William Harvey

William Harvey

1. Born 1578

   • Studied medicine in Cambridge and padua and then worked as a doctor in London.
     • Wrote: "An Anatomical Account of the Motion of the Heart and Blood" in 1628, which described how blood circulates around the body.
       • Became royal doctor to king Charles 1
         • Died 1657

2. Proved that the heart acts as a pump, pumping blood around the body and did this by:

   • Dissecting live cold-blooded animals so he could see the movement of each muscle.
   • Dissecting human bodies to build up detailed knowledge of the heart.
   • Proving that the body has a one way system for blood – he tried pumping liquid backwards through the valves in veins but could not do so.
   • Calculating that the amount of blood going into the arteries every hour was three times the weight of a man. This showed that the same blood was being pumped around the body by the heart.

3. Factors That Helped

   • Technology – Mechanical water pumps in London may have given him the idea about the heart pumping blood.
   • Attitudes/enquiry – Harvey’s discovery was the result of careful dissection, observation of detail and experiment.
   • Individual genius – Harvey was very thorough, spending hours repeating experiments and going over details

4. Factors that hindered

   • Attitudes – Some doctors disagreed with Harvey
   • Religion – The church didn’t like him challenging Galen and Hippocrates’ ideas and theories

5. Limitations

   • His work didn’t save lives and he had fewer patients after he published his theory.
   • There was still a lot to learn about blood and the heart.
   • His discovery wasn’t accepted at first and many doctors said he was wrong because he was contradicting Galen. It was fifty years later when the University of Paris started to teach his work.

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