Harvey’s lecture notes show him to be a witty and independent thinker. Once he rhymed, “There is a lust in man no charm can tame: Of loudly publishing his neighbor’s shame: On eagles wings immortal scandals fly, while virtuous actions are born and die.” Though his work on blood circulation is legendary, we should pause to observe that most scientific discoveries are elaborations of previous work. While it is true that many physicians in Harvey’s time placed undue influence on classical authority, particularly of Galen, not all did; the popular maverick Paracelsus, for instance, declared his intellectual independence by burning the works of Avicenna and Galen. Many read the classics only to critique them. Harvey, like most in his time, was a staunch Aristotelian, but not slavishly so. Furthermore, his experimentalism was heir to a long line of empirical work by his predecessors Vesalius, Fabricius and Colombo. He was not, in other words, working on questions that had not already been matters of intense study, and he was not the only “discoverer” of blood circulation. The Egyptian physician Ibn Al-Nafis had made significant headway 300 years earlier explaining pulmonary circulation. Some of Harvey’s hypotheses later proved false, and his theory was incomplete in itself. A recent book claims that the widespread story that Harvey predicted the existence of capillaries is a myth. Nevertheless, his primary work An Anatomical Study of the Motion of the Heart and of the Blood in Animals (1628) was “certainly immeasurably influential on Western medical practice” according to historian Michael Hart, and his Essays on the Generation of Animals (1651) also formed the basis for modern embryology: Ex ova omnia, he wrote: “Everything from an egg.” Harvey’s clever experimental approach that demonstrated the circulation of blood from one side of the heart to the other, through the lungs and around the body making one big circuit, is well known. (Interestingly, he was not all that impressed with the opinions of Francis Bacon, one of his patients.) Diagrams of Harvey pressing fingers at precise points on veins on the arm to illustrate his ideas are readily available. The details of how Harvey’s theory overcame classical and medieval concepts of the motion of blood, the function of veins and arteries, the action of valves in the veins, and the role of the heart, are all available in the secular literature. Students of history can unravel these details. What concerns us here is William Harvey’s place in the Christian influence on science. Some surviving references provide glimpses into his motivation and beliefs. to be continued...
Posted on: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 15:53:58 +0000
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