William
Harvey,
William Harvey was born in England in 1578. After
earning a degree at Cambridge University at the age of twenty, he
journeyed to Italy to study medicine at the University of Padua.
Padua was the center for western European medical instruction at that
time. Harvey graduated with honors in 1602 and returned to England
where he earned yet another medical degree from Cambridge University.
He then settled down to begin practicing medicine.
Harvey was fascinated by the way blood flowed through the human body. Most people of the day believed that food was converted into blood by the liver, then was consumed as fuel by the body. Harvey knew this was untrue through his firsthand observations of human and animal dissections. In 1628 Harvey published An Anatomical Study of the Motion of the Heart and of the Blood in Animals which explained how blood was pumped from the heart throughout the body, then returned to the heart and recirculated. The views this book expressed were very controversial and lost Harvey many patients, but it became the basis for all modern research on the heart and blood vessels. A second ground-breaking book published by Harvey in 1651, Essays on the Generation of Animals, is considered the basis for modern embryology.
Despite the uproar over each of Harvey's unconventional anatomical theories, he was recognized as a medical leader in his day. He was doctor to King Charles I of England and was appointed doctor of physic at Oxford. At the time of his death in 1657, Harvey's medical and scientific genius were celebrated throughout the European medical community.
Page created by: J. Johnson, W. Hepburn, J. Crawford
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McGraw-Hill (1973). McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Biography; an international reference work. New York: McGraw-Hill.
World Book, Inc. (1990). The World Book Encyclopedia, Volume 9. Chicago: World Book, Inc.