William Harvey

William Harvey (1578–1657) was an English physician who gave the first complete and quantitative description of the circulation of the blood, overturning more than a thousand years of Galenic medicine. He was born in Folkestone, Kent, the eldest of seven sons of a yeoman farmer who later became mayor of the town.

Harvey was educated at the King's School, Canterbury, and at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, graduating in 1597. He then traveled to the University of Padua, the leading medical school of the day, where he studied under the anatomist Girolamo Fabrici, the discoverer of the venous valves, and took his MD in 1602. He returned to London, was admitted to the Royal College of Physicians in 1604, and joined the staff of Saint Bartholomew's Hospital in 1609.

Appointed physician extraordinary to King James I in 1618, Harvey developed his theory through dissections of more than eighty species of animal and through quantitative reasoning: he calculated that the heart pumps roughly 540 pounds of blood per hour, far more than the body can produce or absorb, so the same blood must circulate. He set out the argument in Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus, published in Frankfurt in 1628.

Harvey served Charles I through the English Civil War, attending the king at the Battle of Edgehill in October 1642 and accompanying the royal court to Oxford. His London lodgings were ransacked by Parliamentary forces, destroying his notes on insect generation. After the king's execution in 1649, Harvey retired to his brother's house in Roehampton and published Exercitationes de Generatione Animalium (1651), founding embryology. He died in 1657.

Etymology: William comes from the Old Germanic Wilhelm, combining wil "will" and helm "helmet, protection," giving the sense "resolute protector." It came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066 and has remained one of the most enduring boy names in the English-speaking world, holding the top-three position throughout sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. He bore it through Padua, Saint Bartholomew's, and the foundations of modern physiology.