The Works of William Harvey

Summary

Robert Willis's 1847 translation for the Sydenham Society gathers nearly everything Harvey published or left in finished form, prefaced by Willis's Life of Harvey and the text of his will. Its centre is the Anatomical Disquisition on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals (Frankfurt, 1628), seventy-two pages that overturned fourteen centuries of Galenic physiology. From vivisection of many animals, Harvey shows that the heart's working stroke is its contraction, that the auricles and ventricles beat in sequence, and that the blood of the right ventricle reaches the left through the lungs, not through pores in the septum. He then calculates: even if each beat expelled only half an ounce, the heart would pass more blood in half an hour than the whole body contains, far more than food could replace. The blood must therefore return. Ligatures on the human arm, of the kind used in bloodletting, and the valves of the veins confirm that it flows out by the arteries and back by the veins. Two Anatomical Disquisitions on the Circulation of the Blood (1649), addressed to the Paris anatomist Jean Riolan, answer twenty years of critics. Harvey repeats that questions of fact are settled by the senses, not by the age of an opinion, adds new experiments, takes up Descartes's mechanical account of the heartbeat, and notes how fear, anger and shame visibly drive the blood. The Anatomical Exercises on the Generation of Animals (1651), the longest work in the volume, record decades of observation of the hen's egg, day by day through incubation, and of the does and hinds of King Charles's parks, which the king allowed Harvey to dissect during the rutting and breeding seasons. Harvey rejects the inherited teaching that the embryo forms from the mixed seed of both parents, argues that every animal begins from an egg or primordium, and names the process by which parts appear one after another epigenesis. He takes the blood as the first part to live, visible as a beating red point. Essays on parturition, on the membranes of the uterus and on conception follow. Shorter pieces complete the book: the autopsy of Thomas Parr, reputed to have lived 152 years, whose death Harvey ascribed to rich food and the smoky air of London; and letters of Harvey's last years to physicians in Germany, Italy, France and the Netherlands. Harvey still speaks of spirits, native heat and the dignity of the heart, and much of his embryology was later revised, but his method of observation, experiment and measure shaped the medicine that followed. The full public-domain text is attached.

Plot or Argument

• Willis's Life of Harvey and the will

  The translator's biography traces Harvey from Folkestone, Cambridge and Padua to St Bartholomew's, the College of Physicians and the court, including his attendance on Charles I at Edgehill and in Oxford and the loss of his papers when his London lodgings were plundered. Harvey's will, with its bequests to the College and to his family, follows.

• De Motu Cordis: Dedications, Introduction and Chapter I

  Harvey dedicates the work to Charles I and to the College of Physicians, reviews the Galenic teaching on arteries, spirits and the septum, and explains that the difficulty of observing the heart's rapid motion first led him to suspect that its true movement had not been understood.

• De Motu Cordis: Chapters II-VII, the heart observed

  Vivisection of fish, frogs, serpents, birds and mammals, observed as the heart slows in dying animals, shows that the heart hardens, pales and expels blood when it contracts, that the arterial pulse follows this contraction, and that blood crosses the lungs from the right ventricle to the left.

• De Motu Cordis: Chapters VIII-XIV, the circulation demonstrated

  The famous calculation of blood passed per beat and per half hour, the three positions it requires, and their proof by ligatures on the arm and by the valves of the veins, which allow flow only toward the heart; Chapter XIV concludes that the blood moves in a circle.

• De Motu Cordis: Chapters XV-XVII, confirmations

  Probable reasons from the need to preserve and warm the blood, consequences for the spread of poisons, infections and medicines through the body, and comparative anatomy of hearts in many animals, all agree with the circulation.

• The two disquisitions to Riolan (1649)

  The first disquisition answers Riolan's partial acceptance of the circulation, in which he limited it to the larger vessels. The second, broader letter replies to many objectors at once, defends the evidence of the senses against appeals to antiquity, discusses Descartes, and points to the effect of the passions on the circulation.

• On Generation: method, the hen and the egg

  After introductory chapters on how knowledge is gained from the senses, Harvey describes the hen's reproductive organs and the parts of the egg and follows the developing chick through successive days of incubation, testing the accounts of Aristotle and of his teacher Fabricius at each stage.

• On Generation: the primordium, the blood and epigenesis

  Harvey argues that the first living part is the blood with its pulsing point, that the parts are built up in order rather than all at once, that both parents contribute as efficient causes without the male seed entering the egg as matter, and that an egg or primordium is the common origin of all animals.

• On Generation: the deer and the essays on birth

  Dissections of the king's hinds and does at successive weeks after mating show no visible conception for a time, which Harvey finds hard to explain. The essays on parturition, the uterine membranes and conception discuss labour, the placenta and umbilical cord, the dangers of meddling midwifery, and conception as an act of the uterus comparable to the brain's forming of an idea.

• Thomas Parr and the letters

  The autopsy report on the aged countryman Thomas Parr, made at the king's command in 1635, and letters of 1651-1657 to Caspar Hofmann, Paul Slegel, Giovanni Nardi, Robert Morison, Johann Daniel Horst and Jan Vlackveld, discussing the circulation, the lacteal vessels, generation and the value of rare cases.

