The Visitation of Wiltshire 1565 by William Harvey

The Visitation of Wiltshire 1565 by William Harvey

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On April 1, 1578, William Harvey (1578 - 1657), the oldest son of Thomas Harvey, was born in Folkestone, Kent, England. He obtained his education at Canterbury's King's School and Cambridge University, where he earned his B.A. I was nineteen years old at the time. Harvey enrolled at the University of Padua to study medicine under the renowned anatomist Girolamo Fabrici (Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente) and his pupil Giulio Casserio. After he received his M.D., he was ecstatic.

Harvey returned to England in 1602, where he married the daughter of Dr Lancelot Brown, Elizabeth I's former physician; he became a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1607, and served as physician to St. Lumleian lecturer in the College of Physicians in 1609, and Bartholomew's Hospital in 1609. Harvey began a series of lectures on the heart and blood circulation in 1616. Harvey, who served as King James I's remarkable physician, maintained close professional ties with the royal family until the end of the Civil War.

Harvey was appointed warden of Merton College, Oxford, by Charles I in 1645, but resigned a year later due to his age; he was then offered the president of the College of Physicians. William Harvey died on June 7, 1657, at the age of eighty. Exercitatio anatomica de mote cordis et sanguinis in animalibus (On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals), written in Latin in 1628, including descriptions of heart valves and arterial pulse. Despite advances in blood circulation and the discovery of vein valves, the study of physiology and anatomy in Harvey's day was still dominated by ancient Greek philosophy and medicine, particularly Aristotle and Galen, who taught that blood was prepared in the liver and delivered to the heart, where it flowed throughout the body in humans and higher animals.

Although veins transported blood, arteries carried blood as well as a type of vital air, or pneuma. Harvey's work was groundbreaking in that it relied heavily on minute observations of living animals as well as a long series of dissections, giving him a far more complete understanding of the comparative anatomy of the heart and vessels than any of his contemporaries--a knowledge that was not equaled until the anatomists John Hunter and Johann Friedrich Meckel's studies in the epoch of the epoch of the epoch of the epoch of the epoch of Although Harvey's discoveries were initially regarded with skepticism, his ideas were widely accepted and respected before his death. One in the most important books of physiology is On the Movements of the Heart and Blood in Animals.

Exercitationes de generatione animalium (On Animal Reproduction) was also written by William Harvey in 1651.