Harvey, WILLIAM, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, was born at Folkestone, in Kent, on the 1st of April 1578. His father was a yeoman; and his brothers were merchants of weight and substance, magni et copiosi, in the city of London. After six years at Canterbury grammar-school, Harvey, then sixteen years of age, was entered at Caius College, Cambridge. He took his degree in arts in 1597, and, after five years' study at the university of Padua under Fabricius de Aquapendente, Julius Casserius, and other eminent men who then adorned that university, he obtained his diploma as doctor of medicine in 1602. He returned to England in the same year; and after receiving his doctor's degree from his original university, Cambridge, settled in London as a physician. In 1609 he was appointed physician to St Bartholomew's Hospital, and in 1615 Lumleian Lecturer at the College of Physicians—an office then held for life; and it is generally supposed that in his first course of lectures (in the spring of 1616) he expounded those original and complete views of the circulation of the blood with which his name is indelibly associated. It was not till the year 1628 that he gave his views to the world at large, in his celebrated treatise entitled Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis, having then, as he states in the preface, for nine years or more gone on demonstrating the subject in his college lectures, illustrating it by new and additional arguments, and freeing it from the objections raised by the skilful amongst anatomists. He was appointed successively physician to James I. and Charles I.; and in 1633 we find that his absence, 'by reason of his attendance on the king's majesty,' from St Bartholomew's Hospital was complained of, and that Dr Andrews was appointed as his sub- stitute, 'but without prejudice to him in his yearly fee or in any other respect'—a procedure which shows the esteem in which Harvey was held. We learn from Aubrey that he accompanied Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, in his embassy to the emperor in 1636; and during this journey he publicly demonstrated to Caspar Hofmann, the distinguished professor of Nuremberg, and one of the chief opponents of his views, the anatomical particulars which made the circulation of the blood a necessary conclusion—a demonstration which, it is reported, was satisfactory to all present save Hofmann himself, who still continued to urge futile objections. To appreciate the importance of Harvey's discovery and the nature of the objections that would be urged against it, it is sufficient to state that Harvey's first step was to prove that the arteries contained not air but blood. The whole course of the circulation could not be demonstrated, as Harvey had no idea of a system of capillaries uniting arteries and veins. These were discovered by Malpighi some fifty years later. He attended the king in his various expeditions, and was present with him at the battle of Edgehill (October 23, 1642). 'During the fight,' says Aubrey, 'the Prince and Duke of York were committed to his care. He told me that he withdrew with them under a hedge, and took out of his pocket a booke, and read. But he had not read very long before a bullet of a great gun grazed on the ground neare him, which made him remove his station.' He accompanied the king after the battle to Oxford, where he resided nearly four years, receiving the honorary degree of Doctor of Physic, and being elected warden of Merton College. On the surrender of Oxford to the Parliament in July 1646, he left the university and returned to London. He was now sixty-eight years of age, and seems to have withdrawn himself from practice and from all further participation in the fortunes of his royal master. During the remainder of his life he was usually the guest of one or other of his brothers, now men of wealth and high standing in the city; and it was at the country-house of one of them that Dr Ent visited him at Christmas 1650, and after 'many difficulties' obtained from him the MS. of his work on the generation of animals, which was published in the following year, under the title of Exercitationes de Generatione Animalium.
From this period to the time of his death the chief object which occupied his mind was the welfare and improvement of the College of Physicians. In 1654 he was elected president of the college, but he declined the office on account of his age and infirmities. In July 1656 he resigned his Lumleian lectureship, which he had held for more than forty years; and in taking leave of the college presented to it his little patrimonial estate at Burwash, in Sussex. He did not long survive, but, worn out by repeated attacks of gout, died at London on the 3d June 1657, and was buried in a vault at Hempstead, near Saffron Walden, in Essex. On 18th October 1883, at the cost of the Royal College of Physicians, his remains were removed from the dilapidated vault, and with befitting solemnity reinterred in a marble sarcophagus in the Harvey Chapel attached to the same church.
Harvey's works in Latin were published in 1766; a translation by Dr Willis in 1847 (new ed. 1881); and his Prolectiones Academice by a committee of the Royal College of Physicians in 1887. See Willis's Life of Harvey (1878), Huxley at the Tercentenary (Nature, 1878), and D'Arcy Power (1897). A statue of Harvey was erected at Folkestone in 1881.