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The Man Who Demystified the Human Heart

The long road to understanding how the heart works began almost 400 years ago, when the English physician William Harvey discovered that an organ long revered as the center of human being was in fact just a pump with no power of sensation. This discovery was dramatically confirmed in 1641, when Harvey met a young Irish nobleman named Hugh Montgomery. When he was 10 years old, Montgomery fell from a stumbling horse onto a jutting rock, which pierced and broke multiple ribs on his left side. The wound abscessed and healed, leaving a hole in the boy’s chest through which his beating heart was visible.

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