Harvey, William 1578-1657
English physician, discoverer of the circulation of the blood

Born in Folkestone, Kent, he studied medicine at Caius College, Cambridge, and after graduating in 1597, went to Padua to work under Hieronymus Fabricius. In 1602 he set up as a physician in London. Elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1607, two years later he was appointed physician to St Bartholomew's Hospital, and in 1615 he was Lumleian Lecturer at the College of Physicians. His celebrated treatise, Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis ('An Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and the Blood in Animals'), in which the circulation of the blood was first described, was published in 1628. He was successively physician to James VI and I (from 1618) and Charles I (from 1640), attending Charles at the Battle of Edgehill (1642) then accompanying him to Oxford, as Warden of Merton College. Harvey returned to London in 1646, and devoted himself entirely to his researches. His Exercitationes de Generatione Animalium ('Essays on Generation in Animals'), in which he confirmed the doctrine that every living being has its origin in an egg, appeared in 1651. The key claim of his earlier, distinguished work on the cardiovascular system was that the heart was a muscle functioning as a pump, and that it effected the movement of the blood through the body via the lungs by means of the arteries, the blood then returning through the veins to the heart. His views contradicted ideas central to medicine since Galen, and he was widely ridiculed by traditionalists, notably in France. He was not able to show how blood passed from the arterial to the venous system, there being no connections visible to the naked eye. However, he rightly supposed that the links existed but must be too minute to see, and Marcello Malpighi observed them with a microscope, shortly after Harvey's death.

Bibliography: Gweneth Whitteridge, William Harvey and the Circulation of the Blood (1971)