William Harvey

William Harvey was born in Folkestone, Kent, the eldest of nine children of a prosperous farmer and merchant. He studied at Cambridge and then at Padua, the leading medical school in Europe, under the anatomist Fabricius, who had described the valves in the veins. Returning to London, he became a physician at St. Bartholomew's Hospital and later physician to King James I and King Charles I. Galen had taught that blood was made constantly in the liver and consumed by the body. Harvey dissected many animals and measured how much blood the heart pumps with each beat; he calculated that in an hour it pumps far more blood than the body could possibly produce or contain. He concluded that the same blood must go round and round, pumped by the heart through the arteries and returning through the veins. In 1628 he published On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals. Many physicians attacked his idea at first, and he lost patients, but it was widely accepted before his death. During the Civil War he served with the king. He died in 1657.

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