William Harvey

English physician

• Born: April 1, 1578
• Birthplace: Folkestone, Kent, England
• Died: June 3, 1657
• Place of death: London, England

Observation, dissection, and experimentation led Harvey to conclude that blood follows a circular path through the body, outward through the arteries and back to the heart through the veins. His publication of this theory and his methodology in formulating and supporting it contributed to the advent of the Scientific Revolution.

Early Life

William Harvey was the first of nine children of Thomas Harvey and his second wife, Joan Halke. The Harveys were a family of farmers who had become merchants during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Five of William’s six brothers became prosperous international merchants. From his father, William got his energy, his capacity for hard work, and his painstaking and careful attention to detail; from his mother came his charitable disposition and his faith.

Like most middle-class children of the sixteenth century, Harvey studied at home with a preacher or an itinerant schoolmaster. At age ten, he was admitted by examination to the King’s School in Canterbury as a fee-paying day scholar and lived with an uncle while he went to school.

When he was sixteen, Harvey received a Matthew Parker scholarship to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University. Although he was the first Parker scholar to study medicine, he did not decide to make medicine his career until he was at the University of Padua. Most medical education in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was still based on the writings of ancient authorities such as Aristotle and Galen. Gonville and Caius College had an excellent reputation as a medical school. The program not only emphasized the classical authorities but also provided informal medical lectures and discussions and occasional anatomical demonstrations. Harvey remained at Cambridge for almost six years. At this time, he was a rather small man with raven hair, dark eyes, and a somewhat sallow complexion. A keen observer and an enthusiastic naturalist interested in the causes and relations of things, he was quick to make comparisons, to theorize, and to contrive tests of his theories.

In December, 1599, Harvey went to study at the University of Padua, Italy’s foremost school of medicine, which was noted for its experimental research, freedom of thought, and religious toleration. Protestants were welcome, and Harvey’s fellow students paid him the honor of electing him in three consecutive years to be their representative in the governing system of the university. At Padua, Harvey studied comparative anatomy, embryology, and experimental physiology. One of his most famous teachers was Hieronumus Fabricius ab Aquapendente (known as Fabricius), who had constructed a unique, almost vertical anatomy theater capable of seating as many as 240 viewers to observe anatomical demonstrations. Fabricius’s interest was in the heart and blood. His treatise on the valves of the veins, De venarum ostiolis (1603), was central to Harvey’s own research. Even before Fabricius’s book was published, however, Harvey had received his degree as a doctor of medicine and departed from Padua. At twenty-four, he was ready to begin his life’s work.

Life’s Work

Returning to England from Padua, Harvey applied as a candidate for a fellowship at the College of Physicians and was provisionally permitted to practice medicine while awaiting his examination for candidacy. Finally admitted as a candidate in 1604, he was elected a fellow in 1607.

Soon after being admitted as a candidate for the fellowship, Harvey married Elizabeth Browne, the daughter of Dr. Lancelot Browne, first physician to Queen Elizabeth until her death in 1603. The Harveys had no children and lived most of their lives in Saint Martin’s Parish near Saint Paul’s Church in London. Until Harvey became a fellow in the College of Physicians, his opportunities for income and study were limited to his private practice. In 1609, his reputation as a physician and a letter of recommendation from King James I secured for him the post of physician for Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital, a charity hospital for the London poor. His duties were to visit once a week and treat the patients. During those years, Harvey also served as a censor on a committee of the College of Physicians that monitored doctors practicing within seven miles around London.

All these professional activities were essential for a young man ambitious for success. Throughout this period, however, it was Harvey’s innate medical curiosity and his rigorous research—resulting in voluminous notes based upon both observation and experiment—that would prove most significant both to his life and to his legacy. Although the seeds of his discovery had been germinating in his mind since Padua, it was his appointment as Lumleian Lecturer on anatomy and surgery that finally brought to light his theory of the circulation of blood. On Wednesday, April 17, 1616, Harvey announced his belief that blood traveled through the arteries to all parts of the body and returned to the heart through the veins.

Harvey’s logic was complex, based on his observations of the volume and speed with which blood moved through the body, the muscular action of the heart as it propelled the blood, and Fabricius’s treatise describing one-way valves in veins. Since the liquid from food and drink then commonly believed to generate blood could not easily create as much blood as passed through the system, and since the volume of blood was certainly more than that necessary to nourish the extremities of the body, Harvey saw that the blood moving out into the body through the arteries had to be the same blood that returned to the heart through the veins with their one-way valves. Otherwise, the arteries would quickly become flooded and distended with so much blood and the veins would empty.

