William Harvey (1578-1657) was an English physician to whom we owe a great debt.

    He graduated from Cambridge with a Bachelor degree at age 19, and then attended the University of Padua. After finishing his medical degree there in 1602, he returned to England to take a second degree in medicine at Cambridge. He set up practice in London two years later, where he married Elizabeth Browne, daughter of another doctor who was Physician to both Queen Elizabeth and her successor James I.

    In 1607, not yet aged 30, he took a position at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, now the oldest hospital in Europe. Harvey became Physician in Charge two years later, and remained at "Bart's" until his retirement. Like his father-in-law, he also became Physician to James I, and after him Charles I.

    However, we look to him today for his publication in 1628 of "On the Motion of the Heart and Blood." It is Harvey who first clearly and thoroughly described the action of the heart, and the ways in which blood is moved through the body. Thus the ancient theory of Galen, which had prevailed for nearly a millennium and half, was replaced by substantially the system we use today.

    Nevertheless, change comes slowly, and some scholars at the time were heard to say that they would "rather err with Galen than proclaim the truth with Harvey." But Galen thought that the heart produced heat, and the purpose of sending blood to the lungs was to cool it!

    Harvey, instead, showed how the heart's left ventricle pushed "fresh" blood through the arteries of the body, and the right ventricle sent "spent" blood through the pulmonary artery to the lungs to be reoxygenated. He also discovered the function of the valves in the veins, which prevent blood from flowing backward (away from the heart).

    He also discouraged belief in witchcraft; declared that "all life comes from the egg," and not from spontaneous generation; and established many modern aspects of medical practice through the rules he set for St. Bartholomew's. Truly a man of science!

    Vocabulary: Which word above means:

    1. say aloud, publicly

    2. a chamber in the heart

    3. blood vessels running away from the heart

    4. life arising from mud or other materials, not from other living things

    5. won

    6. related to the lungs

    7. make a mistake, be wrong

    8. put oxygen into again

    9. tried to prevent

    10. blood vessels running toward the heart

    ANSWERS: 1. proclaim 2. ventricle 3. arteries 4. spontaneous generation 5. prevailed 6. pulmonary 7. err 8. reoxygenated 9. discouraged 10. veins