William Harvey demonstrates the circulation of the blood
- Date
- 1628
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- England / Holy Roman Empire (Frankfurt, place of publication)
- Era
- Early Modern
- Significance
In 1628 the English physician William Harvey, physician to King Charles I, published at Frankfurt his short Latin treatise Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (An Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals), known simply as De Motu Cordis.
Drawing on dissection, vivisection of animals, careful observation and quantitative reasoning, Harvey showed that the heart is a muscular pump that drives the blood in a continuous one-way circuit around the body, with the arteries carrying blood out and the veins returning it. He estimated the volume of blood expelled with each beat and demonstrated that the quantity was far too great for the body to manufacture and consume it anew, as Galenic doctrine had held for some 1,500 years. His conclusions overturned the prevailing belief that blood was constantly produced in the liver and consumed in the tissues. Though initially met with scepticism, and some who thought him 'crackbrained', Harvey's experimental method and his demonstration of circulation became a model of physiological investigation and a landmark of the Scientific Revolution in medicine.
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Empires active in 1628
- Solomonic dynasty1270 CE – 1974 CE
- Ottoman Empire1299 CE – 1922 CE
- Mughal Empire1526 CE – 1857 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
- Ming Dynasty1368 CE – 1644 CE
Related science, technology & invention events
- Newton's Principia and universal gravitation1687
- Copernicus publishes De revolutionibus and the heliocentric universe1543
- Galileo's telescope and the Sidereus NunciusMarch 1610
- Kepler's laws of planetary motion1609
- Founding of the Royal Society of London28 November 1660 (chartered 1662)
- Watt patents the rotative steam engine1781
Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Science
Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.
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