Dr Alana Skuse

speaker

639 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 8 May

Dr Alana Skuse’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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You're Dead to Me · Renaissance Medicine (Radio Edit) · 8 May 2026 podcast

Yes, he is a clever chap.

Before this point, you talked about Galen and blood.

And the Galenic theory of blood is that you make blood mostly in your liver and then the heart adds oxygen into the blood.

And then it kind of goes around the body, but it sort of just sloshes around the body.

William Harvey, he measured how much blood you could pump out of the heart.

And he worked out for that to be true, you'd have to be making enormous quantities of blood from your liver every day, like multiples of what you weigh.

So he's like, OK, that can't be true.

So he gets ligatures and he puts them around people's arms.

Yeah.

And then he looks at what happens to the arm.

And if you have the ligature really tight, the arm will go cold.

But if you have the ligature a bit looser, the arm will go hot and fat because the arteries are further down in the body than the veins.

So from there, and using various weird experiments on animals...

He works out that the blood does in fact go round and round the body.

It's not completely like we would understand it now, but he's pretty close.

It starts off with the barbers and for ages they're called the Company of Barber Surgeons because the barbers back in medieval times... They sung lovely songs, didn't they?

Can you imagine?

Four-part harmonies while sawing away.

So the barbers, they are pretty handy with a razor and the monks that were doing most of the medicine back in the medieval period are not actually supposed to spill blood.

So they get the barbers in to do things like that.

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