Unveiling the Genius of William Harvey: A Revolutionary Scientist
William Harvey was born on April 1, 1578, in the city of Folkestone, England. Her father’s name was Thomas Harvey, who was a prosperous merchant of his time and had been alderman, and later mayor, of his town. In all, there were ten children in William’s family – three girls and seven boys. There was happiness, prosperity and health in the family.
In 1588, at the age of 10, William entered the King’s School in Canterbury. This was the same year that the Spanish Armada was destroyed by British sea power. When William turned 15, he got admission in Keynes College, Cambridge. Accidentally the bodies of two major criminals were received by the college for autopsy and research, and naturally Harvey’s interest in medicine was awakened.
• From Cambridge he went to the famous institution of Pedua, which had been made world-famous in the field of medical and scientific research by the association of Galileo and Vesalius. Unfortunately, the influence of Vesalius was now almost destroyed. The same age-old ideas of Galen were being taught there these days, ignoring his discoveries regarding the body’s organization. Harvey entered Pedua as a student. Naturally, Harvey was dissatisfied with this, but he did not reveal his doubts in private until he had received his medical degree. On one hand, he returned to London for practice and on the other hand, at the same time, he got permission to study further in the ‘College of Frisianz’ of Cambridge University.
Three years later he was made a Fellow of the College and appointed physician to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. He would have lectures. On ‘Fundamentals of Medicine’. Harvey had the ability, the self-belief. While he was small in stature, and his skin was somewhat dark. Soon he started being counted among the eminent teachers of medicine.
Apart from this, he was also the royal physician of Emperor Charles I. But his job was full of great perils and storms, for Charles was then engaged in a struggle with Parliament and with Oliver Cromwell, in which his defeat was certain. Fortunately in the year 1642
He had dedicated his life to scientific discoveries at Oxford. So when Charles was beheaded in 1649, he had ceased to mean anything to the emperor.
What is it that Harvey has done that has earned him this place in the history of medicine? And, how was he able to do all this? His habit was to perform surgery on live animals. the animals
He would have directly studied its vibrations by opening his chest. He observed that the heart moves and the next moment becomes motionless, and that both this movement and this movement go on repeating in the same sequence. He held the heart of a living being in his hand and felt that the heart becomes hard one moment and becomes soft the next. And also that this process of the heart is often similar to what we experience every day while stretching the muscles of the arm. When this hardness comes in the heart, it becomes small in size, and in the condition of relaxation, its shape becomes a bit more. Its color does not remain the same in both the states – when it is hard and shriveled, then it is slightly more yellow. After many experiments in many animals, William Harvey came to the conclusion that our heart is shaped like a hollow muscle, and when the muscle is activated, some force comes, then this empty space inside it starts shrinking and the blood starts throwing out. And because of this, it ‘gets some yellowness’. When this muscle is relaxed, it does not have that tension, its inner cavity gets filled with blood from outside and due to this some redness also comes in it. This heart of ours is like a pump.
Having established this basic premise, Harvey now started studying the process of blood circulation in the body. He observed that the blood vessels pulsate at the moment when the heart is contracting. If a needle is pricked, a fountain of blood will start coming out of them and stop. Not only this, by occluding these arteries at various places in the body, he came to the conclusion that this process of pulsation is not a process of their own, but is always dependent on the motion of the heart.
Now his interest arose in the solution of the question that what amount of blood reaches the body through these arteries. By estimating that two ounces of blood move through the heart with each beat, and one
With 72 beats a minute, he quickly calculated that the heart pumps more than a gallon a minute, or—believably—more than 1,500 gallons of blood a day. Naturally, Harvey wondered how this could happen. And while answering his question, he came to the conclusion that this is possible only when the flow of blood starts from the heart itself and, after roaming around the whole body, returns back to the heart itself, that is, the path of blood circulation is one. There should be only ‘the path of circumambulation’.
Harvey re-examined the anatomy, and did some more tests. Studied veins and arteries, blue and red veins, with great precision and found that the direction of blood flow in them is always the same. In both of them there is some kind of valve-like, one-way gate, curtain-like, which allows the blood to flow out of the heart in the arteries, as well as towards the heart in the veins. He directly proved the usefulness of these one-sided doors by testing them on the hearts of animals. Opening a vein, he put a long thin rod in it. This bar moved towards the heart with great ease, but in the opposite direction its movement was completely blocked, because the valves in the middle had closed their doors.
Then tests were done and tests were done again to see if there was some error left. And only then could the true picture of the circulation of the body be known that after coming out of the heart, going through the channels of the arteries and returning through the veins, the blood again returns to the heart.
Nowadays, we hear everyday how many amazing operations these surgeons perform every day and with what ease. If there is any injury to the heart, it can also be treated. If the valves, veins and arteries start responding, then plastic artificial tubes and other valves can be installed in their place and when the operation is taking place, the movement of blood in the body should be done properly: for that there is a method in modern medicine. There is also an artificial pump. We are stunned to hear all this. But even in our times, no matter how well educated a surgeon may be, he would prove to be completely incompetent, if those great experiments of William Harvey had not happened earlier in the field of medicine.
And it is being suspected that he had a hand in bringing a huge storm in the sea.
This information was important in 1634, because people still believed in witches. Royal doctor Dr. William Harvey was ordered to go and examine these witches, and, really, the credit for this examination should also go to Harvey, because on the basis of his report, these witches were released then.
But Dr. Harvey is counted among the warriors of science not because he eradicated this false belief of his era about witches, but because he is the first discoverer of blood circulation in the body. Harvey’s 78-page essay was published in 1628 AD, which was titled: ‘Elementary analysis in relation to the activity of the heart and blood in animals.’ By this he was successful in uprooting a big rooted superstition in the field of science. Since then, our knowledge of the bodily functions of living beings has continued to advance with great stability.