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Introduction
| Birth of anatomy | Development of surgery
| Supplying surgeons
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 Arteries
and veins by William Harvey |
William Harvey (1578-1657)
William Harvey, an English physician working in Italy in the early
17th century, is reputed to have dissected the bodies of his own father
and sister. He discovered through animal dissections that the heart was
not simply a consumer of blood, but an active muscle that pumped blood
around the body through the circulatory system. This was a revelation:
it challenged religious beliefs, since it revealed the body to be a mechanism,
a machine with no innate purpose.
But it also rocked the medical establishment to the core. Until the 17th century, medicine had been concerned with the four humours – blood, phlegm, bile and black bile. Medical cures for illnesses usually involved blood-letting, since it was believed, before Harvey, that blood did not move much around the body. Harvey's discovery was to usher in a new era of medicine, spawning a new profession – that of the surgeon.
Image: Science Museum