William Harvey
was an
English
medical
doctor
. He was born in
Folkestone
,
Kent
,
England
on 1 April 1578. He was the first to explain how
blood
was moved through the
body
by the
heart
. He died on 3 June 1657 in
Roehampton
.
A hospital in Ashford, Kent is named after Harvey. He went to
The King's School
,
Canterbury
, then
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
. He then went to
University of Padua
where he
graduated
in 1602.
When Harvey returned to England he married Elizabeth Browne, the daughter of
Elizabeth I's
royal
physician
. He became a doctor at
St. Bartholomew's Hospital
in
London
from 1609 until 1643.
William Harvey is
famous
for his
idea
on blood being pumped around the body by the heart. He was the first to describe correctly and in detail the circulation and its properties. A few men knew about the lesser circulation of the blood through the lungs, but their work was lost. One 16th century work on
theology
, entitled
Cristianismi restitutio
, was written by Miguel Serveto. After he had been burnt at the stake for
heresy
(by
Calvin
), his book was destroyed. Three copies survived. A century and a half later, long after Harvey, someone noticed he had said something about the blood circulating.
[1]
Harvey announced his
discoveries
about the
circulatory system
in 1616 during a series of
lectures
(his lecture notes still exist).
[1]
He wrote a book (
Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et sanguinis in Animalibus
) about it in 1628.
[2]
He said that blood was pumped around the body in a closed system. Blood was pumped by the heart through the body before coming back to the heart to repeat the
process
. This went against what was believed at the time to be true.
The
Roman
doctor,
Galen
believed that there were two systems in the body dealing with blood. It was thought at the time that the dark red blood in
veins
came from the
liver
and the bright red blood in
arteries
came from the heart. It was believed that the liver and heart made the blood and it was used up by the body parts it was pumped to.
Harvey's ideas came from
dissecting
human
bodies. Harvey found that the liver would have to make 540 pounds of blood every hour for Galen to be right. This showed him that the blood was not being used up. It was being reused by the body. He said blood flowed through the heart in two
loops
. One loop went to the
lungs
and got
oxygen
. The other loop went to the
organs
and body
tissue
giving them the oxygen. He said the heart was just a pump that pumped blood around the body.
Harvey made another great discovery. He said (in
Latin
) "Every living thing comes from an egg". At that time it was not known that
mammals
came from eggs. It was not known until
Karl Ernst von Baer
discovered the eggs of mammals in 1827.
[3]
[4]
The fusion of sperm with egg was first seen by
Oskar Hertwig
in 1876.
[5]
[6]