Harvey and the mystery of circulation -- 9/12/24

Today's selection -- from Empire of The Scalpel by Ira Rutkow. In the seventeenth century, William Harvey overturned ideas on blood circulation that had been accepted for over a thousand years:
 
"The seventeenth is best termed 'the century of the mind.' Parades of ge­niuses populated every discipline. Religion and philosophy had Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, and Spinoza; Rembrandt, Teniers, Vermeer, and Wren embodied the visual arts; music was represented by Cavalli, Monteverdi, Purcell, and Stradivari; and de Bergerac, la Rochefoucauld, Milton, and Pepys exemplified literature and the the­ater. In the sciences, Kepler, Galileo, Halley, and Newton explained the motion of the planets and laws of gravity as astrology gave way to astronomy; Beguin, Boyle, Sendivogius, and van Helmont transformed alchemy into chemistry; and Cavalieri, Fermat, Huygens, and Pascal developed novel methods of numerical calculation to create modern mathematics and mechanics. Collectively, these men and their ideas supported the burgeoning Scientific Revolution. Experimentation and observation supplanted blind faith. The subjective became the objective as Galenism was shat­tered. A moment of truth was upon Medicine, one that had a crucial impact on the craft of surgery.

"The man who introduced the new methods of scientific research was William Harvey, an English physician. He based his work on the anatomical studies of Vesa­lius and through dogged and sharp-eyed observations solved the most elusive and fundamental of the mysteries in Medicine: how blood flowed through the human body. It is hard to grasp the enormity of Harvey's achievement without recognizing the prevailing wisdom that his work struck down. Prehistoric humans undoubtedly realized that blood was in motion because, when they butchered a live animal, they saw pulsating arteries and oozing veins. Galen noted that a beating heart contracted in a staggered motion, which led to his hypothesis that two types of blood, arterial (life-giving) and venous (nourishing), were involved in a to-and-fro action.

An experiment from Harvey's de Motu Cordis

"Galen's thinking still held sway through the beginning of the seventeenth cen­tury. He believed that blood was produced in the liver from digested food brought to it via the intestines. In actual fact, the constituents of blood, red blood cells, most white blood cells, and platelets are produced in the bone marrow, the spongy tissue inside the cavities of bone. Galen stated that the dark red blood coming from the liver flowed through the veins of the body and was responsible for factors related to growth and nutrition and that this venous blood was consumed in its travels. He further maintained that the right side of the heart did not pump blood but was a specialized segment of the venous system with one major function, to convey nour­ishment to the lungs. Galen also hypothesized that a portion of the venous blood from the right side of the heart seeped across invisible openings in the septum, the muscular dividing wall between the right and left sides. On the left side of the heart, the venous blood that oozed through the septum mixed with 'spirit-filled' air from the lungs and was transformed into bright red life-sustaining arterial blood. The arterial blood, warmed by the body's natural heat, left the heart and pulsed along the arteries where, in a tidal-like action, it provided vitality to the tissues and was eventually depleted and did not recirculate.

"Galen's model was highly imaginative and wildly inaccurate but remained the archetype of the human cardiovascular system for nearly one and a half thousand years. He had no understanding of the true movement of blood and how it coursed from the right side of the heart to the lungs, where it gained oxygen, and then circled to the left side of the heart to be circulated throughout the body before returning, deprived of oxygen, to the right side of the heart.

"The solution of the mystery of circulation was left to Harvey, a scholar who had a deep understanding of the history and literature of the subject. From Hippocrates to Galen, he knew these men, their writings, their successes, and their failures. Mind­ful of past inaccuracies, Harvey used human dissection, reasoned experimentation, and mathematical analysis to show that the heart is a complex, muscular pump and propels blood continuously through the vascular system in a circle-like fashion. In 1628, when Harvey authored his Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanquinis in Animalibus (Anatomical studies on the motion of the heart and blood in animals), it was as important an event to the future of Medicine as the printing of Vesalius's DeFabrica.
 
