Every day your heart beats a 100,000 times
and your blood travels 12,000 miles.
Egyptians believed it wasn't blood that travelled
they believed that the heart and other organs had
wills of their own and could move around
independently inside the body.
In the Fourth Century BC, Aristotle
- who by all accounts look like a cross between a hipster and Rory McGrath -
said the heart was the seat of intelligence, motion and sensation
and that it was a hot, dry organ.
Other organs, he thought, like the
brain and liver merely existed to keep the heart cool.
Around 275BC, a guy called Erasistratus almost figured
out the principle of circulation
but thought that the heart pump air containing the
animal spirits around the body.
Before you write him off as a dunce
it's worth noting that after death the
heart and arteries don't contain blood
as it pools in the veins, so this theory
held up for about 500 years until Galen
- shown here having just walked into a plate glass window -
started prodding about in hearts.
He said, [bad Greek accent] "The heart is, as it were,
the hearthstone and source of the innate heat by which the animal is governed."
I wish they weren't all Greeks
I can only really do German and French accents.
Galen felt the heart was secondary
to the liver in importance, since it didn't produce any humour.
The heart continued to be studied in Europe
and Islam, where in the 1200s, Ibn-al-Nafiz
correctly traced pulmonary circulation
but he wasn't very popular at parties and
no one paid any attention.
So it wouldn't be until 1628, when English
physicist William Harvey wrote On the Circulation of Blood,
that we would know that the heart's one role is the
transmission of the blood and its
propulsion by means of the arteries to
the extremities everywhere.
He once restarted an arrested pigeon's heart by flicking it
Very scientific, isn't it?
Flick it.
He realised that blood had to be circulated
when he calculated the volume of blood
being pumped by the heart.
The irony being that he could have learned from
any butcher that cutting an artery would
leave an animal completely exsanguinated
in a matter of minutes.
Amazingly, the effect of electricity
on the heart was being researched as
early as the 1770s. A British physician
called Squires stimulating the heart of
a young girl with electricity in 1774
and a Danish physicist called Abildgaard
reanimating a chicken after
trying electric shocks on various bits of it.
Don't play with your food.
In 1797, Alexander von Humboldt
found a dead bird in his garden
and brought it back to life
by placing electrodes in its beak
and rectum. He then tried the experiment on
himself, with less favourable results...
During the French Revolution
Bichat and Nysten used electricity to restart the hearts
of some of the many beheaded
bodies cluttering up the place.
Astonishingly, pacemakers were being
trialled as early as the late 1920s
developed independently in Australia and America.
In 1957, a dog with an artificial heart survives...
for 90 whole minutes.
In 1963 the first patent for an artificial
heart is granted to a man called
Paul Winchell, a ventriloquist -
now there's a novelty act
Winchell’s work is aided by Dr Henry Heimlich -
yes, that Heimlich!
Four years later, a South African called Louis Washkansky
survived for 18 days after the world's
first successful heart transplant.
Only in the 1980s did the procedure become
more successful and widespread and now
300 are carried out in the UK every year.
Did you know that if you take a single
heart cell and put it in a petri dish
it would have a pulse
and if you took one from another heart
it would have a different pulse
but if you then push them together
so that they were touching
they’d synchronise?
That’s kind of beautiful, isn't it?