Antidepressants Blog

Man has always been acquainted with blood. Inevitable wounds caused it to flow and the spurting from arteries showed that there was great pressure back of it. Yet it was not until the time of the Pilgrims’ coming to America that William Harvey showed how the blood was continually pumped by the heart through the arteries and returned by way of the veins.
Harvey was one of the great observers. Philosophers had said that the hen broke the egg open to free the chick. Harvey looked and found that the chick itself did the pecking open. After he had studied at Caius College, Cambridge, (pronounced “keys” and still the great training school for English physicians) he began to study the heart and blood vessels in men and animals. It was known that both arteries and veins were filled with blood, but it was thought that it just surged back and forth. Harvey studied the action of the heart; he saw that the valves prevented back flow; and he estimated the capacity of the heart and the rate of the flow. When he was through, there was no disputing his theory of the circulation.
During the English Civil War he was an intimate of Charles I and accompanied him on his campaigns. There is a pretty story of his sitting under a hedge at one battle reading a book to the royal children, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, until a cannon ball grazed the ground near them. Charles lost the war and was beheaded, but Harvey was not bothered by the Parliamentarians. He was evidently somewhat the type of his namesake of whom Samuel Johnson said, “If you call a dog Hervey, I shall love him.”
We must consider Harvey’s work all the more remarkable as we realize that he could not know or demonstrate part of the course of the blood. It was some years later that the microscope was perfected so that Malpighi could see and describe the capillaries. These are the minute vessels through which the blood gets from the arteries to the veins; they are so small that the red blood corpuscles have to go through single file. In the days of small distances we were impressed to learn that if all one’s capillaries were placed end to end they would reach two and a half times around the earth at the equator.
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Congenital heart disease refers to defects of the heart that are present at birth. About 6 to 8 babies out of every 1,000 who are born alive have a congenital heart defect.
When you consider that 3 weeks after conception the heart consists of a tiny tube that folds, fuses, excavates, and molds itself so that all of its basic structures are present by the eighth week of development, it is more amazing that things turn out right as often as they do.
If your child has a congenital heart defect, you probably have many questions. What exactly is wrong? How did it happen? How will it affect your child’s life? What can be done about it? Your doctor will answer these questions specifically as they relate to your family, but this section provides a general background to help you understand the information.
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