the essential
Philippe Bécade will begin the 2025 conference cycle of the Academy of Sciences, Arts and Belles-Lettres of Tarn-et-Garonne. The subject will be ‘The discovery of blood circulation: twenty centuries of wanderings’.
From Hippocrates to William Harvey (1578-1657), to whom the discovery of general blood circulation is attributed, the intellectual journey evokes a river with many meanders. But is it really to the English scholar that we owe the discovery of the key which made it possible to understand the entire system? Has blood circulation revealed all its mysteries?
Philippe Bécade, full member of the Academy: “This communication around the circulation of blood will consist of explaining why its discovery took so long to come and why the most prestigious brains have broken their teeth there from Aristotle to Leonardo from Vinci to Galen whose dogmas paralyzed all progress for fourteen centuries.
The second question is a question with an essentially historical connotation: who was the first to approach the truth? It is classic to attribute the discovery to William Harvey but are we so sure? What was the role of Arab, Syrian or Persian medicine in particular?
The third reflection is both an observation and a question: why such a controversy following the publication of Harvey, to the point that Louis XIV himself had to intervene, which allowed Molière to make fun of the Paris medical faculty and from the Sorbonne in ‘The Imaginary Sick’, supported in particular by Descartes and Boileau. Circulation becoming the fashionable subject in both literary and scientific salons.
Finally, I will try to show the extraordinary complexity of circulatory phenomena which have undoubtedly not revealed all their secrets.
Meet on Monday January 6, 2025 at 5 p.m. – Ancien Collège – Maison de la Culture.
Free and free entry.
