William Harvey: the man who discovered blood circulation;

The influential physician who discovered blood circulation and whose family home was in Chigwell

Sometimes someone’s contribution to the pantheon of human life is so meritorious that we claim them as one of ours just because they’re buried among us. Such a man was William Harvey (1578-1657), the physician, pioneering medical scientist and discoverer of blood circulation.

Harvey was born in Folkestone, Kent, on April Fools’ Day in 1578, 20 years into the reign of Elizabeth I and a decade before the Armada crisis. All Fools’ Day maybe, but this man was no one’s fool. He was one of nine, a son of Joan née Halke (or Hawke) and Thomas Harvey, a Folkestone farmer, landowner, merchant and mayor, who sounds like he was peerless as a father and mentor and whose portrait apparently adorned Rolls Park, Chigwell, the seat of the Harvey family, which was sadly demolished in 1953. So, there’s an early clue that Essex features in this story.

Rolls Park, Chigwell. Photo: 62ndregiment.org

That 17th century stately home was once Chigwell’s most-famous building, best-known as the seat of the Harveys, with our William destined to become a famed family member. Perhaps its most celebrated occupant though was Admiral Sir Eliab Harvey, who fought with Nelson at Trafalgar. Talking of portraits, William also had his mugshot hung here along with his six brothers; William’s now in the National Portrait Gallery. Among celebrated visitors to the house was Sir Winston Churchill, who stayed over in 1924.

William attended school in Canterbury then entered Gonville and Caius, Cambridge, in 1593 where he took a degree in 1597. He’d go on to study in Padua (Italy) and would graduate as M.D. (Doctor of Medicine) from both there and Cambridge in 1602. It was to London Harvey now gravitated as a physician. The first great Elizabethan era was waning meanwhile, the venerable Virgin Queen expiring in 1603, ushering in the new Stuart dynasty in the guise of James VI/I. William married in 1604 to Elizabeth Browne, a physician’s daughter, although they’d have no children.

In 1609, Harvey was appointed physician at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, going on to become Lumleian lecturer (after Lord John Lumley) at the College of Physicians in 1615. William was also published, getting his ‘Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis’ out there in 1628, a work dedicated to King Charles I. It was here where he expounded his theories on blood circulation and established his name.

It’s fair to say a number of others were dabbling in the same area before, but it was Harvey’s destiny to be the first to recognise the full circulation of blood around the human body and to supply the results of experiments that backed up his theories of a complete circuit of veins and arteries. He said: ‘It is absolutely necessary to conclude that the blood is in a state of ceaseless motion; that this is the function which the heart performs by means of its pulse’. As someone who bucked the orthodox view, Harvey was mocked by traditionalists, but he was proved right.

Diagram illustrating William's experiments on the valves of the veins. Photo: Wellcome Collection Harvey became well-connected as ‘physician extraordinary’ to firstly James VI/I (in 1618), the one dubbed the ‘wisest fool in Christendom’ (more of a fool than Harvey perchance) and then his ill-fated son, Charles I (in 1632), who’d succeed in losing his head during the English Civil War. Harvey led the physicians who attended on James during his final illness in 1625 and even appeared as star witness during the trial of George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, who’d been accused of poisoning him.

Harvey’s amicable relations with the monarchy continued under Charles I, the physician reputedly allowed to conduct experiments on the King’s deer. Well, I never. This was also the witch trial era, and Harvey participated in one trial in 1634. It is testament to his open-mindedness and sense of fair play that the accused were found innocent at a time when guilt was usually presumed.

Harvey accompanied the Earl of Arundel on a mission to the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II, in 1636, publicly demonstrating his theories at Nuremberg. I love the ‘physician extraordinary’ title incidentally, and feel we should all have such name plates slapped on our doors. A shout out for our wonderful editor follows: ‘Hannah Gildart – Editor Extraordinary’. It has an alliterative ring.

During that English Civil War, Harvey found himself present at the Battle of Edgehill (23 October 1642), the conflict’s first significant yet largely inconclusive dust-up, the warring factions fairly well-matched in the early stages. He was attending on Charles I. Harvey’s support for the monarchy saw him replaced as physician at Bart’s in 1643 by a vengeful Parliament. That added insult to injury as his London home had already been ransacked by Parliamentary troops leading to the loss of much of his research material.

James VI/I, who William was physician for. Photo: Wellcome Collection

Afterwards (1645), Harvey headed to Oxford where he was elected Warden of Merton College, but the surrender of the city to Parliament in July 1646 saw Harvey return to his former stomping ground of London. A later publication of Harvey’s would be ‘Exercitationes de Generatione Animalium’ which came out in 1651, the year Oliver Cromwell trounced Charles I’s son and heir, Charles II, at the Battle of Worcester and sent him scampering into exile.

William Harvey died on 3 June 1657, and was buried among Essex folk, in St Andrew’s Church, Hempstead, near Saffron Waldren. In 1833, he was reinterred in the same Harvey Chapel after essential repairs were carried out on his leaden mortuary chest. Harvey’s works, in Latin, were published in 1766 with an English translation by Dr. Willis coming out in 1847. Willis also wrote a life of the physician (1878).

I like Harvey as he clearly had a sense of humour, which helps make someone more palatable, especially someone who might come at you with a scalpel sometime. Take this gem from the 1650s when he was sounding forth on Francis Bacon who had formerly been his patient: ‘He writes Philosophy like a Lord Chancellor… I have ‘cured’ him’. Harvey was in conversation with antiquarian John Aubrey who guffawed, I’m sure.

St Andrew's, Hempstead, the burial place of William Harvey. Photo: Peter Wood

CHRONOLOGY

1578 – William Harvey born in Folkestone, Kent, on April Fools’ Day.

1593 – Harvey heads to Gonville and Caius, Cambridge.

1602 – Qualifies as M.D. (Doctor Medicine) in both Italy and England.

1604 – Marries Elizabeth Browne, an eminent physician’s daughter.

1609 – Appointed physician at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London.

1618 – Becomes physician extraordinary to James VI/I and later to Charles I.

1628 – Publication of Harvey’s magnum opus on the circulation of the blood.

1634 – Harvey’s participation in a witch trial.

1643 – Support for the Royalist cause sees Harvey lose his role at St Bart’s.

1657 – Death of William Harvey (3 June) aged 79.