William Harvey

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William Harvey

Library of Congress

[b. Folkestone, England, April 1, 1578, d. London or Roehampton, Surrey, June 3, 1657]

Harvey was the first to propose that the heart is a pumping organ that propels blood on a circular course through the body, leaving through arteries and returning to the heart through veins. He noted that blood spurts from a cut artery in conformity with muscular contractions of the heart, and observed that clamping a vein causes it to swell with blood on the side away from the heart.

William Harvey (1578-1657) was both a physician and a remarkable natural historian. His great achievement was the demonstration of the circulation of the blood, a discovery which replaced centuries of theory and speculation with knowledge firmly based on accurate observation and experiment. His work was of vital importance in illustrating the sequence of hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion which has governed all medical discovery since his time. He was the founder of modern physiology.

Harvey was born in Folkestone in Kent on 1 April 1578, the son of a yeoman, James Harvey, and his wife Joane Halke. Aged ten, in the year of the Spanish Armada, he was sent to King's School, Canterbury, and from there to Cambridge University, being admitted to Gonville and Caius College on 31 May 1593. He graduated BA in 1597 and deciding to study medicine, travelled though France and Germany to Padua, where Galileo was then teaching. There is no evidence that Harvey ever met Galileo, nor of whether he believed in the heliocentric view of the universe. His own mentor was the great anatomist, Fabricius of Aquapendente, who maintained the traditions of Vesalius at Padua. Harvey graduated MD in Padua on 25 April 1602 and returned to London, taking his Cambridge MD in that same year. Two years later he married Elizabeth Browne, daughter of Dr Lancelot Browne, onetime physician to Queen Elizabeth. In 1607, he became a Fellow of the College of Physicians and in 1609 began his long association with St Bartholomew's Hospital, on appointment as assistant physician.

In 1615, Harvey was elected Lumleian Lecturer at the College of Physicians, and he delivered his first lectures in April 1616. The notes he used for these lectures not only illustrate his wide reading and knowledge of the classics, but also reveal some of the ideas that led him to the discovery of the circulation of the blood. For many years he gave the Lumleian lectures annually at the College.

His position as a physician was increasingly recognized in wider circles through these years. In 1618 he became physician to James I, initiating a link with the Royal family that persisted throughout his long life. In 1630, at the behest of King Charles I, he accompanied the Duke of Lennox on a European tour and two years later travelled with the King to Scotland. In the years before the Civil War he was in London, but he went to Oxford in attendance on the King in 1642. There, on 7 December, he was made MD of the University. He pursued his anatomical studies and dissections at Merton College. He was at the battle of Edgehill and is said to have had charge of the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York during the action. After the surrender of Oxford in 1646, he returned to London and there continued his scientific studies. He was active in the affairs of the College of Physicians, being elected President in 1654, an honour he declined because of his increasing years, being 76 years old. In that same year he donated his library to the College. He died on 3 June 1657 and was interred at Hempstead.

Harvey's monumental work De Motu Cordis was published in 1628. In his dedication to King Charles I, he likened the position of the monarch in his kingdom with that of the heart within the body. Until that time, medical opinion was governed by the views of the second century writer, Galen, whose works had gained a position among learned physicians that was almost akin to holy writ. The Galenical view was that the blood was formed in the liver from nutrients derived from the intestine. It passed from there to the heart, where it was imbued with ‘vital spirits’, and then traversed the septum (which divides the right and left sides of the heart) through invisible ‘pores’. The different functions of the veins and arteries were unknown and the blood was considered to ebb and flow in the veins to reach the tissues of the body.

Harvey's observations clearly showed the Galenical view to be erroneous. Using experiments in animals such as the snake, he demonstrated that the blood passed from the veins to the right side of the heart (the right ventricle), that the supposed pores in the septum of the heart did not exist, and that the right ventricle propelled the blood into the lungs. It then returned to the left side of the heart. The left ventricle was thicker and more powerful than its counterpart on the right side, because it pumped blood not just through the lungs but throughout the entire body. Harvey clearly demonstrated that blood in the arteries was always carried away from the heart, and how the valves in the veins, originally described by his teacher, Fabricius, ensured that the venous blood always flowed towards the heart. He calculated how much blood might be propelled from the heart with each heart beat and showed there was no likelihood that the liver could synthesize sufficient blood to enter the heart as proposed by the Galenists. From ingenious but classically simple experiments and observations, Harvey concluded that the only explanation for the heart's action must be that a defined amount of blood constantly circulated throughout the body.

