Experiments on Animals

Galen tied off an artery, opened it between the ligatures, and found blood—not the “breath of life” ancient physicians expected. Why did the lesson of this startling experiment lie forgotten for centuries?

Stephen Paget traces the long struggle to understand the body, from Galen in the second century to William Harvey’s investigations in the seventeenth. In an age when revered authorities could outweigh what the eye revealed, generations of anatomists described the vessels yet mistook the blood’s course. Paget follows the experiments on living animals that helped challenge inherited theories, while asking what such research has cost—and what it has made possible. The story is also part of a modern debate over the rules governing animal experimentation in Britain. How did Harvey find his way through the heart’s bewildering motion to the truth of the circulation?

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