Physician who discovered the circulation of the blood, born in Folkestone, Kent, SE England, UK. He studied at Cambridge and Padua, and settled in London as a physician, holding appointments at St Bartholomew's Hospital (160943) and from 1615 at the College of Physicians. He was also appointed physician to James I and Charles I. His celebrated treatise, De motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus (On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals), in which the circulation of the blood was first described, was published in 1628.
William Harvey (April 1, 1578 – June 3, 1657) was a medical doctor who is credited with first correctly describing, in exact detail, the properties of blood being pumped around the body by the heart. Although Spanish physician Michael Servetus discovered circulation a quarter century before Harvey was born, all but three copies of his manuscript Christianismi Restitutio were destroyed and as a result, the secrets of circulation were lost until Harvey rediscovered them nearly a century later.
Early life and education
Harvey was born in Folkestone, Kent, England (where a hospital is now named after him) to a prosperous yeoman, and educated at The King's School, Canterbury, at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, from which he received a B.A.
New circulatory model
Many believe that both Servetus and Descartes merely re-discovered and extended early Muslim medicine especially the work of Ibn Nafis, who had laid out the principles and major arteries and veins in the 13th century.
Fabricius, Harvey's teacher at Padua, had claimed discovery of "valves" in veins, but had not discovered the true use of them. The explanation that he had put forward did not satisfy Harvey, and thus it became Harvey's endeavour to explain the true use of these valves, and eventually, the search suggested to him the larger question of the explanation of the motion of blood. Harvey announced his discovery of the circulatory system in 1616 and in 1628 published his work Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (An Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals), where, based on scientific methodology, he argued for the idea that blood was pumped around the body by the heart before returning to the heart and being re-circulated in a closed system.
This clashed with the accepted model going back to Galen, who identified venous (dark red) and arterial (brighter and thinner) blood, each with distinct and separate functions.
Harvey based most of his conclusions on careful observations made of the human body during controlled experiments, being the first person to study biology quantitatively. Based on observations in endothermic animals, whose hearts beat slower and were thus easier to measure, Harvey realized the liver would have to produce 540 pounds of blood an hour, suggesting the blood was recycled and not constantly produced. Harvey further concluded that the heart actually acted like a pump that forced blood to move throughout the body instead of the prevailing theory of his day that blood flow was caused by a sucking action of the heart and liver.
Embryology
Harvey also conducted research in embryology in his later career, writing On the Generation of Animals(De Generatione) in 1651.
Criticism of Harvey's work
Harvey's ideas were eventually accepted during his life-time. His work was attacked, notably by Jean Riolan in Opuscula anatomica (1649) which forced Harvey to defend himself in Exercitatio anatomica de circulatione sanguinis (also 1649) where he argued that Riolan's position was contrary to all observational evidence. He took advantage of these royal position by dissecting deer from the royal parks and demonstrating the pumping of the heart on Viscount Montgomery's son, who had fallen from a horse when he was a boy, leaving a gap in his ribs, subsequently covered by a metal plate, which he was able to remove for Harvey. "I immediately saw a vast hole," Harvey wrote, and it was possible to feel and see the heart's beating through the scar tissue at the base of the hole.
Harvey also became the Lumleian lecturer to the Royal College of Physicians (1615-56).
Marcello Malpighi later proved that Harvey's ideas on anatomical structure were correct; Harvey had been unable to distinguish the capillary network and so could only theorize on how the transfer of blood from artery to vein occurred.
Even so, Harvey's work had little effect on general medical practice at the time — blood letting, based on the prevailing Galenic tradition, was a popular practice, and continued to be so even after Harvey's ideas were accepted. Harvey's work did much to encourage others to investigate the questions raised by his research, and to revive the Muslim tradition of scientific medicine expressed by Nafis, Ibn Sina, and Rhazes. (See also: François Bernier)
Posthumous Honors
Harvey was ranked #56 on Michael H.
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