Harvey graduated with honors in 1602 and returned to England, earning another medical degree from Cambridge University, finally deciding to settle down and practice medicine.
Harvey took it as his responsibility to figure out the riddle and worked long and hard. Of course, his research was generously sponsored by James 1st’s successors as well as Charles 1 because Harvey was their personal physician, but was only appointed physician to Charles 1 later on in his life. In addition to being sponsored, his work was helped along even more so when he married to Elizabeth Browne, the daughter of a physician to the young but ageing queen Elizabeth 1. He was appointed fellow of the royal college of physicians which was quite an honor in itself, because the events that followed were certainly lucky. He was appointed physician first to james 1, and then charles 1 when the latter became king.
Settling down, Harvey worked at St Bartholemew’s hospital in London continuing his interest in anatomy. He made some very important discoveries.
In 1615 harvey really started to think about how the blood circulated around the body. He was fascinated and was sure that he could work out all the secrets of the system. He discouraged people believing that food was converted to blood by the liver, and then consumed as fuel by the body itself, though many did not believe him even though he knew from firsthand experience and observations of animal dissections. By being sponsored, he dissected many animals and executed criminals to prove his point.
He also proved that the heart was indeed a pump that forced blood around the body through arteries, and that veins returned the blood to be recycled. The discovery that the veins had valves helped Harvey understand how the valves worked. They simply stopped the blood from flowing the wrong way (backwards) to the heart.
Harvey was also approved for proving Galen’s theory (another physician who was Asiatic-greek and lived between 130 and 201, stating a fact that the body made new blood as it was used up) wrong.
Harvey was in no hurry for his work to be noticed, he thought that his work would never be good enough to be written in print, little did he know how his discoveries would shape the future world.
Harvey first revealed his findings in a lecture at the college of physicians in 1616, but was ridiculed so he set out to work for himself.
Finally, in 1628, Harvey published details of his work in a book called Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus (On the movement of the heart and blood in animals).
Harvey faced plenty of opposition to his work. He lost patients because his ideas were considered eccentric. His work made little difference to general medical practice at the time because practices such as blood letting were still quite popular and seem to have worked, and it wasn’t till the 20th century that doctors realized how important it was to check a patients blood flow by taking the pulse.
His results were not purely negative, for Harvey did encourage other doctors to investigate blood circulation such as the bloods role in carrying oxygen to his lungs.
Finally, after William Harvey’s death in 1657, other doctors were convinced of his work and his correctness about blood circulation. Marcello Malpighi contributed to Harvey’s work by convincing doctors about Harvey’s theory by using better microscopes than the one’s used in William Harvey’s Time, discovering about the capillary network through the microscope.
In conclusion, harvey’s work laid the foundation of modern medicine for the circulatory system, a feat remarkable because Harvey did not use a microscope to figure out whatever he did.
Harvey’s second book, Essays on the generaton of animals, is also a wealthy mine on information about embryology and it’s modern counterparts.
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