The Major Scientific Contributions of William Harvey

What must be understood first of all with respect to Harvey's scientific work is that until the seventeenth century what is today called the scientific method was by no means the custom in medical research or practice. Scientific inquiry itself was governed by authoritative knowledge, notably the Arisotelian view of the universe, which argued and inferred backwards from observation of physical motion to the principle of the unmoved mover--i.e., God--as the origin of the universe. Now Aristotle had been adopted "omnivorously" by Catholic doctrine, which meant that the Aristotelian conception of the physical as well as metaphysical universe was the norm, at least in societies dominated by the Catholic Church. All of this is relevant to the context for Harvey's scientific contribution because of the influence of what happened in the seventeenth century with Galileo's perfection of the telescope, as well as the decline of Catholic hegemony over European culture, via the Reformation.

First is the issue of the influence of the Catholic Church and the impact that Galileo's work had on it. Ordinarily, at least from the perspective of the twen

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fate was an afterthought; the real point appears to have been to achieve experiential/experimental observation of life, rather than observation and memorization of bookish knowledge. This was the difference between life/nature and art/artifice. The fact that sundry animals might have suffered was indeed beyond being an afterthought. Knowledge, systematically and precisely derived, appears to have been the paramount objective. Although Harvey dissected (and/or vivisected) some 80 kinds of animals, his principal interest was the behavior of the human heart and of blood within the human body. This is proved by the publications that made his centuries-long reputation as a scientific contributor. In 1628 he published An Anatomical Disquisition on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals. A later work, On Animal Generation, explained the progression of animal development from the embryonic to the morphological, or bodily, form. Neither of Harvey's main works dealt specifically with human anatomy, but the human body is plainly Harvey's real concern. The early part of the first work refers to the medical commentaries of Aristotle and Galen, who had proposed that blood gushed in and out of the heart via pores designed for that purpo
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