Harvey's discovery, comparable to the anatomical studies of Vesalius, was of great importance in destroying the influence of Galen, whose dogmatic assertions had by then become pernicious. It was perhaps natural that so novel and original a discovery would generate controversy. On the continent, Leyden was the first university to accept Harvey's conclusions; in many other schools, particularly in Paris, it was a further half century before Harvey's work was fully appreciated. So important was his work, however, that by the beginning of the eighteenth century the great Dutch teacher of medicine in Leyden, Hermann Boerhaave, stated that nothing that had been written before Harvey was any longer worthy of consideration.

Harvey was interested in many other aspects of comparative anatomy and physiology, for example the problem of reproduction, then poorly understood. But his discovery of the circulation of the blood remains his lasting memorial. His death in 1657 preceded by three years the foundation, by Charles II, of the Royal Society of London. It was, however, in large part due to the influence of William Harvey that the Society chose as its motto ‘Nullius in verba’

— C. C. Booth

Bibliography

• Keynes, G. (1978). The life of William Harvey. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
• Whitteridge, G. (1976). William Harvey: an anatomical disputation concerning the movement of the heart and blood in living creatures. Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford, London

See also blood circulation.

The English physician William Harvey (1578-1657) was the founder of modern experimental physiology and the first to use quantitative methods to establish verifiability in the natural sciences.

Born in Folkestone, Kent, on April 1, 1578, William Harvey came from a prosperous family. After 6 years at King's School, Canterbury, he entered Caius College, Cambridge, in 1593, indicating a preference for a medical career. When he was 20, he went to the University of Padua, the center for western European medical instruction, where he studied under the famed anatomist Fabricius of Aquapendente. In 1602 Harvey was awarded degrees at Padua and at Cambridge.

Harvey was admitted as a candidate of the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1604, and that year married Elizabeth Browne, daughter of Lancelot Browne, physician to King James I. In 1609 Harvey became physician to St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London, and in 1616 he gave the first of his Lumleian Lectures before the Royal College of Physicians, the manuscript notes of which contain the first account of blood circulation. In 1618 Harvey was appointed physician extraordinary to King James I.

Although Harvey's practice suffered because of his radical views, he was appointed physician in ordinary to King Charles I in 1630, and in 1633 he was with Charles's court in Scotland. Professionally, Harvey made news by examining and exonerating several suspected witches and by performing a postmortem examination on Thomas Parr, reputed to have lived 152 years. In 1642, the year he fled from London with the court, he was made doctor of physic at Oxford. When his brothers died in 1643, Harvey retired from St. Bartholomew's Hospital. In 1646 he fled with the court from Oxford back to London and retired to live with his remaining brothers.

Harvey's great contribution, Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus, appeared in 1628. It was a poorly printed 72-page book, done by an obscure printer in Frankfurt. Harvey probably arranged it this way in order to avoid trouble in England, for he realized that his ideas flaunted the conventional teaching about the heart, which had been derived from the writings of Galen. De motu cordis was a landmark in the history of science. In it Harvey demonstrated the circulation of blood in animals, thus giving a firm foundation for the scientific development of the health professions. It must have been composed at different times, for the introduction is more vigorous, and in its critical attitude more youthful, than any of the rest of the 17 chapters.

Harvey's De generatione (1651; On the Generation of Animals) pioneered modern embryology and comparative sex psychology. This work was important in holding that the embryo builds gradually from its parts, rather than existing preformed in the ovum. His studies here were balked by the same difficulty which beset him in his studies on the circulation: he had no microscope. He could neither demonstrate directly how blood would move from arteries to veins, although he postulated the capillary anastomoses, nor could he see directly how the embryo gradually aggregated. In most cases the demonstration was completed by Marcello Malpighi, the great Italian biologist, who was one of the first to have and use a microscope.

