AN ASTONISHING CIRCLE

A salute to the Scientific Revolution based on a still-topical case study in the value of empirical knowledge over unquestioning belief in authority.

“Some of his methods were simple. Others were brilliant. A few were truly awful.” With zest and fascination, children’s nonfiction author Parrott-Ryan describes in exact (and sometimes gruesome) detail the work of 17th-century English physician William Harvey. His willingness to accept what he saw when he cut into dead people (including his own father) and performed vivisections on animals led to a radical advance in our understanding of human anatomy—and years of pushback from colleagues trained to regard Galen and Hippocrates as medical gospel. Harvey’s tale is a departure point for examining later efforts to answer questions that he left open, such as why blood circulates. The book also includes a glittering array of diversions, including capsule histories of ancient Greek and medieval Islamic medicine. Descriptions of the gory if festive autopsies known as “public anatomies” once performed before crowds, sometimes to musical accompaniment, also make delicious reading. Of particular value are profiles of 16th-century Italian savant Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia and other women who broke gender and racial barriers to become physicians, and James McCune Smith, a formerly enslaved man who became the first Black American to earn a medical degree, although he had to travel to Scotland to do so. Anatomical diagrams and illustrations add information and period flavor.

Stimulating, absorbing, and informative.