Sunday, September 15, 2013

Why the anxiety about Harvey’s discovery that the heart is a pump?


"Why the anxiety about Harvey’s discovery that the heart is a pump? Because it was not merely the discovery of a little fact about an organ in your chest . For those alive in the seventeenth century , it challenged a whole framework of thinking about spirits and life that had been taken for granted as true since about 150 CE. It threatened the tight connection between the religious framework of life as a matter of spirits and the scientific framework that explored the nature of those very spirits. After Harvey ,after Copernicus and Galileo, that connection ceased to be conveniently tight . Religion could either drop dogma and go with science, or religion and science would move apart ."

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