Quest

All of us have seen how blood comes out when we suffer a wound. But do we know how this blood is held inside our body, how it keeps flowing inside and how it is supplied to different organs of our body? Clear answers to these questions were not known four hundred years ago, until a British medical scientist, William Harvey conducted a series of experiments and published in 1628 his conclusions on blood flow.

His conclusions were not restricted to simple statements like, blood flows through vessels inside the body. He discovered the entire process of blood circulation, which takes place in two steps. Blood flows from the heart to the lungs, where it is purified and comes back to the heart. It is then carried to different organs through a network of arteries. Harvey’s discovery is extremely important from two points of view. Apart from describing the entire process, it enabled medical science to understand the various diseases and malfunctioning of blood vessels and discover ways to treat them.

Historianssay that an Arab doctor, Ibne-AI-Naffis (1205-1288) had also come to similar conclusions. However, he was not given the credit for discovering blood circulation since his findings did not reach Europe.