Before the world could bask in the light of the Scientific Revolution, a revision of the medical contributions of ancient physicians such as Aristotle and Galen needed to separate fact from unsubstantiated theory from worthwhile theory. A synthesis of empirical observation with mathematical extrapolation needed to take place which simultaneously rejected the Dogmatist school’s literal adherence to age-old texts and the absolute discarding of principles elucidated therein. This bridge between old and new, a pivotal figure in the progress of medicine, was William Harvey (1578-1657), private physician to King James I of England and leading researcher in the areas of anatomy and cardiology.

William Harvey was a proficient student who attended some of the most prominent educational institutions of his time, completing his bachelor’s degree at Cambridge University by the age of twenty and proceeding to Italy and the University of Padua, which was renowned for its medical finesse and a most original and insightful professor, Hieronymus Fabricius, an observational anatomist under whom Harvey first began to question a theory of circulation that had held the status of a rigid, immutable paradigm for some fifteen centuries.

According to Susan Wiegand, “Fabricius had observed the one-way valves in veins, but had not figured out exactly what their role was. The popular belief of the day held that blood was circulated by a sort of pulsing action of the arteries.” As a matter of fact, it was not recognized by Galen that the veins and arteries were in any manner connected. The veins and arteries were thought to carry distinct “varieties of blood.” Blood in the arteries was deemed frothier than that of the veins, and its ebullition, that is, expansion in volume due to “heat” provided by the heart, and subsequent contraction were believed to cause the beats one frequently perceives in one’s chest. The heart was not thought to be a muscle on its own accord whose function was to pump blood to various portions of the organism and re-circulate blood which flowed to it.  But, as Harvey hypothesized, Fabricius’s observation implied a connection of the veins to elsewhere, the arteries, and thus the homogeneity of the blood circulating throughout the entire human body.

As documented in Harvey’s 1628 volume that details his discoveries, An Anatomical Study of the Motion of the Heart and of the Blood in Animals, blood from the veins and the arteries clots in precisely the same manner, neither “variety” denser or less formidable than the other. This, of course, signified that no breach could possibly exist between the two “types”, which were in reality one and the same. Hence, Harvey suggested the theory of the cyclical motion for blood, having drawn upon Aristotle’s discovery of the evaporation and condensation cycles of moisture within the Earth’s atmosphere for a phenomenon somewhat paralleling the one he endeavored to describe. In this manner Harvey was able to furnish accurate models of the human circulatory system without ever having obtained direct visual verification for the existence of capillaries between the veins and arteries, which the Italian scientist Marcello Malphighi, slightly after Halley’s death, was able to spot via a microscope.

In his studies Harvey also explored the structure of the heart itself. He observed that the heart functioned in a manner similar to that of a water bellows with two valves near the aorta which delivered the blood from and through the lungs into its confines. This was an explanation which paralleled the heart to a “flexible mechanism”, not a rigid pump whose every fluctuation was identical to the last, but an organic structure with a range of motions, all nevertheless comprehensible. Scalding criticisms from the hard-liners of the Galenic school reveal the nature of the mysticism his discovery had toppled. Hoffman, one of his principal opponents, remarked, “Truly, Harvey, you are pursuing the incalculable, the inexplicable, the unknowable.” But in truth, Harvey had demolished a centuries-old orthodoxy of collective subjectivism, the perpetuator of medieval murk, which had arbitrarily substituted divine whim for mathematical natural law and thus discarded the need for experimentation as a gateway to true knowledge. The Galenics had thus, since any objective means of cognition were repressed, relied on the sheer authoritative weight of their forebear’s pronouncements. Harvey, however, comprehended that no automatic, intrinsic “insight” and no truth by virtue of antiquity alone were possible. He was determined in his field of study to begin with a tabula rasa, a blank slate, and accept no theory unless an empirical sighting or a laboratory test verified it.

