Harvey, William(1578–1657)
William Harvey, the English doctor and anatomist, was the demonstrator of the principle of the circulation of the blood. He was born at Folkstone, Kent, and educated at King's School, Canterbury, and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. After taking his B.A. in 1597, he left Cambridge for Padua, where he worked with the anatomist Fabrizzi d'Acquapendente (often Latinized as Fabrizio of Aquapendente). Fabrizzi had observed the valves in the veins, although he had not understood their function; Harvey told Robert Boyle that he had developed his theory of the circulation of the blood by reflecting on the operation of these valves, perhaps while still at Padua. In 1602 Harvey graduated from Padua with a medical degree and incorporated as an M.D. of Cambridge. Taking up practice in London, he was married in 1604 to Elizabeth Browne, daughter of the physician to James I. He was elected fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1607, and two years later was appointed physician to St. Bartholomew's College, a position he held for thirty-four years. In 1616, when he began to lecture as Lumleian lecturer in surgery of the Royal College of Physicians (a post he assumed in 1615), he was already expounding his theory of the circulation of the blood, although he did not publish his Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (An anatomical exercise concerning the motion of the heart and the blood) until 1628. Appointed Physician Extraordinary to James I in 1618, and in 1631 to Charles I, Harvey was identified with the royalist cause during the Civil War. In 1642 his London house was ransacked by Parliamentary troops who destroyed notes and specimens. Charles I appointed him warden of Merton College, Oxford, in 1645.
After the Civil War Harvey lived a secluded life, retiring from practice and devoting himself to embryological research. Pleading age, he declined the presidency of the Royal College of Physicians in 1654, and in 1656 resigned from his Lumleian lectureship. He died at Roehampton.
There has been considerable dispute as to whether the discovery of the circulation of the blood can properly be ascribed to Harvey. As early as 1543, Andreas Vesalius had expressed doubts about the traditional Galenic account, according to which blood was made in the liver, flowed through the veins, and was then excreted, except for a small part that passed through minute channels in the septum to the right ventricle and so into the arteries. Vesalius complained that he could not find the channels through the septum. Michael Servetus (1511–1553), Andrea Cesalpino (1519–1603), and especially Matteo Realdo Colombo (1516–1559) all gave a reasonably accurate picture of the flow of blood through the lungs—the so-called lesser circulation. But none of them recognized that the entire blood supply circulated through the body.
Harvey used the comparative method. Confused by the rapidity of movements within a living human body, he dissected such cold-blooded animals as toads and shrimps, in which movement is slower. Many of his contemporaries criticized him on the ground that what was true of the lower animals had no application to man. But for Harvey, as for Aristotle, man formed part of the animal kingdom.
Harvey's great importance lies in the fact that he used the concepts of mechanics in his analysis of physiological processes. He described the working of the heart in the language of pumps; he applied mathematical calculations to show that the body could not possibly manufacture the quantity of blood which, according to Galen's theory, would have to flow through it. The fact that blood still had a quasi-mystical significance made his matter-of-fact approach particularly significant.
Harvey's work greatly influenced many early modern philosophers, including René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes (otherwise so different), who both put Harvey on a level with Galileo Galilei. They saw that Harvey had broken down the barrier between the animal and the human body, and between the processes of the body and the processes of mechanics. Thus Harvey's discovery gave empirical support to their mechanistic hypotheses. Descartes objected, however, that Harvey had not shown from first principles that the blood must necessarily circulate; he had been content to say that the heart is in fact a pump and that the blood does in fact circulate. Harvey replied to Descartes in his letters to the French anatomist Jean Riolan, who had rejected Harvey's theory. These letters were included in Exercitationes Duae Anatomicae de Circulatione Sanguinis, ad Johannem Riolanum Filium Parisiensem (Two anatomical exercises concerning the circulation of the blood, addressed to Jean Riolan Jr., of Paris; 1649).
Scientific truth, Harvey argued, is to be discovered by direct observation. "No more certain demonstration or means of gaining faith can be adduced than examination by the senses, than ocular demonstration." In this respect, Harvey compares biology favorably with astronomy. The astronomer, he suggests, argues from appearances. He cannot see what happens in an eclipse; all he actually sees is one disc sliding across another, whereas the biologist can see the heart beating in a shrimp. Observation shows us that the blood circulates, and that is enough for the biologist. This is a classic statement of the attitude of the observational biologist, in opposition to the Cartesian mathematico-physical conception of science. The Letters to Riolan also contain Harvey's criticisms of the attempt to explain physiological functioning in terms of "spirits." "Persons of limited information when they are at a loss to assign a cause for anything, very commonly reply that it is done by the spirits."
Harvey's other major work is contained in his Exercitationes Duae Anatomicae de Generatione Animalium (Two anatomical exercises concerning the generation of animals; 1651). Although this work was important in developing the view that each living thing is produced from an egg, as opposed to the doctrine of spontaneous generation, it lacks the scientific assurance of the De Motu Cordis. The fact that Harvey had to rely upon the unaided eye very much limited his achievement in this area. The first work of any consequence carried out with a microscope was done in 1660 by Marcello Malpighi, who took Harvey's theory as his point of departure.
Aristotlebiology;; Boyle, Robert; Descartes, René; Galileo Galilei; Hobbes, Thomas; Philosophy of Biology.
Bibliography
Works by Harvey
The collected Latin works of William Harvey were published in London as Opera Omnia in 1766; the earliest English texts, dating from 1653, have been reprinted, edited by Geoffrey L. Keynes (London, 1928); a complete English translation was prepared by Robert Willis for the Sydenham Society, London, in 1847. The notes Harvey prepared in 1615 for his Lumleian Lectures were published in facsimile as Praelectiones Anatomiae Universalis (London, 1886) and translated by C. D. O'Malley, F. N. L Paynter, and K. F. Russell as Lectures in the Whole of Anatomy (Berkeley, CA, 1961). The manuscript De Motu Locali Animalium (1627) was first published in Cambridge, U.K., in 1959, edited by Gweneth Whitteridge. See also De Motu Cordis, edited and translated by Kenneth James Franklin as Movement of the Heart and Blood in Animals (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957); The Circulation of the Blood, containing Harvey's reply to Jean Riolan, edited and translated by Kenneth James Franklin (London: Dent, 1963).
Works on Harvey
For literature on Harvey, see Geoffrey L. Keynes, A Bibliography of the Work of William Harvey (London, 1928; 2nd ed., Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1953), and The Personality of William Harvey (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1949); Henry P. Bayon, "William Harvey," in Annals of Science 3 (1938): 59–118, 435–456; 4 (1939): 65–106, 329–389; Étienne Gilson, Études sur la rôle de la pensée médiévale dans la formation du système cartésien (Paris, 1951), Ch. 2; A. Rupert Hall, The Scientific Revolution, 1500–1800 (London: Longmans, Green, 1954); Louis Chauvois, William Harvey (New York, 1957); Proceedings of the Harvey Tercentenary Congress, edited by John McMichael (London, 1958); John Arthur Passmore, "William Harvey and the Philosophy of Science," Australian Journal of Philosophy 36 (2) (1958): 85–94.
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