An obvious candidate for the seminal event in the history of haemorheology is Harvey's presentation of the concept of the circulation of the blood. Prior to this, the ideas concerning the movement of blood were based, in Europe and Middle East, largely on the principles laid down by Galen, and these had been, in effect, dogma for nearly a millennium and a half. These principles were basically that blood is formed in the liver, thence it travels to the bodily organs and is consumed -hence there is one-way flow and no circulation of the blood at all. Harvey's revolutionary idea that blood circulates repeatedly around the cardiovascular system laid the foundation for haemorheology because once that idea was accepted then the fluidity of the blood immediately became potentially of crucial importance - and haemorheology was conceived. In this paper the ideas that preceded Harvey will be presented, i.e. those of Galen, Ibn al-Nafis, Vesalius, Fabricius and Colombo etc. Harvey's awareness of this background, due mainly to time spent in Padua, triggered his many experimental investigations and discoveries. Ultimately, these led to his astonishing insights published in De Mortu Cordis in 1628 which changed the understanding of the cardio-vascular system forever.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 8. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 11 August 2026.
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#6,144,195
of 34,559,526 outputs
Outputs from Clinical Hemorheology & Microcirculation
#38
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Outputs of similar age
#86,698
of 471,146 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Clinical Hemorheology & Microcirculation
#3
of 19 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,559,526 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done well and is in the 81st percentile: it's in the top 25% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 569 research outputs from this source. They receive a mean Attention Score of 3.1. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 93% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 471,146 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done well, scoring higher than 80% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 19 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 84% of its contemporaries.
