An Astonishing Circle: An Interview with Author Maria Parrott-Ryan

In 1628, a controversial medical pamphlet by William Harvey challenged previous scientific beliefs by claiming that blood moved in a circle through the body. This discovery was dismissed as a dangerous lie, but a similar revelation had been made by Ibn al-Nafis, an Arab physician, who made a similar discovery 300 years before. An Astonishing Circle: The Discovery and Denial of the Circulatory System is the story of how humans came to understand the circulatory system.

Today author Maria Parrott-Ryan joins us to share her own journey of discovery, the most surprising piece of research she found, and her love of science stories.

What inspired you to write this book?

It started with a magazine article. Years ago, a children’s magazine I wrote for was planning its October issue around the theme of “blood.” I loved the theme, but no bloody stories popped into my head, so I must have done something extremely sophisticated such as Google the phrase “cool stories about blood.” Through the strange alchemy of the internet, this led me to William Harvey, the Renaissance physician and anatomist who was the first person to accurately describe the circulatory system.

I was intrigued, so I dug into research and wrote a short article. The article was fun, but it wasn’t nearly long enough to share the compelling, surprising story I uncovered. That story stayed in my head for years until I decided it was time to write a book about it. Writing An Astonishing Circle for young adults and older readers was great, because it allowed me to explore some more complicated concepts, such as the history of scientific experimentation, medical ethics, the seeds of science denial, and the bumpy path of scientific progress.

What inspired the first line of your story?

I chose to begin with the sentence, “In 1628 a remarkable book was born.” I wanted to establish, in a cheeky way, that my book would not be a biography of a single male scientist/genius. Instead, it would be the biography of an idea—one that entered the world in the form of short, typo-filled book.

Today, the idea from that book is well-established and non-controversial: our hearts pump blood in a circle throughout our bodies. But during the late Renaissance, that idea was totally new, a little shocking, and potentially dangerous. Many respected medical experts refused to believe it. And while one man, William Harvey, contributed a significant amount to the idea’s development, his understanding of circulation was never complete. Our modern understanding of the circulatory system continued to develop over the centuries, in some fascinating ways and through many remarkable people. 

What is the most surprising thing you discovered during your research?

I learned so manysurprising, shocking, and downright gruesome things about the history of medical education, practice, and research. Happily, I was able to share a lot of that in the book. (Did you know that anatomists used to perform human dissections for public entertainment? Or that for a short time during the seventeenth century, people experimented with lamb-to-human blood transfusions?)

But possibly the most surprising thing was discovering Harvey’s book, The Movement of the Heart and Blood in Animals. In the book, Harvey lays out his evidence for the circulation of the blood. The book was published nearly four hundred years ago, but it remains so significant that it’s easy to find today. It took me about two minutes to discover and download an English translation from the internet (the original was written in Latin). Even more surprising was that the book is fairly easily follow. Part of that must be because during the seventeenth century, the practice and therefore the language of medicine was nowhere near as advanced and complicated as it is today. But I was also delighted to find Harvey’s three primary arguments for circulation simple and straightforward, even for a layperson like me. Essentially, they hinge on observations of the pulse and some simple math.

What drives you to write science stories?

One answer is that while I’ve always been passionate about stories, for most of my life I had no affinity for science. A decade or so ago, I started waking up to the fact that science is full of incredible stories and that by digging into them, I could learn some truly amazing things about our world.

Another answer is that I think science stories can help us better understand a crucial and deceivingly simple idea: that science is a human endeavor. I didn’t come up with that idea; it’s a quote from the Next Generation Science Standards. I do sometimes like to tweak it, though: Science is an all-too-human endeavor. What I mean is that while people often bring really great human tendencies to bear while doing science, such as curiosity, collaboration, and persistence, we just as often bring our less-admirable tendencies to the endeavor, such as envy, arrogance, and intolerance. I’m sure that’s frustrating for actual scientists, but it also makes for some really compelling conflict, which of course is the foundation of compelling stories.

The people I feature in An Astonishing Circle bring many of the good and bad parts of human nature to their investigations of human anatomy. And to make it even more interesting, they were conducting their investigations at the very beginning of what we think of today as science.

What do you hope readers will get out of An Astonishing Circle?

I hope my readers will be entertained by the story and will delight in sharing some of its more disturbing details with their squeamish friends and family members. But I also hope the story will shed light on conflicts that are playing out in science today, and give my readers a deeper appreciation for the messy human endeavor that is science.

Praise for An Astonishing Circle

“Parrott-Ryan turns a seemingly dull topic into a fascinating look at early medicine. . . . [a] refreshingly absorbing and original resource.”—starred, Booklist

“Stimulating, absorbing, and informative.”—starred, Kirkus Reviews

“A thorough, entertaining, and contextual look at one of the most remarkable discoveries in medicine and beyond.”—School Library Journal

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