Harvey’s observations and experiments since Padua were directed at determining the mechanism controlling this flow of blood. Observations of living animals and the dissections of dead and living animals confirmed his hypothesis. The pulsating motion, the thickening and constriction of the wall of the heart, and the forcible expulsion of the blood by contractions of the ventricles all occurred so rapidly as to appear to be simultaneous. Even so, Harvey believed movement began in the auricles, with the left ventricle being the key to the propulsion of the blood through the lungs. The pulse was caused by the pumping action of the blood in the arteries, and when the flow was hindered, the pulse decreased.

The heart and blood, Harvey concluded, were the agents of life. If the heart failed or if blood did not flow to some part of the body, life in the whole body or in part of it would also fail. If the blood flow were restored, life would be restored. One of the major difficulties for Harvey in this investigation was that many of his observations were based on dissection of animals, but dissection in the sixteenth century quickly led to death. A modern scientist in his conceptions, Harvey lacked the technology necessary to test his theories adequately.

The theory of the circulation of blood was Harvey’s great contribution to science. He published this theory in Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus (1628; The Anatomical Exercises of Dr. William Harvey… Concerning the Motion of the Heart and Blood , 1653). How far or fast his revolutionary idea traveled is uncertain, however. For twelve years, he had tested his theory, presenting his ideas for discussion and criticism until he had the approval of each of the fellows of the College of Physicians.

Harvey believed that most of his scientific colleagues accepted his theory even though it contradicted Galen, the ancient authority on blood. Other scientists, including Fabricius, Andreas Vesalius, and Michael Servetus, had already come close to challenging Galen’s theories of oscillation and the separation of blood in the veins and arteries. Nevertheless, Harvey’s theory was attacked by enough eminent scholars to cause the scientific world to be divided into circulators and noncirculators. This may be one reason that Harvey later declared that it was better to study and think than to publish too quickly and risk stirring up trouble. Like Galileo, Harvey had little respect for authorities. He believed anatomy should be taught by dissection and observation, not by books and other authorities. Scientists, he said, should test every hypothesis with their own eyes, trusting authorities only if their conclusions could be corroborated by firsthand observation and experiment.

After the publication of his treatise on the circulation of blood, Harvey’s life entered a more public and political phase in his job as physician to King Charles I and the royal household. Not only did he continue his experiments and observations of many species of animals, insects, and plants, but he also made several trips, at the king’s request, to Europe, Scotland, and even the Holy Roman Empire. Harvey’s connection with the royal court gave him unusual opportunities for observations. Asked to examine seven Scottish women accused of witchcraft, he determined that they had no unusual anatomical characteristics and cleared them of the charge. Performing an autopsy on Thomas Parr, reputed to be 152 years old when he died, Harvey concluded that the cause of death was his move from Shropshire, where he had worked outdoors in cool, clean air, to London, where he sat, ate, and got little exercise while breathing unclean, sooty air.

Seventeenth century London, desperately overcrowded and growing fast, was in the midst of a medical crisis period. Several recurrences of the plague motivated medical research on the disease’s causes and treatment. In the 1630’s, England was also moving closer to a civil war between Royalist and Parliamentary interests. As the king’s physician, Harvey was directly touched by these two national crises. When London and Parliament turned against the king, Harvey was dismissed as chief physician of Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital. The hostility of his former London colleagues was less disturbing to Harvey than was the plundering of his house and the destruction of his files, which included valuable observations on the generation of insects. To Harvey, politics was insignificant compared with the excitement of scientific investigation. In 1646, at age sixty-eight, he resigned his position as royal physician and was fined two thousand pounds for assisting the Royalist army. He spent the rest of his life making scientific observations and performing experiments.

Harvey’s wife, Elizabeth, died sometime between 1645 and 1652, when he wrote his will—probably before he returned to London from Oxford. His last years were spent quietly at his work at the home of one of his brothers. Science occupied his personal life and was his legacy. His studies, observations, and experiments were a solace that invariably resulted in new and unexpected information. In his studies of animals, he found not only the lesser secrets of nature but even an inkling of the Supreme Creator as well. Harvey, the natural philosopher, claimed that nature in its infinite variety, rather than books, was the true source of knowledge. He was confident that no matter how many discoveries were made by scientists, much still lay hidden for future investigation.

