Harvey

In the autumn of 1628, at the press of William Fitzer in Frankfurt am Main, William Harvey, fifty years old, the physician to Charles I of England and the fellow of the College of Physicians of London, published a Latin octavo of seventy-two pages titled Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals). The publication had been deliberately set abroad to avoid the English ecclesiastical-licensing scrutiny that would have applied at the London presses. The book was about twenty thousand words. It demonstrated, by the combination of dissection-evidence, standing animal-vivisection observation of valves, standing quantitative-arithmetical estimate of the blood-volume the heart pumps per hour, and logical deduction, that the arterial and venous systems are a closed circulation driven by the pump of the heart, in which the same blood passes through the body about a thousand times a day. The classical Galenic doctrine of two separate systems (the venous system originating in the liver, the arterial system originating in the heart, the blood consumed at the tissues and continuously replaced from food) had been the operating model of European medicine for fourteen hundred years. Harvey's book overturned it. The reception was slow (Harvey himself, by his later remark to John Aubrey of c.1650, had not in his lifetime had a single English-physician colleague accept the thesis in full); the acceptance was complete within forty years of Harvey's death.

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