A gruesome sort

Everybody knows that the heart pumps blood around the body, and that a man called William Harvey somehow discovered this fact. Before Harvey, people thought that blood moved around the body in a sluggish fashion. But then Harvey — who was born 14 years after Shakespeare — noticed that, actually, blood shoots out of the heart with great force, travels through the arteries, and then makes its way back to the heart through the veins. To find this out, in an age before X-rays, sonograms or heart monitors, you would, if you think about it, have had to be a pretty gruesome sort of person.

As soon as I started this book, I was gripped with a curiosity I should, I realised, have had all along. How did Harvey make his discovery? I had to wait until about halfway through the book to find out. Meanwhile Thomas Wright, a decent biographer, got me acquainted with Harvey — who, after Newton, Darwin, Einstein and Galileo, is one of the most important scientists who ever lived.