In 1653 appeared the first English edition of De motu cordis, and Harvey's genius was fully recognized. He gave buildings and a library to the Royal College of Physicians, although he refused its presidency. He died of a stroke on June 3, 1657, and, "lapt in lead, " was buried in Hempstead church.

Further Reading

The Works of William Harvey, a translation with a notice of his life by R. Willis, first appeared in Everyman's Library in 1907. Biographies of Harvey are Archibald Malloch, William Harvey (1929); Louis Chauvois, William Harvey: His Life and Times (trans. 1957); K. D. Keele, William Harvey the Man, the physician, and the Scientist (1965); and Sir Geoffrey Keynes, The Life of William Harvey (1966).

Harvey, William (1578-1657). Physician. After Cambridge, Harvey went to the great medical school at Padua. Back in England, he settled down to successful practice in London, becoming physician to Charles I and a staunch royalist. The structure of the heart and vein valves convinced him that, contrary to received physiological opinion, blood must circulate round the body, rather than ebb and flow.

Harvey, William (1578–1657), English physician and anatomist. William Harvey was born at Folkestone, on the south coast of England. He matriculated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1593 and studied anatomy in Padua under Girolamo Fabrizi d'Aquapendente. Harvey received his degree as doctor of medicine in 1602. Returning to England, he settled in London, where he started a medical practice. In 1607 he became a fellow of the College of Physicians and was formally appointed physician to St. Bartholomew's Hospital in 1609. In 1613 he was elected censor in the College and in 1615 Lumleian Lecturer of Surgery with the principal duties of giving a series of lectures on set texts and performing an annual public anatomy in the hall of the College. Some of the anatomical lecture notes survive and have been edited by the College of Physicians (1886); by C. D. O'Malley, F. N. L. Poynter, and K. F. Russell (1961); and by G. Whitteridge (1964).

In 1618 Harvey was appointed court physician to James I and later to Charles I (1625), and as a member of the royal entourage, he was involved in a number of political and diplomatic activities. In 1629 he attended the duke of Lennox in his travels abroad on the orders of Charles I. On several occasions (in 1633, 1639, 1640, and 1641) he was asked to accompany the king to Scotland. In 1635 he traveled with the earl of Arundel on a diplomatic mission to the Emperor Ferdinand II's court at Regensburg. After the Battle of Edgehill (1642), Harvey followed Charles I to Oxford. He remained there for three years and was made warden of Merton College in 1643. During the Civil War, his lodgings at Whitehall were plundered by Parliamentary troops, and he lost all his notes on the generation of insects and natural history. In 1646, when the city surrendered to Parliament, Harvey returned to London, where he lived in learned retirement. He died in 1657, at the age of seventy-nine.

Theories of Circulation

In the Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (Anatomical study on the motion of the heart and blood in animals), published in Frankfurt in 1628, Harvey announced his epoch-making discovery of the circulation of the blood. According to the old view, as it had been systematized by Galen in the second century C.E., blood originated in the liver from the assimilation and transformation of food and then ebbed and flowed through the veins in order to nourish the various parts of the body. A part of the venous blood was thought to seep through the interventricular septum of the heart (considered to be porous) and, upon arrival in the left ventricle, was supposed to undergo further elaboration as a result of being mixed with air coming from the lungs. Galen believed that the veins and the arteries were separate systems that carried fluids of different natures: thick, nutritive blood in the former, and spirituous, energizing blood in the latter. By means of a series of close arguments and experimental proofs, Harvey demonstrated that the blood was continuously and rapidly transmitted from the veins to the arteries, was driven into every part of the body in a far greater quantity than was needed for nourishment, and was finally drawn from the periphery to the heart to start the same cycle again.

