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“Look at this,” she said, picking up a small white part and explaining, “This is a nerve.”
"I have a question," Da Vinci said, studying the cross-sections, his brow furrowing. "I feel like this blood vessel is different. One is light in color, and the other is dark. Do you understand this?"
Hedy was slightly surprised. "You don’t know the difference between veins and arteries?"
He was also somewhat surprised. "What’s that?"
"What about the structure of the heart?"
"Have you ever seen a human heart?"
Okay, got it.
This was the ignorant and uncivilized Middle Ages.
"The anatomy book I read says the blood vessels are all the same, with no distinction," Da Vinci leaned in, carefully examining the different colors. "But I feel like that book has a lot of issues."
"Isn’t dissection forbidden by the Church now?" Hedy suddenly felt she had grasped something important. "So, where did the dissection books come from?"
"They dissect monkeys," Da Vinci said, seemingly unaware of any issue. "Isn’t the structure of humans and monkeys different?"
Hedy took a deep breath and carefully cleaned the fat off the blade.
"Come, let me show you the heart."
The heart was indeed small, about the size of a fist.
It was located in the center of the chest, slightly to the left, andits surface appeared smooth.
Thanks to the good natural ventilation in the basement, otherwise, the smell alone would have been enough to make them faint.
The coffin itself was sealed well, with no insects or pests creeping inside.
Hedy, though nervous, was brave enough to undertake these tasks. As she explained to Da Vinci what the lungs were and their function, she carefully removed the heart, making sure it stayed intact.
Da Vinci wasn’t very familiar with this, and as he sketched, he asked, “Then what? Why are there four chambers?”
They both knew that without the heart, a person would die. But what the heart actually did, how it worked—there was a blank space in their minds.
“Here’s the thing,” Hedy explained, carefully preserving the major blood vessels as she poured water into a cup and poured it into the heart in front of him.
The left and right atria were not connected, and the left and right ventricles could not communicate.
The water flowed from the atrium into the ventricle, but it couldn’t flow back.
“Why is that?”
“Because of the valves.”
Hedy had originally thought she was coming to the Doge’s Palace to work as an alchemist, but here she was, in a basement with candles, giving Da Vinci a lesson in anatomy.
The lecture stretched from the afternoon into the night, with servants coming by to drop off food.
The servants just placed the food from a distance and quickly left, but only Da Vinci had an appetite to eat.
After explaining the general function of the heart, she went on to explain the sternocleidomastoid muscles, where the main veinsand the spine were. Although the things she was describing were common knowledge by modern standards, Da Vinci filled an entire notebook with notes.
Hedy exhausted all the knowledge she had learned in her studies, and by the end, she was both fatigued and hungry.
