The World's Most Mysterious Objects by Patricia Fanthorpe & Patricia Fanthorpe

Author:Patricia Fanthorpe & Patricia Fanthorpe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Dundurn Press
Published: 2010-11-22T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN:

Mysterious Locks, Keys, and Containers

Dr. William Harvey was a medical pioneer who discovered the circulation of the blood. He greatly aided Renaissance anatomy with his brilliant new findings. Harvey rescued the medicine of his day from the strangling grip of traditional Galenic physiology (named after Claudius Galenus, A.D. 129). Harvey advanced the medicine of his time far beyond its contemporary alchemy after he published “Exercitato anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinus in animalibus” (“An Anatomical Essay Concerning the Movement of the Heart and the Blood in Animals”).

Bom in Folkestone, Kent in 1578, Harvey attended Caius College in Cambridge, then studied at Padua before returning to England two years later. By 1602, he had established himself as a reliable physician, and he was elected Fellow of the College of Physicians in 1607. He later worked at Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, a great achievement. Harvey’s career leapt to even greater heights when he was appointed by the College of Physicians to be a public dissector and anatomy lecturer. In 1618, he was appointed as a Royal Physician, putting him in the vanguard of medical research. At this time, theories about the blood and its movements were plentiful, so what made Harvey’s theories better than others? Among other things concerning the blood, he worked out that the amount of blood pumped through an animal’s heart in one hour was much greater than the entire volume of the animal itself!

If only Harvey had used the newly invented microscope, he would have found the tiny blood capillary vessels that he couldn’t see with the unaided eye, the absence of which hindered the final and conclusive proof of his outstanding work.

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