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William Harvey - A Life in Circulation (Hardcover, New)
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William Harvey - A Life in Circulation (Hardcover, New)
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In 1628, the English physician William Harvey published his
revolutionary theory of blood circulation. Offering a radical
conception of the workings of the human body and the function of
the heart, Harvey's theory overthrew centuries of anatomical and
physiological orthodoxy and had profound consequences for the
history of science. It also had an enormous impact on culture more
generally, influencing economists, poets and political thinkers,
for whom the theory triumphed not as empirical fact but as a
remarkable philosophical idea.
In the first major biographical study of Harvey in 50 years, Thomas
Wright charts the meteoric rise of a yeoman's son to the elevated
position of King Charles I's physician, taking the reader from
farmlands of Kent to England's royal palaces, and paints a vivid
portrait of an extraordinary mind formed at a fertile time in
England's intellectual history. Set in late Renaissance London, the
book features an illustrious cast of historical characters, from
Francis Bacon and John Donne to Robert Fludd, whose corroboration
of Harvey's ideas helped launch his circulation theory.
After he published his discoveries, Harvey became famous throughout
Europe, where he demonstrated his theory through public
vivisections. Although his ideas met with vociferous opposition,
they eventually triumphed and Harvey became renowned as the only
man in the history of natural philosophy to live to see a
revolutionary theory gain wide currency. But just as intellectual
ideas could be toppled, so too could kings. When Charles I was
overthrown during the Civil War of the 1640s, his loyal court
physician fell also, and Harvey, an unrepentant Royalist, was
banished from London under the English Republic. He died in the
late 1650s, a gout-ridden, melancholy man, uncertain of his
achievement.
A victim of the political turmoil of the times, William Harvey was
nevertheless the mainspring of vast historical changes in anatomy
and physiology. Wright's biography skillfully repositions Harvey as
a man who embodied the intellectual and cultural spirit of his age,
and launched a revolution that would continue to run its course
long after his death.
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