William Harvey (
April 1,
1578 –
June 3,
1657) was an
English physician who is credited with being the first in the Western world to describe correctly and in exact detail the
systemic circulation and properties of
blood being pumped around the body by the
heart.
Harvey was born in his house (the nearest hospital to Folkestone (in Ashford) is named after him) to a prosperous yeoman, Thomas Harvey, of Folkestone, Kent (1578 – 3 June 1657), Turkey Company merchant, and wife Joan Halke, of Hastingleigh, Kent (1555-1556 – 8 November 1605), and educated at The King's School, Canterbury, at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, from which he received a Bachelor of Arts in 1597, and at the University of Padua (also attended by Copernicus), where he studied under Hieronymus Fabricius, and the Aristotelian philosopher Cesare Cremonini graduating in 1602. He returned to England and married Elizabeth Browne, daughter of Lancelot Browne, a prominent London physician. The couple had no children. He became a doctor at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London (1609–43) and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. After his time at St Bartholomew's he returned to Oxford and became Warden (head of house) of Merton College. In 1651 William Harvey donated money to the college for building and furnishing a library, which was dedicated in 1654. In 1656 he gave an endowment to pay a librarian and to present a yearly oration, which continues to happen in the present day in his honor. Harvey also left money in his will for the founding of a boys' school in his native town of Folkestone; opened in 1674, the Harvey Grammar School has had a continuous history to the present day.
Although Ibn al-Nafis and Michael Servetus had described pulmonary circulation before the time of Harvey, all but three copies of Servetus' manuscript Christianismi Restitutio were destroyed and as a result, the secrets of circulation were lost until Harvey rediscovered them nearly a century later. Harvey travelled widely in the course of his researches, especially to Italy, where he stayed at the Venerable English College in Rome.
This clashed with the accepted model going back to Galen, who identified venous (dark red) and arterial (brighter and thinner) blood, each with distinct and separate functions. Venous blood was thought to originate in the liver and arterial blood in the heart; the blood flowed from those organs to all parts of the body where it was consumed. It was for exactly these reasons that the work of Ibn al-Nafis had been ignored in Europe.
