Blood Circulation 400 Years after its Discovery

Abstract

The English doctor Willian Harvey discovered that the heart pumps blood to the whole body and that this returns entirely to the heart in a closed circuit, a process that takes place all the time and with all the blood. He published his discovery in 1628 (“Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus”) in Frankfurt, although the handwritten notes where he expresses this idea for the first time are dated as early as 1616, that is, 400 hundred years ago. The discovery of blood circulation was the first adequate explanation of an organic process and the starting point of the pathway towards experimental physiology.