Topic summary
Heart valves
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Heart valve.
History
Heart valves were first documented by Leonardo da Vinci over 500 years ago. Da Vinci achieved this by doing dissections on cows, pigs, and humans and studying the dissections. Da Vinci also performed vivo studies on pigs, by using small metallic tracers to analyze the movement of blood in the heart. Da Vinci made wax casts of the bull heart to construct glass models of the bull heart to study the hydraulic characteristics of blood flowing through the heart and heart valves. This was done to make a circulation model that would mimic human circulation. Da Vinci used seeds to visualize turbulences and blood flow.