William Harvey
1578-1657
English Physician
William Harvey was the first scientist to accurately describe the workings of the human blood circulatory system, thus establishing the modern science of physiology. Harvey based his research on extensive experiments and observations of animals and humans, rejecting ideas that were not confirmed by his experiments. Harvey's discoveries contradicted the long held beliefs of his contemporary physicians and scientists, and subjected him to great criticism and derision. When his work was finally acknowledged long after his death, Harvey's stature rose to that of England's most revered physician, as well as one of the founders of modern medical science.
Harvey was born in Folkestone, England, the eldest son of Thomas Harvey, a well-respected Levant merchant who eventually became mayor of Folkestone. After his first wife died in childbirth, Thomas married his second wife Joan, and they had seven sons and a daughter. William attended the King's Grammar School at Canterbury, benefiting from a proper English school education of academics and athletics. His extraordinary academic abilities became apparent and Harvey was enrolled in Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge University, where he received his B.A. in 1597. Harvey entered the University of Padua at the height of its influence as the most prestigious medical university in Europe, and he received his doctorate in 1602. William was then admitted to the College of Physicians and Surgeons, becoming a physician in 1609.
As part of his physician's training, Harvey served as an assistant surgeon at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, where he gathered further clinical experience. After he received his physician's license, Harvey became a professor of anatomy at the College of Physicians and Surgeons and was awarded the Lumleian Lecturer position in 1615. This honored position included a series of weekly lectures over a six-year period, as well as six anatomies a year performed on executed criminals. Harvey's notes from this period indicate that he had begun to develop the ideas and concepts that would later lead to his monumental and critically important discovery of the true role of the heart and blood circulation. Harvey held his university post for 40 years, while serving as the personal physician of King Charles I, and maintaining his own medical practice.
William Harvey. (Library of Congress. Reproduced with permission.)In 1628 Harvey completed the publication that would be considered the most important medical textbook in history, Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis sanguinis in animalius (On the movement of the heart and blood in animals). Harvey proved that blood flowed from the left ventricle of the heart, through the arteries of the body and then into the veins, which eventually returned the blood to the right side of the heart. Harvey confirmed that blood in the right ventricle went to the lungs and returned to the left side of the heart, as part of the pulmonary circulatory system. He also illustrated the functioning of the valves found in the heart and veins, and assumed the presence of capillaries connecting arteries with veins, though final confirmation would come later in the century with the improvement of microscopic study.
Harvey's research corrected many long held erroneous beliefs about blood circulation and the heart, many originally postulated 1,400 years before by Galen (129-199?), the Greek physician of Rome. Harvey was able to cut through an immense accumulation of ignorance and incomprehension that had been held on to tenaciously by the physicians, scientists, and philosophers of Europe even during the seventeenth century. Harvey introduced both a new system of physiology of the heart and a new dependence on the experimental method of scientific research, a basic tenet of the era of modern science.
Harvey's practice suffered a serious decline and his work was largely rejected during his lifetime. When Charles I was dethroned, the aged Harvey retired into exile at his country home, but he did publish another textbook, De generatione animale (1651). In it he famously stated that "all living things come from an egg," and that the egg is a composite of both parents. He is credited with coining the term epigenesis to denote the developmental process of the embryo as it is gradually differentiated and emerges from the formless egg mass. This more accurate proposal was opposed by the more commonly held belief that all embryos existed as preformed, miniature individuals within the egg. Eventually a theory of epigenesis modified from that of Harvey was adopted and is currently accepted. Harvey is rightly remembered as the man who discovered the real workings of the human heart and circulatory system, thereby founding modern physiology.
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