William Harvey mapped blood's circuit and exposed a witch's ordinary toad
In 1628 William Harvey published the first complete description of blood being pumped by the heart around the body and through the lungs. Patients deserted him over it. The same sceptical physician once posed as a wizard to test an accused witch, then dissected her supposedly magical toad and found nothing unusual.
Harvey, born in 1578, was the eldest of nine children of a Folkestone jurat who later became mayor. After Canterbury's King's School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, he travelled to Padua, where he studied with the anatomist Fabricius, author of a treatise on the little valves in veins. Padua made him a doctor of medicine in April 1602, aged 24, with examiners reporting that he far exceeded their high hopes. Back in London he joined the College of Physicians, married a physician's daughter, and in 1609 took charge of patients at St Bartholomew's Hospital for about 33 pounds a year.
From 1616 he gave the Lumleian anatomy lectures, setting himself rules: cut as much as possible in front of the audience, compare humans with animals, and never disparage other anatomists. He planned the abdomen for day one, the chest for day two and the brain, a divine banquet, for day three. Earlier writers such as Realdo Colombo and Michael Servetus had glimpsed parts of the circulation, but his De Motu Cordis, printed in Frankfurt, set out the full system. Colleagues' criticism cost him many patients.
Royal favour sustained him. He became physician extraordinary to James I in 1618 and later travelled everywhere with Charles I, whose hunts supplied deer carcasses for study. He treated Francis Bacon, but remained unimpressed, quipping that Bacon wrote philosophy like a Lord Chancellor. In 1634 his report helped acquit four Lancashire women accused of witchcraft, and in 1632 came the toad episode, after which he calmed the furious owner by revealing he was the king's physician.
Civil war brought losses. Parliamentarian soldiers ransacked his lodgings and scattered years of dissection notes and insect studies. He guarded the king's children at the Battle of Edgehill, followed the court to Oxford and became Warden of Merton College in 1645. Retiring to London, widowed and childless, he refused to publish again, having weathered one storm already. He died in 1657.
Source: William Harvey
