William Harvey Research Paper

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Our medical advancements are the gramercy of the renowned British physician, William Harvey, who accurately described how blood circulates throughout the body, how animals develop, and set a basis for the scientific method. Harvey was born in 1578 in Folkestone, England. He attended Caius College, Cambridge, where he studied the classics, rhetoric, and physiology, and he finished with a Bachelor of Arts degree. Afterwards, he moved to the University of Padua in Italy, the greatest medical school at the time, and he earned a doctorate degree (Aird). He studied under Hieronymus Fabricius and adopted Aristotle’s methods of the study of nature, mostly in comparative anatomy and embryology, and began to challenge Galen’s ideas which were the widely …show more content…

This created a new field of research, known as physiology, because people wanted to have a better understanding of the human body, especially the heart. In 1628, he made his research public by writing a book: Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus which translates to An Anatomical Essay Concerning the Movement of the Heart and Blood in Animals (“About William Harvey”). He became interested in blood and conducted an experiment where blood from the vein and blood from the artery were both extracted and placed in a basin. He learned that it was “the same blood in the arteries as in the veins, after having tied them in the same way, as [he] repeatedly ascertained… [people] may fairly conclude that the arteries contain the same blood as veins, and nothing but the same blood” (Harvey 12). They were even the same color, of the same consistency, and the same volume (Aird). This contradicted Galen’s idea that veins contain blood and arteries contain blood and spirits (Aird). He used this exact same experiment to confute Jean Roinlan, a French doctor who published a book disproving some of Harvey’s ideas (Yount 86). Harvey’s ideas changed the way scientists think about the circulatory system. They know now that it works as a system of veins and arteries since they carry the same blood. Although Harvey did not know why the blood was two different colors, scientists have performed more tests over the years and now know it is because one has oxygen and the other one does

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