Circulation: William Harvey's Revolutionary Idea

For a man of such diminutive stature, William Harvey made a huge and inestimable impact on modern medicine. Arguably the greatest Englishman in the history of science after Isaac Newton, Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood overturned centuries of long-held beliefs, and unusually, he lived to see his own doctrine established in his lifetime. Set in the thumping heart of late Renaissance London, Tom Wright's vivid portrait of Harvey also shows how his physiological ideas permeated culture and language, from London’s bustling trade networks to the discovery of meteorological cycles, and featuring a dramatic cast of historical characters, from Francis Bacon, England’s erstwhile Lord Chancellor and a former patient, and John Donne’s sensual poetry which too places the heart at the centre of man’s existence, to Robert Fludd, whose support and corroboration of Harvey’s ideas helped launch his circulation theory. Prior to 1620, the anatomic tradition was governed by the thoughts of Galen, the celebrated second century Roman physician, who claimed the liver generated blood, and that the body was composed of four humours which in turn determined a man’s temperament: melancholic, phlegmatic, sanguine or choleric. Harvey began to explore the notion that the heart was the central organ, a notion that a number of brilliant continental minds had been probing for almost a century before. Harvey obsessively and tenaciously pursued his idea, dissecting a menagerie of animals, dead and alive, in his private research chamber. He published his findings in his magnum opus De Motu Cordis in 1628, which he dedicated to King Charles I.But just as Harvey’s theory placed the heart at the centre of man, it posited the King as the centre of the body politic. It was a conservative and dangerous allegiance -- and just as cherished Galenic ideas could be toppled, so was the King in the ensuing Civil War. Harvey was exiled, his London home ransacked, and he died, gout-ridden, in the eaves of his brother’s house in Bishopsgate. Circulation celebrates the remarkable rise of a yeoman’s son to the elevated position of King’s physician, and above all, admires an extraordinary mind amid a rich, fertile time in England’s intellectual history.