In 1649, he published another book on the circulation of the blood, De circulatione sanguinis (1649; The Circulation of the Blood , 1847). This volume was a reply to Galenist criticisms of his theory. His final publication, Exercitationes de generatione animalium (1651; Anatomical Exercitations, Concerning the Generation of Living Creatures , 1653), on the generation of animals, was his major contribution to embryology, offering a new view of foetal development as epigenetic, that is, caused by changes in the egg or womb occurring over several days or weeks. In 1651, Harvey arranged to build a library for the College of Physicians and made a gift to the college of his patrimonial estate in Kent. On June 3, 1657, he died in London, where his memorial service took place. He was buried in Hampstead, Kent.

Significance

Harvey, like his contemporaries Galileo, Johannes Kepler , Thomas Hobbes , Francis Bacon, and René Descartes, was an early figure in the scientific revolution. For these men, knowledge depended on human observation, rational analysis of that observation to create workable hypotheses, and tests to prove or disprove those hypotheses. These men of the early seventeenth century believed in their own ability and were confident that nature was a God-given authority superior to any ancient philosopher.

What Harvey did naturally, earlier scientists and some of Harvey’s contemporaries thought revolutionary. Consumed with curiosity, Harvey collected specimens, observed the natural world, painstakingly recorded his observations, and made copious, detailed notes. He dissected countless animals and performed innumerable autopsies. All of his work was done before the invention of the microscope. This method of meticulous observation and scrupulous record-keeping was new to the seventeenth century and became the basis of the scientific method, which is the foundation of all scientific inquiry today. Perhaps, in the long run, Harvey’s most important contribution lay in his introduction of that method to future generations of scientists.

Bibliography

Aubrey, John. “William Harvey.” In Aubrey’s Brief Lives. Reprint. Boston: D. R. Godine, 1999. A colorful personal impression of Harvey, whom Aubrey knew. Valuable as a picture of seventeenth century England and of Harvey’s behavior and idiosyncrasies.

Bylebyl, Jerome J., ed. William Harvey and His Age: The Professional and Social Context of the Discovery of the Circulation. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. This collection of three scholarly papers discusses the discovery of circulation in the context of the health crises created by the plague and fire in seventeenth century London. The papers also examine the general practice of medicine in London and the reaction to Harvey’s theories among his contemporaries.

Dickinson, C. J., and J. Marks, eds. Developments in Cardiovascular Medicine. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. A collection of papers presented at a symposium celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of Harvey’s birth. Papers by Gweneth Whitteridge, a medical historian, and H. Trevor-Roper, a social historian, relate Harvey to seventeenth century England.

French, Roger. William Harvey’s Natural Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Explains how Harvey devised a method for structuring knowledge, formulating questions and arriving at answers and how he used this system to discover how blood circulates.

Fuchs, Thomas. The Mechanization of the Heart: Harvey and Descartes. Translated by Marjorie Grene. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2001. Compares and contrasts the two men’s views on the circulation of blood and the action of the heart. Examines how their opposing opinions were received and revised in subsequent generations.

Gregory, Andrew. Harvey’s Heart: The Discovery of Blood Circulation. Lanham, Md.: Totem Books, 2001. Describes Harvey’s discovery and how it challenged existing theories of blood circulation.

Keynes, Geoffrey. The Life of William Harvey. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1966. The standard biography. Attractive, illustrated, and well documented, written by a medical historian whose previous works include a number of articles on Harvey. Detailed and interesting, although dated by style and format.

McMullen, Emerson Thomas. William Harvey and the Use of Purpose in the Scientific Revolution: Cosmos by Chance or Universe by Design? Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1998. A biography focusing on how Harvey and his contemporaries thought about purpose and chance in the universe. Thomas maintains that Harvey held deeply religious beliefs that influenced his scientific work.

Pagel, Walter. William Harvey’s Biological Ideas: Selected Aspects and Historical Background. New York: S. Karger, 1967. This book by a medical historian balances Harvey’s medical discoveries and innovations with his speculative natural philosophy and use of symbolism in ways compatible with medieval science.

Rogers, John. The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996. Examines how Harvey’s ideas about blood circulation and other novel beliefs of the seventeenth century influenced Milton’s thoughts and writings.

Whitteridge, Gweneth. William Harvey and the Circulation of the Blood. New York: American Elsevier, 1971. A scholarly biography placing Harvey in the context of fellow seventeenth century scientists. Presents Harvey as a more medieval than modern scientist.