William Harvey (1578–1657) was the first doctor in the Western world to offer a complete description of the body’s circulatory system. His discoveries—and the animal experiments he used to prove them—would change forever both the medical profession and the way biologists conduct research.
Harvey was born in Folkestone, Kent, the oldest of nine children. His father owned a carting business and was the town’s mayor, and the family was prosperous enough to send him to Cambridge, which he entered in 1593. He graduated at age twenty and then studied medicine at the University of Padua in Italy.
After returning to England, he married Elizabeth Browne in 1604. Browne’s father, Lancelot, had been the personal doctor to Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) and King James I (1566–1625), a family connection that proved beneficial for Harvey. He was eventually named court doctor himself, serving as physician to James I and Charles I (1600–1649).
With the king’s support, Harvey embarked on a series of experiments in the 1620s, dissecting deer and other animals in an effort to gain a better understanding of the body. At the time, most of the prevailing medical theories were still based on the writings of Galen (129–c. 216). But like Ibn al-Nafis (1213–1288), the Arab doctor who had discovered pulmonary circulation several centuries earlier, Harvey eventually concluded that Galen’s theories were implausible. The result was Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals), which Harvey published in 1628.
Although the defeat of the royalist faction in the English civil war cost Harvey his job, he continued his medical experiments, turning to the “dark business” of conception. His Essays on the Generation of Animals (1651) was the first to hypothesize that animals came into existence as the result of the meeting of sperm and egg—hundreds of years before the theory could be proven with a microscope.
After the downfall of the royalist side in 1651, Harvey attempted suicide with poison, but survived. He died of a stroke six years later, at age seventy-nine.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Harvey’s hometown of Folkestone later became famous as the site of the western portal of the channel tunnel linking England and France.
- As the king’s personal physician, Harvey treated the wounded at the Battle of Edgehill in 1642, the first major battle of the English civil war.
- The Harvey family had a coat of arms emblazoned with the motto “The greater the effort, the greater the reward.”
