The Table After the Eighth Quart

Stephen Hales ties a fourteen-year-old mare onto her back, opens her crural artery, fits a nine-foot glass tube to it, and watches blood climb eight feet three inches before it starts its pulse-by-pulse arithmetic — up twelve inches, then eight, then six, then one, settling into vibrations of two to four inches per beat. He drains her by the quart, refitting the tube after each one, building a table of diminishing heights until, by the eighth quart, he switches to pints because the pressure has grown too faint to measure in anything coarser. Jennings numbers the entries like scripture. Buried in entry 2, between the tying-down and the first quart, is the only sentence in the whole account that admits a subject capable of suffering: "The Pulse of a horse that is well, and not terrified, nor in any pain, is about thirty six Beats in a minute... This mare's Pulse beat about fifty-five times in a minute, and sometimes sixty or a hundred, she being in pain." Four words, bracketed between two numbers, doing the work of acknowledging a nervous system before the table resumes.

What's visible now that wasn't quite visible nine visits ago is what the table