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William Harvey Facts & Worksheets

William Harvey (April 1, 1578 - June 3, 1657) was an English physician who was the first to correctly describe the full circulation of blood in the human body and provide tests and reasoning in support of this notion.

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William Harvey (April 1, 1578 – June 3, 1657) was an English physician who was the first to correctly describe the full circulation of blood in the human body and provide tests and reasoning in support of this notion.

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Key Facts & Information

EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION

  • William Harvey was born in Folkstone, England on April 1, 1578. He was born into a fairly wealthy family. His mother was Joan Halke and his father was Thomas Harvey, a prosperous businessman who became Folkstone’s mayor. He had seven brothers and two sisters.
  • From 1588 to 1593, Harvey attended King’s School in Canterbury, Kent, and from 1593 to 1599 he studied the arts and medicine at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
  • He continued his studies at the leading European medical school then, the University of Padua. He was a student of Hieronymus Fabricius, an Italian anatomist and surgeon, who had a strong influence on Harvey.
  • Harvey and Fabricius became friends. From Fabricius, Harvey learned that dissection offered a way to better understand the human body.
  • In 1574, Fabricius discovered valves in human veins, although his discovery was not published until 1603.
  • On April 25, 1602, Harvey received his doctorate from Padua, and then returned to England to work as a doctor. In 1604, he married Elizabeth Browne, the daughter of a London surgeon, Launcelot Browne, who acted as a surgeon to James I, the King of England and Scotland.
  • Harvey and his wife seemed to be content together, and Harvey in his will referred to her as “my beloved deceased, caring wife”. They had no children.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

  • In 1602, Harvey returned to England and was awarded a Doctor of Medicine degree by the University of Cambridge, adding to that which he already had from Padua. Afterwards he moved to London to practice as a doctor.
  • In 1604, he joined the College of Physicists, becoming a college fellow in 1607, and a head physicist at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital.
  • Harvey became the College of Physicians’ Lumleian Lecturer in 1615, where he specialized in teaching surgery. In 1618, he was appointed physician to James I and continued as physician to Charles I in 1625 upon his accession to the throne.

DISCOVERY OF CIRCULATION

  • Harvey’s key work was Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals), which was published in 1628, with an English version published in 1653.
  • His greatest achievement was to recognize that the blood flows rapidly around the human body, pumped through a single artery and vein system. This hypothesis was supported with experiments and arguments.
  • Prior to Harvey, two separate blood systems were believed to exist in the body. One carried purple, “nutritive” blood and used the veins to distribute nutrition to the rest of the body from the liver. The other carried scarlet, “vivifying” (vital) blood, and used the arteries to distribute from the lungs a lifetime principle. Today these blood systems are understood as deoxygenated blood and oxygenated blood.
  • Harvey believed that the venous valves were taken into consideration to lead him to discover the circulation. It was known that inside the veins, there were tiny flaps which allowed free passage of blood in one direction but strongly inhibited blood flow in the opposite direction.
  • These flaps were thought to keep the blood from pooling under the force of gravity.
  • Harvey’s main experiment concerned the amount of blood flowing through the heart. He made an estimation of the ventricles’ volume, how effective they were in expelling blood, and how many beats the heart made every minute.
  • Harvey’s values indicated that the heart pumped 0.5–1 liter of blood per minute (modern values are about 4 liters per minute at rest and 25 liters per minute during exercise). The human body has around 5 liters of blood.

STUDY OF REPRODUCTION

  • Harvey committed much of the latter part of his career to the nature of animal reproduction. As an example of oviparous reproduction, he experimented on chickens, where embryonic development takes place in eggs hatched outside the body of the mother, and on deer as an example of viviparous reproduction, where embryonic development takes place within the body of the mother, resulting in the birth of live young.
  • Reproduction was incompletely defined before, and Harvey studied issues of the role of sperm and menstrual blood in embryo formation.
  • His observations were excellent but without the use of the microscope, such matters could not be properly resolved.

DEATH

  • In Harvey’s later life, he suffered from gout, kidney stones, and insomnia.
  • On June 3, 1657, at the age of 79, he died of a stroke. William Harvey’s grave can be found in the village of Hempstead, in the English county of Essex.

William Harvey Worksheets

This is a fantastic bundle which includes everything you need to know about the William Harvey across 22 in-depth pages. These are ready-to-use William Harvey worksheets that are perfect for teaching students about William Harvey (April 1, 1578 – June 3, 1657) who was an English physician who was the first to correctly describe the full circulation of blood in the human body and provide tests and reasoning in support of this notion.

Complete List Of Included Worksheets

  • William Harvey Facts
  • Periods of History
  • Physicians in History
  • Getting to Know William
  • Blood Flows
  • Choose One
  • Purple and Scarlet
  • Let’s See
  • Word Guessing
  • Word Scorer
  • Circulatory System

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