April 1 - William Harvey, his experiments and blood circulation

Hi, welcome to On This Day in Tudor History with me Claire Ridgway, founder of the Tudor Society and Anne Boleyn Files. Now where am I taking you back to today? Well I'm taking you back to Queen Elizabeth I's reign but on this day in Tudor history, the 1st of April 1578, English physician William Harvey was born in Folkestone, Kent. Now you might not have heard of William Harvey but he's gone down in history as being the man who discovered the circulation of blood and he was also physician extraordinary to King James I and served his son King Charles I in this position too. Now let me tell you a bit more about Harvey's work on the heart and circulation. In 1615 William Harvey was elected to the Lumleyan lectureship, that's very hard to say, in the College of Physicians and so prepared a course of lectures. His preparation for this included vivisectional experiments on the heart. As his biographer Roger French notes, Harvey's findings were inconsistent with the Galenic doctrine that blood moved into the arteries as the heart passively contracted after its forcible diastole. Harvey concluded, explains French, that the active phase of the heart's action was a forceful systole. It's rising up in the vivisected animal which produced the pulse by pushing the blood into the arteries as it contracted. Don't I sound knowledgeable and did I understand a word of that? No, sorry. Of course the doctrine of Galen, the famous Greek physician and scholar, had been long accepted so Harvey's findings were greeted with scepticism for quite a time, although by his death in 1657 they'd been accepted. Now I'm not a scientist at all, not in any way whatsoever, so here's an explanation of Galen's theory from the National Geographic magazine. According to Galen, dark venous blood formed in the liver and then travelled through the veins throughout the body to deliver nourishment and build and maintain tissues. Some blood would come into contact with air in the lungs and go to the heart. From there this bright red blood went to the brain to form pneuma, p-n-e-u-m-a, a substance responsible for sensation and feeling. According to Galen's theory the blood did not return to the which meant that it needed to be constantly replenished. Galen believed that the liver could produce too much blood and that this had to be alleviated by bloodletting. William Harvey challenged Galen's doctrine by laying out the evidence for his view that blood moved throughout the body in a circle. It circulated. His experiments on live animals had shown him their beating hearts and this observation caused him to conclude that it was the heart that was responsible for moving the blood around the body and that it did it by pumping it. The heart moved the blood out through the arteries and the blood was pumped back to the heart through the veins. After rigorous research and experiments Harvey published his findings in 1628 in his book On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals which was first published in Latin. This wasn't actually new. Centuries before that manuals on Chinese medicine had mentioned blood being pumped around the body by the heart in a circle and a 13th century Arabian doctor had written about circulation. In England however Galen's doctrine was still believed. Harvey also did experiments like applying tourniquets to the arm and showing that there must be valves in the veins. Harvey was also responsible for another medical work this time on embryology a book called On Animal Generation. Harvey died on the 3rd of June 1657 from a stroke and here's a bit of William Harvey trivia. In Charles I's reign he was involved in investigations into alleged witchcraft. As a physician he examined some women from Burnley who were accused of being witches but they were pardoned after he and his colleagues concluded they were normal women without extra nipples to feed their familiars. In one witchcraft trial he dissected a toad to prove that it was a normal dead toad and not a demon in disguise. I'll give you a link to read Harvey's work on The Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals as it is very interesting. Also on this day in Tudor history the 1st of April 1536 Imperial Ambassador Eustace Chapuis recorded King Henry VIII courting a woman who wasn't his wife. This woman was Jane Seymour and you can find out more about that in last year's video which I'll give you a link to. You can subscribe by clicking round about there, you can hit the bell to be notified as these videos go live and please do consider giving me a like and leaving a comment. I'll be back tomorrow, bye!