Misunderstood Geniuses： William Harvey

Let's go back in time about 1800 years ago to the year 145 AD. A time when everyone ate organic food because that's all there was, and nobody listened to dubstep. Over in Greece, some guy had a dream where the god of medicine told him his son needed to be a doctor. So he sent his son, Galen, to med school. The medicine god knew what he was talking about because Galen became the most famous doctor in ancient history. But that's not why we're here today. We're here to talk about the guy that took him down. For a long, long time, everyone knew that your body was made up of four fluids called humors. Blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. People thought of these fluids the same way some people today think about genetics. A handy explanation for, like, everything. So, say you had a bad temper. That meant you had tons of yellow bile inside. But if you were all detached and unemotional, your body was probably full of phlegm. Galen grabbed this idea and ran with it, coming up with lots of medical treatments mostly involving cutting people open and letting their blood drain out. His medical books were so popular, they rocked the bestseller list for the next 1,500 years. And that's when William Harvey steps in. We've gone past the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, but the medical world is still all about Galen. Harvey's a young hotshot doctor to British royalty who's got it made if he plays his cards right. There's only one problem. He's way too curious. Galen was smart, but limited. For one thing, he never got to test his theories because cutting dead people open was a big no-no back in the day. It pretty much killed your chances of getting into heaven, so Galen had to figure things out either by guessing or by dissecting dead animals, which was kinda but not totally useful when talking about humans. But Harvey's got no qualms with slicing up dead people, even though surgery is considered a pretty trashy career move and done only by low-class barbers. He's inspired by a couple of Renaissance doctors named Vesalius and Fabritius who are revolutionizing the world of medicine, but they've got way too big a man-crush on Galen to really challenge his ideas in a major way. Not so with Harvey, whose curiosity leads him to ask more and more questions every time he digs into those corpses. Galen claimed that blood was produced in the liver and then sent up to different parts of the body, which used it up. Harvey says that makes no sense. Blood travels in a circle, from the heart, through the arteries, into the veins, and then back into the heart. Galen thought there were two kinds of blood. Harvey's like, no, just one. But it changes color when it mixes with oxygen. He finally goes public with his stuff in 1628 with his book De Motu Cordis, which roughly translated means Everyone's a Moron Except Me. The book doesn't just update Galen's theories, it completely disproves them. If blood circulates around the body like Harvey claims, none of Galen's theories make much sense, including digestion, respiration, and all of that cool bloodletting stuff. Not surprisingly, people go all medieval on Harvey's ass, even though everyone does it from a different angle. Doctors who've spent their entire careers practicing Galen's theories are understandably threatened by Harvey's ideas, so they diss him every chance they get. On the flip side, philosophers like Rene Descartes, who's trying to prove that the universe is just a wicked big machine, support Harvey's theories, but only the parts that fit their agenda. It's like if someone today discovered that humans actually evolved from Martian space rocks. You can bet that both evolutionary scientists and creationists would have a big problem with that for totally different reasons, even if the evidence proved it to be true. For the next couple of decades, it's Harvey versus everybody. All the royal doctors who once loved him now call him a nutcase, and Harvey basically ditches everyone to work on other research, choosing to just ignore the haters. By the 1650s, William Harvey's a grumpy old man who's watched his wife die and has had the British Parliament send thugs to his place to steal most of his research, making him bust out with the phrase, Man is but a great mischievous baboon. But it's not all depressing news. He still teaches his anatomy lessons from time to time, and a new generation of med students treat him like a rock star, embracing his work and applying it to their own research. By the time he dies, William Harvey has been lucky enough to see his work vindicated, a prize most misunderstood geniuses never get. And Galen, king of the world for 1,500 years, fades into pop culture obscurity, suffering the same fate as Friendster and Jamiroquai.