A major new narrative history series exploring over 2,000 years of western medicine, written and presented by medical historian Andrew Cunningham. 6/30. The early transfusion experiments For almost 2,000 years in the West, medical men had been taking blood out of their patients to cure them. It wasn't until 1660 that anyone thought of putting blood in! Andrew Cunningham explores how William Harvey's important and controversial discoveries of the circulation of the blood and the pumping force of the heart led to ideas of 'extending the circulation of the blood beyond the boundaries prescribed for it by Nature' and to pass blood from one person to another. The readers are David Rintoul, Peter Capaldi, Jason Watkins and Scott Handy.