Harvey, William
NAME:
Harvey, William
ACHIEVEMENTS:
Discovered the circulation of the blood
NICKNAME/ALIAS:
None
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH:
1 April 1578, Folkestone, Kent, England
DATE AND PLACE OF DEATH AND AGE AT DEATH:
3 June 1657, probably at Roehampton, Surrey. Aged 79
DISCIPLINE:
Physician
FIELD:
Medicine
EDUCATION:
King's School, Canterbury
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
University of Padua
MAJOR WORK:
(1628) "An Anatomical Exercise Concerning the Motion of the Heart and Blood in
Animals"
LIFE AND TIMES:
On his return to England from Padua, Harvey obtained further qualifications from the Royal College of Physicians and was eventually made a Fellow of the College in 1607. He had contacts at court through his brothers and his father-in-law who was physician to James I, and in 1609 he was appointed to the post of physician at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London.
He established a thriving private practice and also devoted much of his time to his own medical research. He was interested in comparative anatomy and dissected almost every type of living organism, including insects, earthworms, toads and frogs, birds and mammals. He also conducted post mortem examinations and made his own clinical observations on the patients he treated. In 1615 he was appointed to a lectureship at the College of Physicians.
In 1618 became physician extraordinary to the king and was in charge of the king's health when James I died in 1625.
The new king, <personal doctor to> Charles I*, kept him on as his own personal physician. Charles helped Harvey’s research by giving him access to the deer in the royal parks and Harvey kept the king informed about any discoveries.
His primary interest was the circulation of the blood. In the early sixteenth century, the accepted theory was that blood in the veins was formed in the liver, from where it traveled to the right side of the heart. It then passed through a hole into the left side of the heart where it mixed with blood from the arteries and air from the lungs. The movement of the blood was understood to be due to arterial contraction.
Doubts about this theory grew with the new knowledge of human anatomy after the work of <influenced by> Vesalius* and others towards the middle of the sixteenth
century. Harvey, like many others, was dissatisfied with the accepted theory and over the course of many years of observation and experiment he discovered how the heart pumps the blood round the body.
He demonstrated that when the chambers of the heart (the ventricles) contract, the blood flows out of the heart, and that valves in the heart direct the flow: from the right side of the heart to the lungs, and from the left side to the limbs and organs. When the ventricles expand, blood flows into the heart, directed by valves in the large veins.
Harvey had communicated the result of his experiments to his friends and in 1628 he reached a wider public when his "An Anatomical Exercise Concerning the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals" was published in Frankfurt. Although the book brought him fame throughout Europe, it also caused controversy.
The French philosopher <theory half-accepted by> Descartes* accepted Harvey's theory of the circulation of the blood but, because Descartes believed that the will was supreme, he rejected the concept of the heart acting as an involuntary muscle.
Many of Harvey's English colleagues ignored his ideas, and his private practice suffered because people were disconcerted by his radical new theory. He remained in favour at court and in 1636 was appointed physician on a diplomatic mission to plead the case of the king's nephew, the Elector Palatine, with the Holy Roman Emperor (Ferdinand II) at Regensburg in Germany. At Nuremberg, Harvey gave a public lecture to a hostile audience on his theory of the circulation of the blood, and he also visited Vienna, Prague, Venice, Rome and Naples.
When Civil War broke out in England in 1642 he was put in charge of the kings' sons (including the future <cared for the young> Charles II* at the Battle of Edgehill where, he later told <a pal of> Aubrey*, he crawled with them under a hedge and began to read to them, when a shot landed almost on top of them).
In 1645 the king appointed Harvey Warden of Merton College in Oxford. In 1651 Harvey published the results of his latest research in "Anatomical Exercitations Concerning the Generation of Animals". Although he stated that in all living things the origin of the embryo is found in the egg (finally demonstrated by the work of <work developed by> Baer* in the nineteenth century) Harvey's findings were limited by not having a microscope.
He was doubtful about the role of semen in reproduction and it was not until 1686 that <work related to> Leeuwenhoek*'s microscopic research revealed the existence of the spermatozoa.
As a prominent Royalist, Harvey was not in favour during the Cromwellian period and he withdrew from most of his former activities. Virtually all Harvey's valuable scientific research data had been lost during the war. In 1652 he donated his library and remaining manuscripts to the Royal College of Physicians but they were also lost in the Great Fire of 1666.
ASSESSMENT:Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood was one of the great
milestones of medical history and it opened up research in biology and the functions of the body for future generations.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS:
Knew <knew work of> William Gilbert*’s library
He met <met> Peiresc*
His work was used by <work known to> Redi*
ONELINER: William Harvey, who discovered the circulation of the blood
LANGUAGE:
English
PARENTS:
Father: Thomas Harvey
Mother: Joan Halke
SIBLINGS:8
SPOUSE: Elizabeth Browne
CHILDREN: None
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Keynes, Geoffrey, The Life of William Harvey, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1966
Aubrey, John, Brief Lives, Secker and Warburg, London, 1960