A long and complex genealogy of anatomical findings and physiological speculations underlies Harvey's discovery. Realdo Colombo (1516?–1559?) discovered pulmonary circulation, but failed to put it in the wider context of systemic circulation; Andrea Cesalpino (1519–1603) caught a glimpse of the capillaries, but by circulation he meant a series of distillations occurring in the blood; Girolamo Fabrizi (1537–1619) detected the venous valves but did not understand their role in the centripetal venous flow. Unlike his predecessors, who reached only partial conclusions and remained entangled in the theoretical constraints of older accounts, Harvey managed to find an elegant and consistent solution for a whole series of interrelated problems: the correct interpretation of the systole and diastole of the heart (the former viewed as an active contraction, the latter as a passive distension), the clear demonstration of the pulmonary transit of the blood (from the right to the left ventricle by way of the pulmonary artery, the lungs, and the pulmonary vein), the understanding of the actual role of the venous valves (which serve to prevent the blood driven into the veins from being regurgitated back into the arteries). The experimental demonstration of circulation rested on the correct understanding of two key insights: the uses of ligatures of varying tightness and the calculation of the rate of blood passing through the heart at each beat.

Theoretical Elaborations, Anatomy, and Spirit

In Exercitationes Anatomicae Duae de Circulatione Sanguinis (1649; Two anatomical exercitations on the circulation of the blood), written in response to some objections put forward by Jean Riolan, he distanced himself from René Descartes's explanation of the heartbeat. In addition, Harvey took the opportunity to define his idea of spirit as an inherent and material component of blood. In so doing, he rejected Jean Fernel's belief in the existence of transcendent and immaterial spirits governing the vital functions of the body.

The theory presented in De Motu Cordis and De Circulatione offered an alternative and revolutionary account of the anatomy and physiology of the human body. By disentangling the function of respiration from the motion of the heart and arteries and by separating the purpose of the circulation from the processes of concoction and nutrition, Harvey initiated a process of conceptual and factual reorganization in which the respiratory, digestive, and nervous apparatuses began to assume the characteristic features that they still have today. Inevitably, though, Harvey's model was also confronted with a crucial objection: why had the blood to circulate rapidly and incessantly throughout the body if nourishment of the parts was not one of the functions of that circulation and if no exchange of vital properties contained in the inhaled air took place in the lungs? The ultimate purpose of circulation and the difference between arterial and venous blood remained two unsolved points in Harvey's system.

In Exercitationes de Generatione Animalium (1651; Anatomical exercitations concerning the generation of living creatures), Harvey addressed the question of the generation of oviparous and viviparous animals. In embryology he advanced the theory that the parts of higher animals were successively formed out of the undifferentiated matter of the egg (a process he called "epigenesis"). Harvey's main concern in the treatise was the explanation of the origin and mechanism of conception. Unable to observe the initial stages of pregnancy in dissected hinds and does, he failed to understand the part played by the male's semen in fecundating the female. He argued that the process of fertilization could be compared to a transmission of vital energy at a distance.

In De Generatione Harvey also argued in favor of the preeminence of the blood, as an inherently animate matter, over the other parts of the body. His theory of epigenesis demonstrated the original nature of the blood. Its intrinsically spirituous substance confirmed the existence of a vital matter endowed with the ability to move, perceive, and respond to external stimuli. Harvey went so far as to identify the soul with the blood. His interest in the responsive nature of living matter dated back to the beginnings of his natural investigations. An unfinished treatise entitled "De Motu Locali Animalium" (On the local motion of the animals) testifies to his interest in studying the difference between voluntary and involuntary motions and the interplay of muscles, nerves, and the organs involved in locomotion and sensation.

The first to accept the circulatory model was Harvey's friend and colleague at the College of Physicians, Robert Fludd (1574–1637), who looked at the discovery of circulation as a confirmation of his speculations on the correspondence of microcosm and macrocosm. René Descartes (1596–1650) accepted Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood but disagreed with his explanation of the movement of the heart. Whereas Harvey maintained that the movement was the result of a vital contraction, Descartes explained it as a mechanical impulse determined by the ebullition and consequent rarefaction of the blood. Thomas Willis (1621–1675) and Richard Lower (1631–1691) refined and supplemented Harvey's circulatory model. Both mechanical anatomists like Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694) and chemical physiologists like Franciscus de la Boë (called Sylvius; 1614–1672) made Harvey's discovery an integral part of their physiological schemes. Francis Glisson (1597–1677) took the Harveian thesis of the inherently active and sentient natureoftheblood asthestartingpointforacomprehensive theory of irritability.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Harvey, William. The Circulation of the Blood and Other Writings. Translated by K. J. Franklin. London, 1990.