Characters

• William Harvey, author and experimenter

  Physician and anatomist who reports his own dissections and experiments in the first person, courteous to his teachers but insistent that observation overrules authority.

• Galen, ancient authority

  The second-century physician whose system of liver-made blood, septal pores and arterial spirit Harvey dismantles while citing his experiments with respect.

• Aristotle, ancient authority and guide

  Harvey's most constant interlocutor in On Generation, admired for his method and his primacy of the heart and blood, corrected on the egg and on the role of the male.

• Hieronymus Fabricius of Aquapendente, teacher and foil

  Harvey's Paduan master, who described the valves of the veins without grasping their use and whose account of the chick's origin Harvey refutes.

• Jean Riolan the younger, opponent

  Senior anatomist of the Paris faculty who accepted only a partial, limited circulation; Harvey's two disquisitions answer him.

• Charles I, patron

  King and dedicatee, who allowed Harvey to dissect the deer of the royal parks and sent him to examine the Montgomery heart case and the body of Thomas Parr.

• Thomas Parr, subject of an autopsy

  Shropshire countryman reputed to be 152 years old, brought to London by the Earl of Arundel in 1635, who died there within weeks.

Lessons

• Counting the blood

  The decisive step in De Motu Cordis is arithmetic. Harvey deliberately chooses low estimates for how much blood leaves the heart at each beat and still finds that in half an hour more blood is expelled than the body holds and far more than food could supply. The argument does not depend on exact numbers, only on their order of magnitude. Students can see how a simple quantitative question can defeat a long-accepted theory.

  • Reconstruct Harvey's calculation in Chapter IX with modern figures for heart rate and stroke volume. Does his conclusion survive?
  • Why does Harvey choose deliberately small estimates?
  • What other long-held belief could be tested by asking, 'How much, and how fast?'

• The senses against antiquity

  In the second disquisition to Riolan, Harvey answers critics who would not abandon doctrines carrying the weight of the ancients. He replies that facts known by the senses wait on no opinion and that nothing is older or more authoritative than nature. He does not despise the ancients; he cites Aristotle and Galen constantly. His point is that respect for teachers does not oblige us to deny what we see, and that a Creator's works are the final court of appeal for questions of anatomy.

  • How does Harvey show respect for Galen and Aristotle while disagreeing with them?
  • Riolan accepted part of the circulation but not all. Why might a learned man accept half of a new idea?
  • When is it right to trust an authority over your own observation, and when is it wrong?

• Watching a chick become a chick

  On Generation records patient, repeated observation: eggs opened day after day of incubation, the first red pulsing point, the vessels spreading, the body forming part after part. From this Harvey concludes that the embryo is built up gradually rather than unfolded from a miniature already present, and coins the term epigenesis. His view that the blood lives first was later revised, but his insistence on watching the process in sequence set the pattern for embryology.

  • What does Harvey see on the first days of incubation, and what does he conclude from it?
  • What is the difference between epigenesis and the view that every part exists from the beginning in miniature?
  • Harvey could not see cells or sperm. How did the limits of his instruments shape his conclusions?

• The physician at the bedside and the deathbed

  Harvey was a working physician, and the volume shows it: the bled patient who faints, the Montgomery youth whose heart he touched through an old wound in the chest, the warning against midwives who hurry a labour, the autopsy of Thomas Parr. His explanations mix new physiology with older ideas of the non-naturals, air, diet and the passions. Students can study how a great discoverer still reasoned within the medicine of his time.

  • What causes does Harvey give for the death of Thomas Parr? Which seem sound to you, and which belong to older medicine?
  • In the Montgomery case, how does Harvey tell that the moving part is the heart and not the lung?
  • Harvey praises the patience of nature in childbirth. What does that passage suggest about the duty of a healer to do no needless harm?

Context

Harvey worked within the Paduan anatomical tradition of Vesalius, Colombo and Fabricius, which had already corrected Galen's descriptions of human structure, and within the Aristotelian philosophy that made the heart the first principle of life. Realdo Colombo had described the passage of blood through the lungs in 1559, and Fabricius had published on the venous valves in 1603. Harvey's achievement was to join anatomy, vivisection and quantitative reasoning in an argument about function. His later work on generation responded to Aristotle and Fabricius and to the long medical debate about the contributions of father and mother.

Composition

Harvey taught the circulation in his Lumleian lectures from about 1616, as his surviving lecture notes show, but published it only in 1628, at Frankfurt with William Fitzer. The replies to Riolan were printed at Cambridge in 1649. On Generation was the fruit of decades of work; much of Harvey's material on insects and comparative anatomy was lost when his lodgings were ransacked in 1642, and George Ent persuaded him to publish the surviving work in London in 1651. Willis translated all of these for the Sydenham Society in 1847, adding the Parr autopsy and the letters.

