Draft: this lesson was written with AI help and has not yet been read by a human editor.
1 What your class asks
This lesson asks you to describe the basic structure and function of vital organs, here the heart and the lungs, and how body systems relate to each other. The museum offers one physician's account of the route the blood takes between the two sides of the heart through the lung. Other organs and other systems are for your class to study. 1
Curriculum expectations, with their official codes
- B2.2 describe the basic structure and function of vital organs in various systems in the human body
- B2.3 describe interrelationships between human body systems
2 The lesson
What path does blood follow through the heart and lungs?
Draw the heart as two sides, with the lungs beside it. Mark where blood enters, where it leaves and which organ it passes through, then compare your drawing with a partner's.
How does one organ depend on another?
Choose the heart or the lungs. Ask what the other organ would have to do differently if the first stopped working well, and what you could measure to find out.
Go deeper
Your heart has two big rooms, one on the right and one on the left, with a wall between them 2. About eight hundred years ago, doctors thought this wall had tiny holes, too small to see, and that blood went through them from one side to the other 2. Ibn al-Nafis wanted to explain Ibn Sina's anatomy, and when he reached the heart he departed from Ibn Sina and from Galen before him 3. The physician looked and said there are no holes here and the wall is solid: the blood leaves the right room, goes to the lung and comes back to the left room 2.
Think about it
Doctors had taught that blood crosses the wall of the heart through tiny holes, but Ibn al-Nafis looked and said the wall is solid. Whom would you believe, an old teaching or a doctor who looked, and why?
Into the museum
- The pulmonary circulation: Galen's route and Ibn al-Nafis's route, set side by side.
- Ibn al-Nafis: the physician, and the books he left to a hospital.
Try this
Read about the pulmonary circulation. Draw the route it describes in one colour, then mark in another colour the route through the wall between the ventricles that it rejects.
3 Check yourself
Nothing here is marked or sent anywhere. It is for you.
In your own words: what does Pulmonary circulation have to do with this lesson?
Compare with the card
The blood's route through the lung. In the thirteenth century the physician Ibn al-Nafis wrote, in his commentary on the anatomy of Ibn Sina's Canon, that blood does not cross from the right ventricle of the heart to the left through pores in the wall between them, as Galen had taught, because that wall is solid; it reaches the left ventricle from the lung. Which organs does the blood visit on this route?
I can now
Notes
- 1. Ontario Ministry of Education, The Ontario Curriculum: Science and Technology, Grades 1–8 (2022)
- 2. John B. West, 'Ibn al-Nafis, the pulmonary circulation, and the Islamic Golden Age' (2008), pp. 1877–1880, §Pulmonary circulation
- 3. John B. West, 'Ibn al-Nafis, the pulmonary circulation, and the Islamic Golden Age' (2008), pp. 1877–1880, §Ibn al-Nafis