Born at Folkestone, Kent, April 1, 1578: died at London, June 3, 1657. A celebrated English physician, physiologist, and anatomist: the discoverer of the circulation of the blood. He was educated at Canterbury and Cambridge (Gonville and Caius College), where he graduated in 1597; studied at Padua; took the degree of doctor of medicine at Cambridge in 1602; became physician of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in 1609; was Lumleian lecturer at the College of Physicians 1615–56; and became physician extraordinary to James I. in 1618. During the civil war he sided with the Royalists, was at the battle of Edgehill, and went to Oxford with the king. His chief works are “Exercitatio de motu cordis et sanguinis” (“Essay on the Motion of the Heart and the Blood,” 1628), “Exercitationes de generatione animalium” (1651).

Personal

  He did delight to be in the darke, and told me he could then best contemplate. He had a house heretofore at Combe, in Surrey, a good aire and prospect, where he had caves made in the earth, in which in summer time he delighted to meditate.—He was pretty well versed in the Mathematiques, and had made himselfe master of Mr. Oughtred’s Clavis Math. in his old age; and I have seen him perusing it, and working problems, not long before he dyed, and that booke was alwayes in his meditating apartment…. He was not tall; but of the lowest stature, round faced, olivaster complexion; little eie, round, very black, full of spirit; his haire was black as a raven, but quite white 20 yeares before he dyed…. I have heard him say, that after his booke of the Circulation of the Blood came-out, that he fell mightily in his practize, and that ’twas beleeved by the vulgar that he was crack-brained; and all the physitians were against his opinion, and envyed him; many wrote against him, as Dr. Primige, Paracisanus, etc. (vide Sir George Ent’s booke). With much adoe at last, in about 20 or 30 yeares time, it was received in all the Universities in the world; and, as Mr. Hobbes sayes in his book “De Corpora,” he is the only man, perhaps, that ever lived to see his owne doctrine established in his life time. He understood Greek and Latin pretty well, but was no critique, and he wrote very bad Latin…. All his profession would allowe him to be an excellent anatomist, but I never heard of any that admired his therapeutique way. I knew severall practisers in London that would not have given 3d. for one of his bills; and that a man could hardly tell by one of his bills what he did aime at.

  Dr. Harvey was not only an excellent physician; he was also an excellent man: his modesty, candour, and piety, were equal to his knowledge: the farther he penetrated into the wonders of nature, the more was he inclined to venerate the author of it.

  Twice in the past thirty years, I have visited the vault at Hempstead, and viewed the receptacle that holds, like an Egyptian mummy-case, the remains. In 1848 the leaden case was lying with several others—there are over forty of them—near one of the open gratings of the vault. There were many loose stones upon it, and a large hole in the lead, which let in water. In 1859 Drs. Quain and Stewart, who went to the vault by request of the fellows of the Royal College of Physicians, found the remains in even a worse state, for the leaden case was then almost full of dirty water. In 1868 I found the case removed from its previous position, and lying apart in the vault, which had been repaired. In the case there was still an opening, but the water had either been removed or had escaped by evaporation. I was able to throw a reflected light into this opening, but I could see no remains, and I think that there is little left of what was once the bodily form of our greatest English anatomist. I would that what there may be, were safely placed in the mausoleum of the illustrious,—the Abbey of Westminster. John Hunter and David Livingstone were nobly companioned by William Harvey.

General

  Devoting myself to discern the use and utility of the movements of the heart in animals, in a great number of vivisections, I found at first the subject so full of difficulties that I thought for a long time, with Fracastor, that the secret was known to God alone. I could distinguish neither in what manner the systole and diastole took place, nor at what moment the dilatation and constriction occurred, owing to the celerity of the movements of the heart, which in most animals is executed in the twinkling of an eye, or like the flash of lightning. I floated undecided, without knowing on what opinion to rest. Finally, from redoubled care and attention, by multiplying and varying my experiments, and by comparing the various results, I believed I had put my finger on the truth, and commenced unravelling the labyrinth. I believed I had seized the correct idea of the movement of the heart and arteries, as well as their true use. From that time I did not cease to communicate my views either to my friends, or to the public in my academical course.