However, his approach was not one of an intellectually crippled Deweyite empiricist, merely gathering data without synthesizing it into a cohesive a posteriori scientific theory. His style closely mirrored that of Aristotle, who was, according to Ayn Rand, “the father of the scientific method”, and a thinker whose works had been introduced to Harvey at Cambridge by philosophy professor Cesare Cremonini. Both Cremonini and Harvey had been students of Fabricius and resorted to an epistemological approach upheld by the Aristotelian school. Harvey identified a passage from Aristotle as his guiding principle in the formulation of his systems: “Faith is to be given to reason if the things which are being demonstrated agree with those which are perceived by sense: when they have become adequately known the sense should be trusted more than reason. Hence we ought to approve or disapprove or reject everything only after a very finely made examination.”

Harvey’s strategy is sensible, especially given modern examples of dogmatism in the sciences in such theories contrary to empirical observation as the Big Bang, Global Warming, and Keynesian economics, the latter of which is responsible for the cancer of the welfare state that has so grievously usurped the autonomy of diligent, scientifically-oriented physicians. Had greater weight been bestowed upon satellite data that showed no significant increases in the Earth’s temperature, or Dr. Halton Arp’s astronomic observations of redshift as a distinct property of quasi-stellar objects (and not a sign of “the universe’s expansion”), or Ludwig von Mises’ and Milton Friedman’s commonsense demonstrations of the free market as a source of universal prosperity, based in part on the analysis of progress in the nineteenth century, such fallacies would have been debunked with startling rapidity. Because, according to another prodigious physician-philosopher, John Locke, “all men are liable to error”, the synthesis of empiricism and rationalism, observation followed by explanation, serves as a check on chance mathematical miscalculations or theoretical non sequiturs and is able to amend temporary errors of knowledge while preserving those aspects of reality which are both demonstrable and explicable by the scientific mind.

Harvey’s approach toward calculation was also in accord with Aristotelian methodology. His quantitative analysis was sufficient for proof of particular phenomena, such as circulation of the blood and the heart’s role as the central “bellows.” Yet he exhibited what Professor Andrew Gregory termed “roughness.” Perhaps considering the range of various fluctuations the heart can undertake, it was fitting for Harvey to grant leeway to his figures in examining fundamental properties that would be applicable to the heart regardless of the strength of whatever individual beat the heart had last performed. Professor Gregory claims that simply because Harvey employed mathematics only approximately, he possessed little commonalities with the mainstream of the Scientific Revolution. However, this is a fallacious claim because it perceives a dichotomy between the approach of the ancients and that of the Enlightenment discoverers. Despite the Enlightenment’s correction of mistaken theoretical beliefs dating from the Classical period, some of its most prominent thinkers, Hooke and Goethe in optics, Boyle in chemistry, had evaluated both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of their subject matters, employing sensory analysis where numbers alone where insufficient. The fact that Aristotle would not have disapproved of Harvey’s technique merely reinforces its genuinely modern/scientific character. If, for example, Harvey had not employed the qualitative observation of all blood clotting in the same manner, would he even have considered comparing the viscosities of venous and arterial fluids?

Perhaps others of Harvey’s contemporaries comprehended the impact of his studies to a greater extent than himself. Descartes, for example, was fascinated by Harvey’s system as a verification that natural law and material causation could be detected in organic processes as well as mechanical ones. Harvey, however, happened to be a theist and considered a divine agent, coordinating a universal “purpose”, to play a role in animating blood and acting as its ultimate “mover”. Harvey was correct in suggesting that the universe possessed a logical order by which it functioned and that the comprehension of that order is essential to human mastery of the universe and, in Harvey’s particular case, human mastery over man’s own circulatory system’s well-being. However, this Descartes did not deny. Descartes merely wished to substitute a synthesis of mathematical formulae and mathematical principles for an anthropomorphic cosmic boss, “God”, and embrace the diametrical opposite of Hoffman’s mysticism of inexplicability: the hypothesis that, with exploration and experimentation, man’s mind could comprehend all the mechanisms that operated in his body. Harvey may have discredited such a “novel extreme” in word due to his reluctance to part with a theological paradigm that had dominated the Western world for fifteen centuries prior, yet throughout his work and throughout his methodology is implied a support for Descartes’ ambitions in deed. Let us forgive Harvey’s slight blunder in smuggling a morsel of ancient fallacy into his convictions along with a plethora of ancient brilliance. After all, “all men are liable to error.”

