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...