special juice.
—Mephistopheles, speaking to Faust
5.
THE RED STUFF
One day while I was rummaging around in a tidal flat on the South Shore of Long Island, a stray bit of metal ribbon sliced a neat new crease in my wrist. I was around ten years old at the time and I remember staring in silent fascination as the blood welled up and then began to run out of the half-inch cut and