William Harvey
William Harvey
William Harvey (1578–1657) was an English physician who first fully described the circulation of the blood. Born in Folkestone, Kent, he studied at Cambridge and then at the University of Padua, where his teacher Hieronymus Fabricius had described the valves in the veins. Returning to London, he became a physician at St Bartholomew's Hospital and later physician to King James I and King Charles I. Through careful dissection, experiment and simple calculation, he showed that the amount of blood the heart pumps is far too great to be continuously produced by the body, and concluded that the same blood must circulate, driven by the heart, out through the arteries and back through the veins. He published this discovery in 1628 in On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, overturning ideas that had stood since Galen. His experimental method helped lay the foundations of modern physiology.
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Medicine from Hippocrates to Laennec
Hippocrates taught that illness has natural causes and should be studied by careful observation; the physician's oath that bears his name still shapes medical ethics. Galen, a Greek physician in Rome, built on Hippocratic medicine, and his writings guided doctors for over a thousand years. William Harvey corrected Galen's teaching by demonstrating the circulation of the blood in 1628. René Laennec, an admirer of Hippocratic observation, invented the stethoscope in 1816.
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