1559 - Medicine

Medicine

Italian anatomist Realdo Colombo, 48, at Padua advances knowledge of human blood circulation. A pupil of Andreas Vesalius, Colombo shows that the right and left ventricles of the heart are separated by an impenetrable wall, that blood is conveyed from the right side to the lungs, where it is mixed with air, and that it returns in aerated form to the right side (the "pulmonary circuit"). But Columbo hews to the traditional view that the liver is the center of the venous system and is the organ that creates blood (see Servetus, 1553; Harvey, 1628).