William Harvey

About this figure

William Harvey (1578-1657) was an English physician who overturned more than a thousand years of accepted medical theory by demonstrating that blood circulates continuously through the body, driven by the heart acting as a pump. Born in Folkestone, he studied medicine at Cambridge and then at the University of Padua, then Europe's leading medical school, under the anatomist Hieronymus Fabricius, who had already described the valves in veins without correctly explaining their purpose. Harvey later became a prominent physician in London, serving as physician to King James I and then to King Charles I, and held a senior position at the Royal College of Physicians.

Drawing on years of dissection and vivisection of animals, Harvey reasoned quantitatively that the heart pumps far more blood in an hour than the body could possibly produce or consume, as the prevailing Galenic theory held; blood, he concluded, had to be recirculated in a closed system, pushed outward through the arteries and returned through the veins. He published this argument in 1628 in a short Latin treatise, "Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus," known in English as "An Anatomical Disquisition on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals." The work met resistance from physicians trained in Galenic medicine, but its careful combination of experiment and mathematical reasoning gradually won acceptance within Harvey's own lifetime, and it is now regarded as a foundational text of modern physiology and experimental biology. Harvey continued this style of empirical inquiry in his later work on reproduction and embryology, "Exercitationes de Generatione Animalium" (1651), though it had less lasting impact than his work on circulation. He lost most of his property during the English Civil War as a Royalist, and spent his final years in relative retirement, still practicing medicine and pursuing anatomical study until his death in 1657.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.