Sir William Harvey: Experimental Physician

SUBJECT: MEDICINE

Sir William Harvey: Experimental Physician

by Kieran Kejiou

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” The surgeon’s eyes laughed above his mask, while saline arced from the girl’s knee, pooling at his feet. Like an orthopaedic Manneken Pis.

“No idea,” I replied.

Never thought I’d be asked that at 22, but I did enjoy his choice of words. After all, I wear a beard on my face, a degree on my wall and letters after my name. I even own a cheeseboard, which I use to eat cheese. And we’re talking real cheese – none of that “Babybel as a snack” nonsense. The kind that looks and smells like ogre pus. I consider myself a proper adult. While I haven’t picked a specialty yet, I still harbour that romantic hope of discovering something that makes it into GCSE science textbooks. They’re way cooler than Nature or the news. If we’re teaching something to all young people, you know it’s a pretty important piece of knowledge.

So, when I grow up, I suppose I’d like to be like Sir William Harvey – the doctor who first described the circulatory system. And treated two kings. But mostly the circulatory system.

(Still, imagine “Royal Physician to two monarchs” on my CV…)

‘Yes. Just like this. But with more knee’

THE (ADOPTED) PHYSICIAN OF CAMBRIDGE

Born in Folkestone, Kent on 1st April 1578, William Harvey was the son of a merchant, educated at the King’s School in Canterbury from 1588 to 1592. The following year, Harvey was admitted to study for a BA degree at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge.

Note, for my fellow history-of-Cambridge geeks, that I’m not specifying his subject because, to this day, you do not graduate from the University of Cambridge with a BA ‘in’ anything. Back then, the degree was for the study of the liberal arts. Some Latin, a bit of Greek, some logic thrown in for fun.

I’m building up to a minor secret: it’s quite likely that Harvey never actually took the Cambridge medicine course! During this period, Cambridge medics would study for six years to attain the MB degree, before five more years to gain the MD needed to practice medicine. Harvey did neither. Instead, upon taking his BA in 1597, he vanished to Europe for a bit before popping up at the University of Padua in 1598, studying under famed surgeon Hieronymous Fabricius. Harvey took his MD from Padua in 1602, prompting Cambridge to just hand him an MD later that year!

TOPPLING GIANTS

Soon after, Harvey began practicing medicine and was elected to fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians in 1607. We don’t know much about his pursuits beyond his patients, but as Lumleian lecturer to the College, Harvey unveiled his research in his 1616 talks. In 1628, he published a book of his complete findings, Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus.

Harvey’s book and lectures didn’t quite tear down the establishment in frenzied revolution. Instead, his findings would politely challenge the facts of the time. Teachings long enshrined and revered as gospel since the fall of the Roman Empire, were a symptom of the tight academic control exerted by the Church in Europe at the time. These educated clergymen took great pains to reconcile the findings of the ancient physicians with Biblical scripture, weaving a cohesive body of medical knowledge.

Prominent among those physicians of old was Galen, a celebrated and learned scholar who built a framework to understand the inner workings of the human body, using logic and animal dissections. Galenic teachings then, with the blessing of the Church, became the scripture of the medical profession, to be accepted without question in the West for nearly 1500 years.

Galen’s followers believed that digested food was turned into blood by the liver, before being sent through the veins to nourish the tissues of the body. The tissues would eat it up, while the liver continually made more blood to keep them fed. Some of this blood would be enriched with ‘pneuma’ from the air in the lungs, creating a vital spirit needed by all tissues. The heart would expand, sucking in this enriched blood, before squeezing it all out through the arteries.

De Mortu Cordis disagreed, with an air of correcting Father Christmas’ economic policy on global gift-giving.

Backed up by his rigorous experimentation and anatomical dissections, Harvey claimed (among other things):

• The heart’s expansion is passive while the contraction actively pumps blood • Valves in the veins only permit blood flow towards the heart, not the tissues • More blood is pumped by the heart than could be fully absorbed by the body’s tissues • Therefore, blood moves in the continuous circuit around the body Despite its controversy, Harvey’s model of blood circulation would eventually update Galen’s idea of continuous replenishment. It’s important to realise that this process was slow, and ideas weren’t swapped overnight, especially not by Harvey. His preparedness to challenge Galen was by no means a rejection of his teachings. Indeed, Harvey frequently included ancient teachings in his lectures alongside his own findings. But his approach was to discern how things worked through hypothesis testing and repeated measures, rather than the old way of deducing why things were. William Harvey, while a humble man, would be immensely proud of the new,

Today, Sir William Harvey’s work strolls onto the pages of virtually all biology courses taught in secondary school. And he’s got the posthumous glory of having touched virtually every facet of modern medicine with his model of blood circulation. And he treated two kings…

But he also has the more profound honour of ushering truly curious, scientific thought into medicine. The concept of informing medical practice by diligently recording, repeating and measuring began with him. At least in the West… We can talk about the Arabic and Chinese physicians another day!

Through Harvey’s time at Cambridge, Gonville & Caius College played a small but important role in his success, adding to the near-legendary mystique of this great city. Whichever route you take here, be it through an Immerse summer programme or a bank holiday getaway, be sure to pay a visit to Caius, where it all started for one of Britain’s greatest clinician-scientists. His are very worthy footsteps for any young scientist or budding physician to follow.