"If a man is judged by his appearance and personality then Harvey was an also-ran. Stout and swarthy with an abruptness and testiness that exasperated his colleagues, he offset his eccentricities with sheer brilliance. Harvey's father was a prosperous merchant and his son was well educated. In 1588, the ten-year-old Harvey was sent to the King's School at Canterbury, where students lived a monk-like existence and were encouraged to converse only in Greek or Latin. Five years later, Harvey enrolled at Gonville & Caius College, a constituent unit of the University of Cam­bridge, and his interest in Medicine was soon piqued. Six decades earlier, John Caius, a respected anatomist and founder of the school, had roomed with Vesalius when the two men studied Medicine in Padua. Through Caius's auspices, Elizabeth I granted the faculty at Gonville & Caius the right to anatomize two executed criminals each year. These dissections were carried out in front of the student body. Thus, by the time of Harvey's graduation in 1597, he had received considerable introduction to the nuances of human anatomy."

Author:  Ira Rutkow
Title: Empire of the Scalpel: The History of Surgery
Publisher:Scribner
Date: Copyright 2024
page(s): 79-81

 
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A Flotilla Of Ferries - The 9/11 Boatlift


BOATLIFT is the story of the largest maritime evacuation in history. On 9/11, over 500,000 people were rescued from Manhattan’s seawalls in just nine hours. How did this happen? What heroism made this possible? The answer lies in the resilience of the every day people at the scene that day, and the brave community of mariners who ply the waters of New York’s Harbor.




Eleanor Powell

Begin the Beguine!



Today's selection--from This Was Hollywood by Carla Valderrama. Arguably the greatest of Hollywood’s leading female dancers was Eleanor Powell:


“On November 21, 1934, Ellie celebrated her twenty-second birthday on a train to Hollywood to do a specialty dance in George White's 1935 Scandals. She was wary about the ‘wicked place’ she had heard such awful things about, and her experience there confirmed her fears. She was the only sober member of the cast. Everyone else was constantly drinking, and a lead actor was once ‘so stoned’ he ate the artificial food in a scene. When production wrapped, she headed back to New York, promising herself she'd never go back to Hollywood. But MGM head Louis B. Mayer was impressed by her number in the film and wanted Ellie for a specialty number in the musical extravaganza Broadway Melody of 1936. Ellie told her agent she would do it if they gave her a thousand dollars and an actual role in the film, expecting MGM to tell her to take a hike. They didn't. 


“Instead, on her first day at the studio, Mayer was so impressed by her dancing that he decided to test her for the lead role. Terrified, she tried to talk him out of it, but Mayer told her he ran the studio and if he wanted her to make a test, she was making a test. She got the part, and the studio set about getting her ready for her close-up. 


“MGM had her teeth capped and her freckles faded with a series of ultraviolet light procedures. Her hair was given a permanent wave and a lightening rinse. Her eyebrows were plucked, and the ends were shaved so they could be penciled into perfection. She was given daily diction lessons and taught how to handle her hands properly on the screen. The dancing for the film was nearly as grueling as her makeover: By the end of filming she had lost four toenails on her right foot. It was all worth it when the film premiered. 


“‘Chiefly the cinema news this morning concerns Miss Eleanor Powell, a rangy and likeable girl with the most eloquent feet in show business,’ the New York Times raved. ‘If she is not quite the distaff Fred Astaire, she is certainly the foremost candidate for that exalted throne .... Miss Powell's dazzling pedal arpeggios convert the sober art of tap-dancing into a giddy delight.’ Screenland magazine said ‘not since Fred Astaire's film debut has a movie audience been so electrified.’ Variety wrote, ‘[I]t's inevitable that she be termed a femme Astaire, for she's possessed of the same nimble tread, finished precision and general adeptness in her stepology.’

 

“Mayer signed Ellie to a seven-year contract and gifted her a portrait of himself, inscribed, ‘You are my lucky star!’ MGM built her a special rehearsal hall with two dressing rooms attached, each with its own bath. They also built bleachers on her sets to accommodate the spectators like Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, and Clark Gable, who always dropped by to watch her dance. 


“Ellie choreographed her own numbers, making her the only female choreographer at MGM. She challenged herself with difficult routines, dancing with a dog she trained herself, tapping with a horse, dancing off a diving board and leaping across a pool, and dancing in the rain (long before Gene Kelly). And she never shied away from outrageous stunts like twirling her way down a sixty-foot-high fire pole and dancing across sixteen-foot-high drums—with plenty of splits, flips, and spins along the way. 

