William Harvey(1578–1657)

William Harvey was born at Folkestone in Kent on the first of April 1578, the eldest of nine children of Thomas Harvey, a prosperous yeoman of the town who later sat as its mayor, and Joan Halke. He went to the King's School at Canterbury at ten, took his Bachelor of Arts at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1597, and crossed in the autumn of the following year to the University of Padua, then the foremost medical school in Europe, where he sat under Hieronymus Fabricius, the anatomist whose careful study of the valves in the veins would set Harvey on the road to his life's discovery. He took the degree of Doctor of Medicine at Padua in April 1602.

He came home to London, married Elizabeth Browne, daughter of the royal physician Lancelot Browne, in November 1604, and was admitted to the College of Physicians in 1607. From 1609 he held the post of physician to St Bartholomew's Hospital, walking the wards twice a week, and in 1615 was appointed the College's Lumleian Lecturer in Anatomy and Surgery, a duty he kept for forty-one years. His Lumleian notes of April 1616, still preserved at the British Library, contain the earliest written statement of what he had by then come to believe: that the blood is driven by the contraction of the heart in a continuous circuit through the arteries to the tissues and back through the veins to the heart again.

In 1618 he was sworn physician extraordinary to James I, and in 1630 physician in ordinary to Charles I. He attended the king through the Civil War, was present at the battle of Edgehill in October 1642 reading a book under a hedge with the royal children in his charge, and spent the years of the war at Merton College in Oxford in close company with the king, where he continued his anatomical work on embryology. He was for a short time Warden of Merton in 1645.

The great book had appeared seventeen years earlier. In 1628, at the press of William Fitzer in Frankfurt am Main, Harvey, then fifty, published a seventy-two-page Latin octavo titled Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus, the Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals. It demonstrated, by the combination of careful dissection, vivisection of live animals to observe the action of the valves, and a quantitative arithmetical estimate of the volume of blood the heart pumps in an hour, that the arteries and veins form a single closed circulation, and that the same blood passes through the body many times a day. The Galenic doctrine of two separate systems that had stood for fourteen hundred years was overturned. The book is the founding document of modern physiology, and the experimental method of medicine descends from its argument.

He published in 1651 a second great work, the Exercitationes de Generatione Animalium, on the embryology of the chick and the deer, which founded the comparative study of animal development. He died at his brother's house at Roehampton on the third of June 1657, in his eightieth year, and was buried in the Harvey vault at the church of St Andrew at Hempstead in Essex. The Harvey name in modern medicine carries the weight of the small Latin book of 1628 from which the science of the body's working flowed.