Dr. W. Harvey, circa 1800. Portrait of English physician William Harvey (1578-1657), who is credited with first correctly describing, in exact detail, the properties of blood being pumped around the body by the heart. Artist Philip Audinet.
W. Harvey', (1578-1657), 1830. William Harvey (1578-1657) English physician educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, who made contributions to anatomy and physiology particularly the systemic circulation and properties of blood. From "Biographical Illustrations", by Alfred Howard.
William Harvey was an English physician who greatly contributed to physiology. He made important discoveries in the circulation of blood within the human body. He showed that arteries and veins form a complete circuit. The circuit starts at the heart and leads back to the heart.
Background
Harvey was born in Folkestone, Kent on April 1, 1578, the son of a yeoman, James Harvey, and his wife Joane Halke. William had six brothers and two sisters. Of his brothers five became successful London merchants who traded with Turkey and the Levant. One of them, Eliab, looked after William's interests in his later life and it was in his house that William died.
Education
Aged ten in the year of the Spanish Armada, William Harvey was sent to King's School, Canterbury, and from there to Cambridge University, being admitted to Gonville and Caius College on 31 May 1593. He was admitted to Caius College, in the University of Cambridge, in Cambridge, in May 1593, and a little later that same year was awarded the special scholarship in medicine which had been founded in 1572 at the college by Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury.
From the details of the scholarship which he held for a period of six years, it is known that Harvey spent the first three of these years studying "subjects useful to medicine" - the classics, rhetoric, philosophy, and perhaps some mathematics.
During the second three years, Harvey studied those subjects which make up the base of medicine itself. Harvey took his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1597, and finally left Cambridge in October 1599. While still a student at Cambridge, it seems likely that Harvey traveled in France, Germany, and Italy and probably decided to attach himself to the University of Padua.
The exact date at which he first went there is unknown, but during the year 1600, he was elected "counsellor" or representative of the English nation by the English students at that university. While at Padua, Harvey attended lectures in the "new" anatomical theater built in 1594.
On April 25, 1602, Harvey completed his studies at Padua and received the degree of Doctor of Medicine. His teachers wrote on his diploma: "[Harvey] had conducted himself so wonderfully well in the examination, and had shown such skill, memory and learning that he had far surpassed even the great hopes which his examiners had formed of him. They decided therefore that he was skillful, expert, and most efficiently qualified both in arts and medicine…"
On his return to England in the same year, he settled in London and incorporated as a Doctor of Medicine at the University of Cambridge. But the degrees which he held did not give him the right to practice medicine within the City.
William Harvey was admitted as a candidate for the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1604.
Harvey was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians on 5 June 1607, which earned him the Post-nominal letters, and he then accepted a position at St Bartholomew's Hospital that he was to occupy for almost all the rest of his life.
In 1609 Harvey became physician to St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London, and in 1616 he gave the first of his Lumleian Lectures before the Royal College of Physicians, the manuscript notes of which contain the first account of blood circulation.
Harvey also delivered the Anatomical lectures in the College, and the manuscript notes of these lectures, called the Prelectiones Anatomie Universalis ("Lectures on the Whole of Anatomy") and dated April 16, 17, and 18, 1616, are now preserved in the British Museum. In 1619, he lectured on muscles, as is shown by another manuscript, also in the British Museum.
In 1618, he became physician to Elizabeth's successor James I and to James' son Charles when he became king. Both James and Charles took a close interest in and encouraged Harvey's research.
In 1627, Harvey wrote notes for a treatise, On the Local Movement of Animals. This work is not of great importance but is interesting to physiologists and neurologists, for it shows among other things Harvey's unsuccessful attempt to solve the problem of the contractions of muscles.
In 1628, Harvey's greatest work, Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in Animalibus, ("An Anatomical Treatise on the Movement of the Heart and Blood in Animals") was published in Frankfurt, Germany.
Although Harvey's practice suffered because of his radical views, he was appointed physician in ordinary to King Charles I in 1630, and in 1633 he was with Charles's court in Scotland. In the summer of 1634, Harvey was called upon to examine certain women accused of witchcraft who had been brought to London from Lancashire. In November 1635 he performed the autopsy on Thomas Parr, alleged to have been 152 years old. In the following year he accompanied the Earl of Arundel on his embassy to the Emperor Ferdinand II.
Professionally, Harvey made news by examining and exonerating several suspected witches and by performing a postmortem examination on Thomas Parr, reputed to have lived 152 years. In 1642, the year he fled from London with the court, he was made doctor of physic at Oxford. When his brothers died in 1643, Harvey retired from St. Bartholomew's Hospital. In 1646 he fled with the court from Oxford back to London and retired to live with his remaining brothers.