“But what audiences really wanted was to see her dance with Fred Astaire. She would soon get the chance, with Mayer deciding he wanted to pair her with Astaire in Broadway Melody of 1940. The only thing left was for Ellie and Fred to meet to make sure their height was a match. At their fateful meeting in Mervyn LeRoy's office, Ellie measured in at five feet, six and a half inches in her stocking feet. Fred, whose height (or lack thereof) was often a subject of debate, would find a way to make do. 


“The two planned to co-choreograph their duet numbers for the film, but their styles were very different, and things started slow. Both were naturally shy and nervous to encroach on the other, and it was unclear who was going to take the lead. Ellie decided to make the first move. 


“‘Mr. Astaire, I have a number and there's something wrong in the middle of it,’ she said. ‘If I did it for you, would you please help me with the center part of it?’ They began to test out moves for each other. After a few days, they had a breakthrough, and Fred ran over excitedly and lifted her, exclaiming, ‘Oh, Ellie!’ Embarrassed at his forwardness, he quickly put her down and said, 


“‘Oh, I beg your pardon, Miss Powell.’ 


“‘Please, we're just a couple of hoofers,’ Ellie told him. ‘Can't I call you Fred?’

 

“Fred smiled, and the ice was finally broken. Both were perfectionists and often worked straight from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. without noticing the time. Ellie later said that they rehearsed as though they were ‘creating a cure for cancer.’ Eventually, they had to set an alarm clock so the piano player could take a break. They spent two weeks just rehearsing their arm movements for their nine-minute-long routine to Cole Porter's Begin the Beguine, hailed by critics and still regarded as a dance classic. 


“One day during production, the great conductor Arturo Toscanini came to see Ellie do what he called ‘the dance with the noise.’ A week later, she received a letter from him saying the three memories he would take with him when he left this world were the Grand Canyon, the sunset, and Eleanor Powell's dancing. 


“The film debuted with the tagline ‘The World's Greatest Dancers In The World's Greatest Musical Show,’ and the critics agreed. ‘Fred Astaire ... is finally teamed with a dancing partner who is his match as a dancer,’ the New York Daily News declared. '’Their work together is so smooth and perfectly timed that watching them together ... is an esthetic treat of major proportions.’


“Fred had no illusions about who was the better dancer.


“‘She “put 'em down” like a man,’ he said, ‘no ricky-ticky-sissy stuff with Ellie. She really knocked out a tap dance in a class by herself.’ Years later, he would tell her son, ‘Your mother is a much better dancer than me!’

“As Ellie's career blossomed, so did her love life. Blanche had instilled a fear of premarital sex in her daughter, and Ellie remained a virgin until her wedding day, when she was nearly thirty-one years old. One day in May 1942, she met an up-and-coming actor named Glenn Ford. ‘I had only seen her in black-and-white movies, and in person I was struck by her coloring, her

chestnut hair, worn in soft waves to her shoulders, this glowing complexion, and beautiful cornflower blue eyes,’ Glenn recalled. ‘And when she smiled, I was just captivated.’


“After their first date, at Musso & Frank's on Hollywood Boulevard, they quickly became inseparable. And on Christmas Day, 1942, Glenn got down on one knee and asked for her hand. America was at war, and Glenn enlisted in the Marines. Ellie announced her retirement from show business.


“Ellie later explained that the main factor in her decision to retire was her marriage to a man just starting his career when she was at the top of hers. ‘He had such an inferiority complex, it was sheer hell,’ she said. Glenn would be told there was a wait at restaurants—until the host would see Ellie and say, ‘Ah! Miss Powell! But, of course, come right this way. We have your table.’ Glenn would ‘die a thousand deaths’ and refuse to eat at the restaurant again. '’We were running out of restaurants,’ Ellie said. ‘Something had to give, and it was my career.’”

This Was Hollywood Forgotten Stars and Stories Turner Classic Movies
 
author: Carla Valderrama  
title: This Was Hollywood: Forgotten Stars and Stories (Turner Classic Movies)  
publisher: Running Press Adult  
date:  
page(s): 160-163