Professor Robin Condliffe
speaker
497 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 7 Jul
Professor Robin Condliffe’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And he had this idea that blood was produced from the liver.
It would go into the right side of the heart and go across tiny little holes or pores into the left side of the heart.
and air would come in through the lungs and would mix with the blood in the left side of the heart and form a thing called pneuma, or your spirit.
Now, we know now that was not the case, but as we say, for many years, received wisdom in Western medicine was this was the function of the lungs.
In Syria, in, I think it was the 1200s, Ibn al-Nafis, he...
suggested something very similar to what we now see as the role of the lungs and the pulmonary circulation.
But it wasn't until Vesalius, so Vesalius was a Belgian physician in the 16th century, who was the first person to really do systematic human dissection.
Until then, there'd been dogma against human dissection for obvious reasons.
From animals, yes, exactly.
Small animals, big animals, I don't know.
But no human dissection.
And Vesalius, if you get hold of his book, he dissected the human body.
And the book is very, very beautiful, dissections explaining how the anatomy... Now, that doesn't necessarily say how the physiology, how blood flowed, how air flowed, but it certainly showed there were no pores in the lungs at all.
And it showed the connections between the liver, between the lungs and the heart.
William Harvey, you've heard of William Harvey in the 17th century, beginning of the 17th century.
Harvey did some wonderful experiments demonstrating how the circulation works.
It's the arm, he's not looking at the lung, but you tighten a tourniquet up in the arm.
Tighten, make it really tight and your arm goes white and you can't feel an artery.
If you loosen a little bit,
then blood starts going in, but the veins are still blocked.
Showing 21–40 of 497 · page 2 of 25
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