William+Harvey

=**William Harvey (1578-1657)**= "The heart is the household divinity which, discharging its function, nurishes, cherishes, quickens the whole body, and is indeed the foundation of life, the source of all action." Born April 1, 1578 in Kent, England, William Harvey was the oldest of seven children. He was the son of Thomas Harvey, merchant of Folkestone and Joan Harvey. William learned Latin in Folkestone and enrolled in King’s School, which he attended for five years. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Caius College in Cambridge and continued medical school at the University of Padua. He studied and developed a friendship with Hieronymus Fabricius, a prestigious anatomist. From the University of Padua, Harvey earned a Doctor of Medicine degree in 1602. After graduating from Padua, he earned the same degree at the University of Cambridge. In 1604, Harvey moved to London and entered the College of Physicians. That same year, he married Elizabeth Brown, daughter of Queen Elizabeth’s physician. In 1618, William Harvey was appointed as the physician for James I’s court and later accompanied Charles I as his physician. He worked at the St. Bartholomew Hospital until 1643. While working at the hospital he began forming lectures, which increased the knowledge of anatomy. He retired from the hospital, where he later moved to London to live with his two brothers, due to the fact that his wife had died as well as his other brothers. He spent the rest of his life reading general literature and died in his brother’s house due to cerebral hemorrhage in 1657. Harvey died at age 79. The cause of death was a stroke, which we now know to be a circulatory disease.

Major Accomplishments


Harvey’s major accomplishment was that he was the first to describe in exact detail the systemic circulation and properties of blood being pumped throughout the body by the heart. It witnessed a revolution in epistemological thinking, an upheaval in the approach to acquiring the truth about the natural world. Harvey was the first to use human cadavers to discover the blood circulation. Use the link below to understand further accomplishments: []

Previous Work
Harvey used the work of Greek physician, Galen, who proved that arteries contain blood. Galen took the Hippocratic concept that our health needed a balance between the four main bodily fluids, but regarded anatomy as the basis of this medical knowledge. According to Galen, blood was formed in the liver from food carried to that organ from the stomach and intestines through the portal vein. He also dissected animals to further experiment. More on Galen, click the website below: [] In the century before Harvey, Belgian anatomist Andreas Vesalius published charts of his own dissections. Vesalius' work literally resurrected the practice of dissection of human cadavers

Years before Harvey, Belgian anatomist Andreas Vesalius published charts of his own dissections. Vesalius' work literally resurrected the practice of dissection of human cadavers. He stole dead bodies from the cementary and performed experiments on them. Hieronymus Fabricius, of Italy, published a work on the valves in the veins in 1603, but he mistakenly saw them as imposing a speed limit on the flow of blood //from// the heart. However, al-Nafis' work was not widely known in Christian Europe, and no one put it together with the true import of Fabricius' research until William Harvey.