A Brief History

The ancient Greeks, including Galen and Hippocrates, saw the cardiovascular system as two different networks of arteries and veins. Galen first though that the liver was the one responsible of producing blood and distributing it throughout the body in a centrifugal way while air was absorbed from the lung into pulmonary veins and carried by arteries to the tissues in the body. So, according to him, such system included blood and air dissipated at the ends of arteries and veins depending on the needs of local tissue. However, in 1628, William Harvey published “On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals”, showing that arteries and veins are connected throughout the body rather that only in the lungs and that the beat of the heart produced continuous circulation of blood. This work slowly convinced the medical world of the system we know nowadays as well as it opened new paths to deeper discoveries of such system.

Haemost, J. (2011). Discovery of the cardiovascular system: from Galen to William Harvey [Web portal]. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21781247

Hippocrates

William Harvey

Galen