Reception

The circulation met strong opposition, especially in Paris, but was widely accepted by the 1650s, helped by Descartes's public endorsement of it in the Discourse on Method (1637), even though Descartes misdescribed the heartbeat. Marcello Malpighi's microscopic observation of capillaries in the frog's lung (1661) supplied the link Harvey had inferred but never seen, and Richard Lower and others built on Harvey's physiology. His embryology influenced the long eighteenth-century debate between epigenesis and preformation. The Willis translation was reprinted, and the works were chosen for the Great Books of the Western World (2nd ed., 1990), volume 26.

Comparisons

• On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals (De Motu Cordis)

  The library's separate De Motu Cordis record covers the 1628 treatise alone in detail. This collection shows what came after it: Harvey answering critics, applying the circulation to the passions and to medicine, and turning his method to the origin of life.

• Generation of Animals

  Harvey's On Generation is in large part a sustained dialogue with Aristotle's treatise. He keeps Aristotle's method, his four causes and his belief that the parts form in sequence, but rejects his account of the male seed as giving form to the menstrual matter and finds an egg where Aristotle had not looked for one.

• Galen: Selected Works

  Galen's physiology is the target of De Motu Cordis, yet Harvey also uses Galen's own experiment of tying a tube into an artery and praises his anatomical skill. Reading both shows that Harvey corrected Galen from within the tradition of experiment that Galen had helped found.

• On the Fabric of the Human Body (Preface)

  Vesalius corrected human anatomy by dissecting with his own hands in Padua in the 1540s; Harvey studied in the same university two generations later and carried the inquiry from structure to motion and function.

• Discourse on Method

  Part V of Descartes's Discourse praises Harvey's circulation as an example of mechanical explanation while attributing the heartbeat to the heating and expansion of the blood. In the second disquisition to Riolan, Harvey answers that view politely and holds to contraction.

Quotes

Medical Lens

The volume is a primary source for the history of physiology and of experimental medicine. De Motu Cordis establishes the circulation by vivisection, quantitative estimate, ligature of the human arm and the anatomy of the venous valves. The disquisitions to Riolan apply the circulation to phlebotomy, fainting and the bodily effects of the passions, an early physiological treatment of the relation between emotion and the body. On Generation and its appended essays are a major early modern source on embryology, labour and the placenta, and include sharp criticism of hurried midwifery. The Parr autopsy explains death in extreme old age by the older categories of the non-naturals, air and diet, and gives an early complaint about the coal smoke and filth of London air. Harvey's explanations keep native heat, spirits and much humoral language, so his medicine should be read as a bridge between Galenic and modern physiology rather than as modern physiology in Latin. Any retrospective diagnosis of Parr's final illness from Harvey's description is interpretive.

• De Motu Cordis, Chs. II-V

  Vivisection of cold- and warm-blooded animals, observed as their hearts slow, shows that contraction is the heart's active phase.

  Anatomy Dissection
• De Motu Cordis, Chs. IX-XIII

  The calculation of blood expelled in half an hour, and ligature experiments on the arm as used in bloodletting, with the valves of the veins, prove the circuit.

  Anatomy Dissection Bloodletting
• Second Disquisition to Riolan

  Bleeding flows more freely in a warm body; a timid patient who faints stops bleeding; anger, shame, fear and desire move the blood visibly; pain relieved by bleeding and cupping.

  Bloodletting Mind Body Humoral Medicine
• On Generation, Exercise the Fifty-second

  Harvey examines the young son of Viscount Montgomery, who survived a chest injury with an open cavity, and touches the beating apex of his heart, finding it without sensation of touch.

  Physicians Doctors Anatomy Dissection
• On Parturition

  Natural and unnatural labour, the placenta and after-pains, and criticism of young midwives who hasten delivery with oils and drugs and endanger the mother.

  Childbirth Maternal Physicians Doctors
• Anatomical Examination of the Body of Thomas Parr

  Autopsy of a man reputed to be 152, with lungs congested and the cause of death referred to the change of air, diet and drink on coming to London.

  Aging Senescence Anatomy Dissection Ancient Medicine

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Repeat Harvey's simple demonstration from Chapter XIII: press a finger on a visible vein on the back of the hand or forearm, stroke the blood away from the heart with another finger, and observe whether the vein refills. Write up what you saw and how it supports the circulation.

• Fiction

  Write the scene, from the young Viscount Montgomery's point of view, in which the king's physician arrives, asks to see the old wound, and discovers that what everyone took for the lung is the heart.

• Essay

  Harvey says nothing is older or of higher authority than nature. Write an essay on how a Christian student should weigh the authority of great teachers against what careful observation shows, using Harvey's treatment of Galen and Aristotle as evidence.

Further Reading

• William Harvey's Biological Ideas, Walter Pagel

  A demanding scholarly study of Harvey's Aristotelian and vitalist commitments alongside his experimental method.

• William Harvey and the Circulation of the Blood, Gweneth Whitteridge

  A close study of how Harvey reached the circulation, by the editor and translator of his lecture notes.

• Galen: Selected Works, Galen

  Read On the Natural Faculties beside De Motu Cordis to see the system Harvey replaced.