Dr William Harvey (1578-1657): physician, obstetrician, and fetal physiologist.

Abstract

William Harvey was born in Folkstone, Kent, in 1578 and educated first at the Grammar School in Canterbury and then at Caius College Cambridge (1593-7). In 1599, at the age of 21, he travelled to Padua where he studied for the next three years under such masters as Fabricius ab Aquapendente (Anatomy) and Galileo (Mathematics). After obtaining his doctor's degree with high distinction in 1602 he returned to England where he settled in London and married in 1604. The same year he became a member of the College of Physicians and in 1608 was appointed physician to St Bartholomew's Hospital. In 1615 he was made Lumleian lecturer to the College, a post he retained for life. The following year he gave his first dissertation on the circulation of blood, though his most famous work On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals was not published until 1628. Meanwhile Harvey had been appointed physician to King James I (c 1618), and subsequently to Charles I. During the Civil War when the Court withdrew to Oxford, he was made Warden to Merton College (1642). In 1646, when 66 years old, he resigned and withdrew from practice. His wife had died and as there had been no offspring, he went to live with one or other of his brothers. In 1651 the second of his great books, that On the Generation ofAnimals was published together with an essay On Parturition which was the first original English work on midwifery. In 1654 Harvey presented the College of Physicians with a new building. The same year he was elected President but gracefully declined the office because of his age and infirmities. He suffered badly from gout. So instead he was appointed Consiliari. He died three years later at the age of 79 and was buried in Hempstead, Essex. So much for a bald outline of Harvey's life. For himself, he was a small person with dark eyes and an honest, cheerful countenance. A modest man, he lived in harmony and friendship with his colleagues. He was also a philosopher who liked nothing better than to withdraw to the attic or to a cavern in the garden in order to meditate. His contributions to medicine were immense. He introduced the experimental and observational approach to solving scientific problems and made tremendous contributions to comparitive anatomy and physiology, including embryology, as well as to clinical medicine, surgery and obstetrics. Sadly most of his work was lost when a mob pillaged his home at the outbreak of the Civil War in William Harvey in 1627.