——. The Works of William Harvey. Translated by R. Willis. London, 1847.

Secondary Sources

Bono, James. "Reform and the Languages of Renaissance Theoretical Medicine: Harvey versus Fernel." Journal of the History of Biology 23 (1990): 341–387.

Frank, Robert G. Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists: A Study of Scientific Ideas. Berkeley, 1980.

French, Roger. William Harvey's Natural Philosophy. Cambridge, U.K., 1994.

Keynes, Geoffrey. The Life of William Harvey. Oxford, 1966.

Lawrence, T. Gulielmi Harveii Opera Omnia: A Collegio Medicorum Londinensi Edita. London, 1766.

Pagel, Walter. New Light on William Harvey. Basel, 1976.

——. William Harvey's Biological Ideas. Basel, 1967.

—GUIDO GIGLIONI

Quotes:

"There is a lust in man no charm can tame: Of loudly publishing his neighbor's shame: On eagles wings immortal scandals fly, while virtuous actions are born and die."

For other persons named William Harvey, see William Harvey (disambiguation).

William Harvey
William Harvey
Born	1 April 1578 Folkestone
Died	3 June 1657
Nationality	English
Fields	Medicine Physiology
Doctoral advisor	Hieronymus Fabricius
Known for	Systemic circulation

William Harvey (1 April 1578 – 3 June 1657) was an English physician who was the first to describe correctly and in exact detail the systemic circulation and properties of blood being pumped around the body by the heart.

Contents 1 Early years 2 Circulation of the blood 3 Legacy and last years 4 See also 5 References 6 Further reading 7 External links

Early years

William Harvey was born at home (one of the nearest hospitals to Folkestone is named after him) to a prosperous yeoman, Thomas Harvey, of Folkestone, Kent (later a Levant Company merchant), and wife Joane Halke, of Hastingleigh Kent (1555-1556 – 8 November 1605), and educated at The King's School, Canterbury. At 16 he was awarded a medical scholarship (founded by Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, the first such scholarship in England, for which preference was given to a Man of Kent)^[1] to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, through which he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1597.^[2] John Caius, who refounded the college before Harvey’s time, used to advise his students to seek some part of their medical education abroad: like him^[3], Harvey went on to the University of Padua, Italy (also attended by Copernicus), where he studied under Hieronymus Fabricius, and the Aristotelian philosopher Cesare Cremonini graduating in 1602. He returned to England and married Elizabeth C. Browne, daughter of Lancelot Browne, a prominent London physician. The couple had no children. He practiced as a physician in London, where he had an appointment at St Bartholomew's Hospital (1609–43) and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. After his time at St Bartholomew's he returned to Oxford and became Warden (head of house) of Merton College.

Circulation of the blood

Although Ibn al-Nafis and Michael Servetus had described pulmonary circulation before the seventeenth century, this aspect of the theory circulation was generally unknown in Europe until Harvey rediscovered it nearly a century later. However, Harvey's model of the circulatory system was a "conceptual leap that was quite different from Ibn al-Nafis' refinement of the anatomy and bloodflow in the heart and lungs" because it envisions a continuous circulation of the blood throughout the body between the veins and arteries, and not just in the lungs.^[4]

Harvey travelled widely in the course of his researches, especially to Italy, where he stayed at the Venerable English College in Rome.

Image of veins from Harvey's Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus

In Italy he came in contact with Hieronymus Fabricius, his teacher at Padua, who had claimed discovery of 'valves' in veins, but had not discovered the true use of them. The explanation that he had put forward did not satisfy Harvey, and thus it became Harvey's endeavour to explain the true use of these valves, and eventually, the search suggested to him the larger question of the explanation of the motion of blood. Harvey announced his discovery of the circulatory system in 1616 and in 1628 published his work Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (An Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals), where, based on scientific methodology, he argued for the idea that blood was pumped around the body by the heart before returning to the heart and being re-circulated in a closed system.