Harvey's great contribution, Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus, appeared in 1628. It was a poorly printed 72-page book, done by an obscure printer in Frankfurt. Harvey probably arranged it this way in order to avoid trouble in England, for he realized that his ideas flaunted the conventional teaching about the heart, which had been derived from the writings of Galen.
De motu cordis was a landmark in the history of science. In it Harvey demonstrated the circulation of blood in animals, thus giving a firm foundation for the scientific development of the health professions. It must have been composed at different times, for the introduction is more vigorous, and in its critical attitude more youthful, than any of the rest of the 17 chapters.
Harvey's De generatione (1651; On the Generation of Animals) pioneered modern embryology and comparative sex psychology. This work was important in holding that the embryo builds gradually from its parts, rather than existing preformed in the ovum.
His studies here were balked by the same difficulty which beset him in his studies on the circulation: he had no microscope. He could neither demonstrate directly how blood would move from arteries to veins, although he postulated the capillary anastomoses, nor could he see directly how the embryo gradually aggregated. In most cases the demonstration was completed by Marcello Malpighi, the great Italian biologist, who was one of the first to have and use a microscope.
In 1653 appeared the first English edition of De motu cordis, and Harvey's genius was fully recognized. He gave buildings and a library to the Royal College of Physicians, although he refused its presidency.
William Harvey died, aged 79, in London on June 3, 1657 at the home of one of his brothers. The cause of death was most probably a cerebral hemorrhage. He had no children, and his wife, Elizabeth Browne, died before he did. William Harvey’s grave can be found in the village of Hempstead, in the English county of Essex.
A notable Royalist, he was at that time not allowed to visit London.
Views
He was particularly interested in philosophy, and the natural philosophy of Aristotle was the great formative influence which can be seen in all his subsequent writings.
The error of many, Harvey pointed out to Dr. Ent, was that, lacking any experimental knowledge of the truth of a proposition, they nonetheless proceeded to build on the proposition some positive judgment and so deluded themselves and deceived others.
Harvey wrote that burning curiosity is that which makes a physician, and curiosity he himself possessed in full measure.
In him curiosity led to observation, observation to experiment and closer observation.
Aristotle and Galen, he said in the treatise On Generation, had not discovered all that there was to be known.
So Harvey stands in the seventeenth century rooted in the teaching of his own day, ever conscious of a debt to the works of the past, but freed from bondage to that past and showing that careful experiment and observation alone lead to knowledge of the truth.
Quotations:
"I avow myself the partisan of truth alone."
"The heart of animals is the foundation of their life, the sovereign of everything within them, the sun of their microcosm, that upon which all growth depends, from which all power proceeds."
"I cannot frequently forbear to wonder and sometimes smile at those who persuade themselves that all things were so consummately and absolutely delivered by Aristotle and Galen, or some other great man, as that nothing was left to the addition of any that succeeded."
"Spirit is set in motion by the heart and flows through the arteries. Blood and spirit are one thing ... "
Membership
Harvey was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians on 5 June 1607.
Personality
In terms of his personality, the information shows that William Harvey was seen as a "... humorous but extremely precise man...", how he was often so immersed in his own thoughts that he would often suffer from insomnia (cured with a simple walk through the house), and how he was always ready for an open and direct conversation.
He also loved the darkness, for it is said that it was there where "... he could best contemplate," thus sometimes hiding out in caves.
Harvey was also an intense and dedicated observer of birds during his free time: several long and detailed passages of citations could be written delineating his observations in such places as the Pile of Boulders (a small island in Lancashire) and Bass Rock (island off the East Coast of Scotland).
Physical Characteristics:
A heavy drinker of coffee, Harvey would walk out combing his hair every morning full of energy and enthusiastic spirit through the fields.
Quotes from others about the person
"Harvey was not content merely to gather knowledge; he digested and arranged it under the guidance of the faculties which compare and reason." - Robert Willis
Interests
birdwatching
Philosophers & Thinkers
Aristotle
Connections
In November of 1604, he married the daughter of Dr. Lancelot Browne, physician to Queen Elizabeth I and to King James I. Of Harvey's wife, little is known beyond the fact that she had a pet parrot, a handsome bird and a famous talker, which died and was dissected by Harvey, who described it with affection in his book "On the Generation of Living Creatures."
His wife died some time after 1645 and before Harvey.