ABSTRACT
Despite the remarkable discoveries in science and medicine, such as Isaac Newton’s mechanical universe and William Harvey’s pulmonary circulation of the blood, medical practice still relied on variations of Galen’s humoral theory. In the seventeenth century, researchers went from asking “why” to “how” and discovered new paradigms that would transform the ways in which people saw the world and the universe beyond. Even though scientific research advanced new paradigms such as the pulmonary circulation of the blood, medical practice stagnated with the traditional practices of uroscopy and bleeding patients to collect a fee for these services. For example, although Harvey (1578-1657) and Marcello Malpighi (1628-1694) explained the pulmonary circulation of the blood, there was little the average physician could do with this discovery and, thus, without antiseptic surgery, antibiotics, and general anesthesia, open heart surgery could not be performed successfully until the 1960s.1