This clashed with the accepted model going back to Galen, who identified venous (dark red) and arterial (brighter and thinner) blood, each with distinct and separate functions. Venous blood was thought to originate in the liver and arterial blood in the heart; the blood flowed from those organs to all parts of the body where it was consumed.

Harvey based most of his conclusions on careful observations recorded during vivisections made of various animals during controlled experiments, being the first person to study biology quantitatively. He did an experiment to see how much blood would pass through the heart each day. In this experiment he used estimates of the capacity of the heart, how much blood is expelled each pump of the heart, and the amount of times the heart beats in a half an hour. All of these estimates were purposefully low, so that people could see the vast amount of blood Galen's theory required the liver to produce. He estimated that the capacity of the heart was 1.5 ounces, and that every time the heart pumps, 1/8 of that blood is expelled. This led to Harvey's estimate that about 1/6 of an ounce of blood went through the heart every time it pumped. The next estimate he used was that the heart beats 1000 times every half an hour, which gave 10 pounds 6 ounces of blood in a half an hour, and when this number was multiplied by 48 half hours in a day he realized that the liver would have to produce 540 pounds of blood in a day. At this time, common thought was that the blood was produced in the liver and not constantly recycled, mainly because they didn't have the means to observe capillaries.

He proposed that blood flowed through the heart in two separate closed loops. One loop, pulmonary circulation, connected the circulatory system to the lungs. The second loop, systemic circulation, causes blood to flow to the vital organs and body tissue. He also observed that blood in veins would move readily towards the heart, but veins would not allow flow in the opposite direction. This was observed by another simple experiment. Harvey tied a tight ligature onto the upper arm of a person. This would cut off bloodflow from the arteries and the veins. When this was done, the arm below the ligature was cool and pale, while above the ligature it was warm and swollen. The ligature was loosened slightly, which allowed blood from the arteries to come into the arm, since arteries are deeper in the flesh than the veins. When this was done, the opposite effect was seen in the lower arm. It was now warm and swollen. The veins were also more visible, since now they were full of blood. Harvey then noticed little bumps in the veins, which he realized were the valves of the veins, discovered by his teacher, Hieronymus Fabricius. Harvey tried to push blood in the vein down the arm, but to no avail. When he tried to push it up the arm, it moved quite easily. The same effect was seen in other veins of the body, except the veins in the neck. Those veins were different from the others - they did not allow blood to flow up, but only down. This led Harvey to believe that the veins allowed blood to flow to the heart, and the valves maintained the one way flow. Harvey further concluded that the heart acted like a pump that forced blood to move throughout the body instead of the prevailing theory of his day that blood flow was caused by a sucking action of the heart and liver. These important theories of Harvey represent two significant contributions to the understanding of the mechanisms of circulation.

William Harvey

Colour Portrait

William Harvey, after a painting by Cornelius Jansen

William Harvey

Legacy and last years

Harvey's ideas were eventually accepted during his lifetime. His work was attacked, notably by Jean Riolan in Opuscula anatomica (1649) which forced Harvey to defend himself in Exercitatio anatomica de circulations sanguinis (also 1649) where he argued that Riolan's position was contrary to all observational evidence. Harvey was still regarded as an excellent doctor. He was personal physician to James I (1618-1625). After his and others' attempts to cure James of his fatal illness failed, he became a scapegoat for that failure amidst rumours of a Catholic plot to kill James, but was saved by the personal protection of Charles I (to whom he was also personal physician, from 1625 to 1647). He took advantage of these royal positions by dissecting deer from the royal parks and demonstrating the pumping of the heart on Viscount Montgomery's son, who had fallen from a horse when he was a boy, leaving a gap in his ribs, subsequently covered by a metal plate, which he was able to remove for Harvey. "I immediately saw a vast hole," Harvey wrote, and it was possible to feel and see the heart's beating through the scar tissue at the base of the hole.^[5]

His research notes were destroyed in riots in London at start of the English Civil War. He himself went with the king on campaign, and was in charge of the royal children's safety at the Battle of Edgehill, hiding them in a hedge. He was forced by enemy fire to shelter behind the Royalist lines, and at the end of the battle he tended to the dying and wounded.

