The Wine-Dark Sea Within by Dhun Sethna

The Wine-Dark Sea Within: A Turbulent History of Blood
By Dhun Sethna
Basic Books, 2022

The basic realities of blood — that it’s pumped by the heart, that it circulates throughout the body, that it carries nutrients vital to life — occupy a strange duality in the lore of human knowledge. For millennia, the basics of volume, production, and all of that pumping were known with intimate familiarity by every marketplace butcher, midwife, and battlefield soldier on the planet. And yet the actual mechanics that every school child and casual amateur knows today (a moviegoer ignorant of biology will instantly know if a bloody wound on-screen “looks real”) were mysteries to those front-line witnesses and to bookish theorizers alike. Aristotle of course had his say, but the light of science took thousands of years to penetrate veins and arteries.

The story of that slow, piecemeal discovery is the subject of Dhun Sethna’s new book, The Wine-Dark Sea Within. Sethna, an academic cardiologist and contributor to a widely-used cardiology textbook, here takes readers on a brief and necessarily fast-paced tour of how humans learned about the fuel that makes their lives possible.

Names like Galen, Vesalius, and Leonardo fill Sethna’s pages, along with lesser-known figures like 18th century chemist Joseph Black, who burst onto the medical scene of Scotland with his master’s thesis (Sethna enthuses: “Everything about that remarkable work was historic!”), or Cornishman John Mayow, a great synthesizer of the standout medical ideas of his time (Sethna enthuses: “He was equally eager to make them his own, and he was more than reticent in acknowledging their true sources!”). 

But although other figures abound, the book’s real hero is William Harvey, the caustic, brilliant 17th-century English physician who was the great pioneer of understanding blood and the circulation of blood. There are preliminary breakthroughs all around him, but it’s Harvey who drew together the strands and did the experiments (vivisections, countless thousands of them, conducted on strapped-down and screaming members of nearly a dozen species but mostly dogs) and laid the groundwork for a broad spectrum of future inquiries. Harvey stands as a marvel in Sethna’s book, someone who “lived not only one of the greatest adventures of all time in medicine but, in the process, experienced insecurity, vulnerability, and frailty of the human condition,” as he puts it. “He is a man of the present; he belongs everywhere.” His fame did not quite penetrate to the provinces, as Sethna gently points out. When Harvey was buried in the family tomb in Hempstead, the locals knew he’d been a great man but had no idea why. (With tiresome predictability, Sethna enthuses: “Alas, W. H. – we hardly knew ye!”).

Sethna’s portrait of Harvey is quick and frustratingly glib (even more frustrating is how few better alternatives exist – where are the great biographies of this towering figure?), and although he goes into greater detail as he brings the story down closer to the present day, the glibness sticks around at the same shrill radio-in-the-barber-shop volume. Book sections crop up regularly with titles like “Who’s on First?”, “The French Connection”, “A Confederacy of Circulateurs”, and “Niter, Niter, Everywhere.” A tiny bit, a very tiny bit of this kind of morose jocosity might serve to enliven things (the same might be said of two or three exclamation points, although not the several thousand this author uses), but this much of it starts to raise unwanted questions, foremost being: is this a serious work written for the intelligent non-specialist, or is it tired standup written for bored undergraduates? After a few dozen pages, even the hardiest readers won’t care anymore. 

Some of those readers will doubtless opt out of The Wine-Dark Sea Within and drop it in favor of, for instance, Five Quarts by Bill Hayes. The ones who stick around will get some of the benefits of Sethna’s medical expertise, but they’ll have to hack their way through quite a bit of frothing exuberance to get to it. 

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.