  Harvey is entitled to the glory of having made, by reasoning alone, without any mixture of accident, a capital discovery in one of the most important branches of science. He had also the happiness of establishing at once his theory on the most solid and convincing proofs; and posterity has added little to the arguments suggested by his industry and ingenuity. His treatise of the circulation of the blood is farther embellished by that warmth and spirit which so naturally accompany the genius of invention.

  It may indeed be thought wonderful, that Servetus, Columbus, or Cæsalpin should not have more distinctly apprehended the consequences of what they maintained, since it seems difficult to conceive the lesser circulation without the greater; but the defectiveness of their views is not to be alleged as a counterbalance to the more steady sagacity of Harvey. The solution of their falling so short is, that they were right, not indeed quite by guess, but upon insufficient proof: and that the consciousness of this, embarrassing their minds, prevented them from deducing inferences which now appear irresistible. In every department of philosophy, the researches of the first inquirers have often been arrested by similar causes. Harvey is the author of a treatise on generation, wherein he maintains that all animals, including men, are derived from an egg. In this book we first find an argument maintained against spontaneous generation, which, in the case of the lower animals, had been generally received. Sprengel thinks this treatise prolix, and not equal to the author’s reputation. It was first published in 1651.

  In truth, the great intellectual achievement of Harvey consisted precisely in the fact that his discovery was made without even that degree of ocular verification (imperfect though it be) which subsequent inquiry has rendered possible. The difficulty that confronted him, and of which his theory failed to take account, was the mode in which the blood passed from the small arteries into the small veins. These vessels he and others could see and recognise by dissection of a dead animal’s body. But the union of an artery and a vein he could never see. That in some unexplained manner the blood did pass from the final branching of an artery to the final branching of a vein he felt as scientifically certain as though his eye had seen it; but the fine network of capillary tubes which unite the two systems of vessels was reserved for Malpighi’s microscope.

  Harvey was the favoured friend of his sovereign, the honoured Nestor of his profession, the pride of his countrymen. If he lived now, and were guilty of serving mankind to the same extent and in the same way, so far from any such marks of favour reaching him, he would find himself to be a mark of a different kind—a mark, I mean, for immeasurable calumny and scandalous vituperation; and, though his professional brethren would surely pay him all honour, so far from being the pride of his countrymen, a goodly number of them, of all grades in the social scale, would be spending a world of energy in the endeavour to give him the legal status of a burglar.

  From the MS. volume of Harvey’s lectures, in the British Museum, which, after having been lost sight of, has been recently rediscovered, he appears to have fully established his doctrines in 1616, but first promulgated them in his lectures in 1619, after reiterated experiments and long and patient study. His immortal “Treatise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood,” dedicated to Charles I, was published at Frankfort in 1628, when he had attained his fiftieth year, when his reputation as a physician had been long established, and when his brilliant discoveries were the theme of discussion and admiration in all the seats of learning throughout Europe—not that his doctrine was accepted without opposition and even scorn and contempt—for he did not escape the opprobrium and contradictory treatment that has befallen most other great discoverers. At first his doctrines were denied and repudiated, subsequently it was affirmed that they contained nothing that was not already known.

  The modern controversy (Dr. George Johnson, “Harveian Oration,” 1882; Willis, “William Harvey, a History of the Discovery of the Circulation of the Blood,” 1878) as to whether the discovery was taken from some previous author is sufficiently refuted by the opinion of the opponents of his views in his own time, who agreed in denouncing the doctrine as new; by the laborious method of gradual demonstration obvious in his book and lectures; and, lastly, by the complete absence of lucid demonstration of the action of the heart and course of the blood in Cæsalpinus, Servetus, and all others who have been suggested as possible originals of the discovery. It remains to this day the greatest of the discoveries of physiology, and its whole honour belongs to Harvey.

  His other celebrated work, the “De Generatione,” belongs to the next period. Though this work has not the importance of the “De Motu Cordis,” it is remarkable that the doctrine of “epigenesis” expounded in it—the theory that the development of the embryo takes place by the successive addition of parts, not by the unfolding of a complete miniature present from the first—is substantially that which is now held.