Harvey also became the lecturer to the Royal College of Physicians (1615-56).

Harvey's work had little effect on general medical practice at the time — blood letting, based on the prevailing Galenic tradition, was a popular practice, and continued to be so even after Harvey's ideas were accepted. Harvey's work did much to encourage others to investigate the questions raised by his research. For example, Marcello Malpighi not only later proved that Harvey's ideas on anatomical structure were correct but developed a model of the capillary network. Harvey himself had been unable to distinguish the capillary network and so could only theorize on how the transfer of blood from artery to vein occurred.

In 1651 William Harvey donated money to Merton College for building and furnishing a library, which was dedicated in 1654. In 1656 he gave an endowment to pay a librarian and to present a yearly oration, which continues to the present day in his honour. Harvey died of a stroke in 1657 at the age of seventy-nine, and was buried in St Andrew's Church, Hempstead, a village to the east of Saffron Walden in Essex. He left money in his will for the founding of a boys' school in his native town of Folkestone; opened in 1674, the Harvey Grammar School has operated continuously up to the present day.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. included William Harvey in a list of "The Ten Most Influential People of the Second Millennium" in the World Almanac & Book of Facts.

See also

• Amato Lusitano - 16th century physician, also credited with the discovery of the circulation of the blood
• Josephus Struthius
• Scientific revolution
• List of multiple discoveries

References

1. ^ Robb-Smith, A. H. T. (1971), "Medical Education in Cambridge before 1600", in Rook, Arthur, Cambridge and its Contribution to Medicine, London: Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine 
2. ^ Harvey, William in Venn, J. & J. A., Alumni Cantabrigienses, Cambridge University Press, 10 vols, 1922–1958.
3. ^ Copeman, W. S. C. (1971), "John Caius", in Rook, Arthur, Cambridge and its Contribution to Medicine, London: Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine 
4. ^ Peter E. Pormann and E. Savage Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine Georgetown University, Washington DC, 2007, p. 48.
5. ^ "History of Biology: On Brain and Soul". http://scienceweek.com/2004/sa040903-4.htm. Retrieved 2008-12-29. 

Further reading

• Butterfield, Herbert (1957). The Origins of Modern Science (revised ed.). New York: The Free Press. 

• Gregory, Andrew (2001). Harvey's Heart, The Discovery of Blood Circulation. Cambridge, England: Icon Books. 

• Harvey, William (1889). On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals. London: George Bell and Sons. http://books.google.com/books?id=ewAIAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=william+harvey&as_brr=1#PPR3,M2. 

• Kearney, Hugh (1971). Science and Change 1500 - 1700. New York: McGraw-Hill. 

• Mitchell, Silas Weir (1907). Some Memoranda in Regard to William Harvey, M.D.. 

• Munk, William (1878). The Roll of the Royal College of Physicians of London, Vol. I (2nd ed.). London. pp. 124 – 146. http://www.rcplondon.ac.uk/heritage/munksroll/munk_details.asp?ID=5069. 

• Rapson, Helen (1982). The Circulation of the Blood. London: Frederick Muller. 

• Singer, Charles (1959). A History of Biology (third, revised ed.). London: Abelard-Schuman. 

• Royal Society of Medicine (Great Britain) (1913). Portraits of Dr. William Harvey. London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press. http://www.archive.org/details/portraitsofdrwil00royarich. 

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: William Harvey

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: William Harvey

• William Harvey info from the (US) National Health Museum
• The life and work of William Harvey @ Ward's Book of Days
• The Harvey Genealogist: The Harvey Book: PART ONE (mentions William Harvey and various ancestors and relatives)
• William Harvey: „On The Motion Of The Heart And Blood In Animals“, 1628

Academic offices
Preceded by Nathaniel Brent	Warden of Merton College, Oxford 1645–1648	Succeeded by Nathaniel Brent

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