Harvey’s theories were subject to contentious dispute on the part of the Galenic school during the discoverer’s lifetime. Peter Landry reveals that Harvey himself ignored his critics for the majority of his career, refusing, like Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark, to become mired in pleading his case to men who had already rejected the epistemological means, observation and the scientific method, by which to process the content of Harvey’s breakthroughs and recognize the validity thereof. However, in 1649 he at last published a small volume where he presented thorough counters to his critics. Within a year, the truth of Harvey’s propositions was grasped by the majority of the medical and scientific community. Harvey was the rare fortunate genius whose prowess was recognized during his lifetime and fueled his further explorations, as the elderly physician acquired an interest in embryology and accurately predicted the cellular interactions involved in the generation of offspring two hundred years before sufficiently powerful microscopes developed to verify his correctness… with no substantial flaws in his interpretation! Once again, Harvey deduced his theory from meticulous exploration of animal anatomy, as documented in his 1651 book, Essays on the Generation of Animals.

Harvey ‘s contributions to the progress of medicine and the cohesion that he established between descriptive observation and extrapolative theory are best documented by Sir William Osler, who notes that after Harvey “no longer were men to rest content with careful observation and with accurate description; no longer were men to be content with finely spun theories and dreams, which ‘serve as a common subterfuge of ignorance’; but here for the first time a great physiological problem was approached from the experimental side by a man with a modern scientific mind, who could weigh evidence and not go beyond it, and who had the sense to let the conclusions emerge naturally but firmly from the observations." As is evident, Harvey was the essential bridge between Aristotle and Descartes, between the ancient and modern worlds, whose re-evaluation of ancient techniques and their refinement marked a waypoint on the path of advancement, beyond which medical discoveries and technologies accelerated with never-before-seen swiftness. And to think that one of Harvey’s contemporaries wrote that "'twas believed by the vulgar that he was crack-brained, and all the physicians were against him"! The Galenic physicians, who elevated authority above objectivity, are long dead and forgotten. So are the grimy, jeering mobs that mocked Harvey in slum taverns and to whom Harvey rightly paid no heed. Harvey, an illustrious example of a man who deemed his own cognition an adequate means of comprehending reality, not needing the sanction of a committee of witch doctors and orthodox medievalists, remains a prominent name in the field of medicine, as his discoveries are not mere temporary paradigms, but rather eternal truths that will be just as valid in the twenty-second century as they had been in the seventeenth. 

Harvey was one of the forebears of rational, absolute, Western medicine. Can we today preserve his legacy in a sea of statism, subjectivism, and collective delusion?

Sources Used:

Gregory, Andrew. “William Harvey’s Reception.” Available December 20, 2002: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sts/gregory/215/handouts/h04_wh2.doc

J. Johnson, W. Hepburn, J. Crawford. “William Harvey.” Available December 20, 2002: http://www.sjsu.edu/depts/Museum/harvey.html

Landry, Peter. “William Harvey (1578-1657).” Available December 21, 2002: http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Biographies/Science/Harvey.htm

Wiegand, Susan. “William Harvey (1578-1657).” Available December 20, 2002: http://www.accessexcellence.org/AB/BC/William_Harvey.html

G. Stolyarov II is a science fiction novelist, independent philosophical essayist, poet, amateur mathematician, composer, contributor to Enter Stage Right, Le Quebecois Libre, Rebirth of Reason, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Senior Writer for The Liberal Institute, and Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Argumentator, a magazine championing the principles of reason, rights, and progress. His newest science fiction novel is Eden against the Colossus. His latest non-fiction treatise is A Rational Cosmology. Mr. Stolyarov can be contacted at gennadystolyarovii@yahoo.com.