Harvey, William

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Harvey, William (1578–1657). Physician. After Cambridge, Harvey went to the great medical school at Padua. His teacher Fabricius had identified valves in veins, and was interested in animal generation; these became Harvey's great concerns also. Back in England, he settled down to successful practice in London, becoming physician to Charles I and a staunch royalist. The structure of the heart and vein valves convinced him that, contrary to received physiological opinion, blood must circulate round the body (rather than ebb and flow), which he determined to confirm ‘by sense and experience’ (animal dissection, vivisection), but De Motu Cordis (1628) initially met with considerable controversy. He then turned to embryology, inferring that all animals start from an egg.

David Knight

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