1 ) that comprise all of the cosmos - fire, water, air, and earth. By that time, the Hellenist civilization had rejected the mythological notions of earlier civilizations that placed everyday events in the hands of spirits in favor of the conviction that events such as rain or disease have natural rather than supernatural causes and that these causes are subject to critical and rational analysis: a transition from “mythos” to “logos,” from mythology to logic or reason ( 14).Īccordingly, humans were believed to be made up of the same fundamental elements (Fig. To fully appreciate the magnitude of Harvey’s revolution, we have to dip back in time to the golden age of Greece, around 400 B.C. It was in the latter capacity that he undertook the experiments that were to lead to one of the greatest scientific revolutions of the century - one that was to abolish, without a trace, a dogma that had persisted for almost 1,500 years ( 11, 12, 14). Later, at the age of 37, he was appointed to the distinguished position of Lumleian Lecturer in anatomy at the College of Physicians. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London in 1609. degree from Cambridge (1602) he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1607 and the physician to St. ( 4)Īfter returning to London, Harvey obtained his M.D. that when he took notice the Valves in the Veins of so many several parts of the body, were so plac’d that they gave free passage to the Blood Towards the Heart, but oppos’d the passage of the Venal blood the Contrary way: He was invited to imagine that so Provident a Cause as Nature had not so Plac’d so many Valves without Design: and no Design seem’d more probable, than That, since the Blood could not well, because of the interposing Valves, be Sent by the Veins to the Limbs it should be Sent through the Arteries and Return though the Veins, whose Valves did not oppose its course that way. Years later, when Harvey was close to death, he was asked by Robert Boyle what had induced him to think that the blood circulated ( 13, 17). There Harvey studied under a student of Versalius, Fabricius, who had written a treatise on the valves in veins but hadn’t the vaguest idea about what they did other than that they might slow blood flow ( 6, 13, 14, 17). Caius who helped found Harvey’s alma mater at Cambridge, was one of the great centers of medical education at the time, the home of Galileo and the great anatomist Versalius. That institution, the alma mater of the same Dr. He obtained a Doctor of Physic diploma from the University of Padua in 1602. He studied at the elite King’s School in Canterbury (1588–1594) and later at Gonville and Caius College of Cambridge University, where he received a B.A. The year was 1578, and the period has come to be known as the period of the “scientific revolution.” And indeed, it was a revolution, not because of the frequency of scientific discoveries - that prize goes to the present - but because it witnessed a revolution in epistemological thinking, an upheaval in the approach to acquiring the truth about the natural world.īecause of his family status, Harvey had no problem obtaining a privileged education. William Harvey was born to a reasonably well-to-do family during a period of unparalled intellectual fervor.
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