William Harvey

(PD) Image: From book: William Harvey, by D'Arcy Power, 1897
William Harvey. From book of that name by D'Arcy Power, 1897

William Harvey (1578-1657), a late 16th early 17th century English physician, gifted humanity with one of the most important contributions to the progress of medical science. By introducing quantitative methods into anatomical and physiological investigations, Harvey discovered that the heart pumps blood through the body, and does so via a system of vessels such that the blood moves in a circle, from the heart through the arteries and back to the heart through the veins. Publishing those findings in his 1628 book, Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (Anatomical Exercises on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals), usually referred to as De Motu Cordis, Harvey made the following contributions in the history of medical science:

• He solved a puzzle that unknowingly had eluded the western world's Galenic physicians up to his time — namely, the cardinal features of the map of the transport path of blood through the body — that blood circulates through the body from the heart and back to the heart;
• He reintroduced the concept of experimentation in scientific studies, earlier introduced by Galen but mostly ignored by medical researchers for nearly one and a half millennia;
• He introduced the first use of quantitative methods in medical research — by estimating the volume of blood pumped by the heart each day and showing the improbability that the amount of food consumed each day, if entirely converted to blood by the liver, as blood was supposedly formed, could account for that volume; and,
• Independently of of contemorary, Francis Bacon, he showed that reasoning by induction — generalizing from a collection of separate but related facts — could yield inferences about human physiology.

Brief sketch of Williams Harvey’s life

Born in 1578 (April 1, at Folkstone, Kent), after Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) had died but his reputation for his remarkably detailed and illustrated human anatomical studies had not. William Harvey lived nearly to the age of 80 years, dying in 1657. His father, a landowner, could afford to send him to the University of Cambridge which he entered at age 16 years and received his B.A. at age 19 years. Harvey developed an interest in medicine and decided to go Italy, one of the major centers of intellectual activity in Europe at the time, and he enrolled in the then renown University of Padua, studying medicine under the noted anatomist Fabricius of Aquapendente, receiving his Doctor of Medicine at age 24 years, April 1602.

After Padua, he returned to England and developed a practice in medicine, became a Fellow of the College of Physicians in London, and married. He secured a position as physician at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, one of London’s great hospitals, and distinguished himself as a physician. In 1616, at age 38 years, the College of Physicians elected him their Professor of Anatomy, in which position he made his discovery of the circulation of the blood.

In 1618 he became physician extraordinary to the king (James I), and after Charles I succeeded the throne, in 1625, Harvey became the King’s physician, and benefitted from the King’s patronage to pursue his medical investigations. When civil strife engulfed England, Harvey, now in his 60s retired to London to live with a brother, pursuing his experiments until he died.  

De Motu Cordis

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