HARVEY'S DISCOVERY,the pump,circulating the blood around the body.
We take the function of heart so much for granted that it is difficult to grasp the magnitude of William Harvey's discovery, published in his work Exercitatio Anatomica Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in animalibus (An Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animal ) , that it is a pump, circulating the blood around the body and back to the heart.
Born in 1578 in Folkestone, Kent, Harvey had studied medicine at the University of Padua, reputed to have best Medical school in Europe (Italy was regarded as the center of anatomical study), Where he had sat at the feet of Hieronymus Fabricius (Girolamo Fabrici), the leading anatomist of the day. On returning to England in 1602, he married the daughter of a physician to the royal household, and it may have been through her family's influence that he obtained the post of physician to St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London.
Harvey's great passion was for anatomy. Determined to discover how blood passes through the heart, he dissected every kind of creature from earthworms and insect to animals, eventually arriving at a correct description of the circulatory system. His book made him famous throughout Europe, although traditionalists, especially in France, ridiculed his findings, which contradicted the long established writings of Galen (c.129-216). A few years after Harvey's death in 1657, Marcello Malpighi was able to confirm with a microscope that he had correctly assumed the existence of capillaries, too small to be identified with the human eye, linking the arterial to the venous system.
We take the function of heart so much for granted that it is difficult to grasp the magnitude of William Harvey's discovery, published in his work Exercitatio Anatomica Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in animalibus (An Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animal ) , that it is a pump, circulating the blood around the body and back to the heart.
Born in 1578 in Folkestone, Kent, Harvey had studied medicine at the University of Padua, reputed to have best Medical school in Europe (Italy was regarded as the center of anatomical study), Where he had sat at the feet of Hieronymus Fabricius (Girolamo Fabrici), the leading anatomist of the day. On returning to England in 1602, he married the daughter of a physician to the royal household, and it may have been through her family's influence that he obtained the post of physician to St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London.
Harvey's great passion was for anatomy. Determined to discover how blood passes through the heart, he dissected every kind of creature from earthworms and insect to animals, eventually arriving at a correct description of the circulatory system. His book made him famous throughout Europe, although traditionalists, especially in France, ridiculed his findings, which contradicted the long established writings of Galen (c.129-216). A few years after Harvey's death in 1657, Marcello Malpighi was able to confirm with a microscope that he had correctly assumed the existence of capillaries, too small to be identified with the human eye, linking the arterial to the venous system.
