Renaissance/Early Modern
William Harvey
1578–1657
“I profess to learn and to teach anatomy not from books but from dissections, not from the tenets of philosophers but from the fabric of nature.”
William Harvey was physician to the English court and a careful student of anatomy trained at Padua and Cambridge. In he showed by measurement and experiment that the blood circulates continuously, driven by the heart's contraction, against Galen's account of a slow one-way tide from the liver. He kept the search for purpose in living structure while making observation the test. Descartes accepted the circulation and reduced it to mechanism. Harvey refused that step.
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