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The Major Scientific Contributions of William Harvey

t the heavens looked like and how they functioned were entirely discredited.

This did not mean that the world itself was not valid but did imply that everything in the universe should and could be investigated. Galileo, an elder contemporary of Harvey, is credited with originating the scientific method, which as his work with the telescope shows is centered on experimentation as well as observation and inference.

The Protestant Reformation is relevant to the work of Harvey as a scientist because of Harvey's association with and participation in, as a scientist, the Protestant/English social structure. Although Harvey was associated with Charles I's Royalists during the English Civil War, owing to his being the physician of the king, he was on the periphery of the political struggles and was allowed to retreat into more or less neutral civil life. It was in 1654, during the Cromwell (Protestant/Puritan) reign of England (and near the end of Harvey's life), that Harvey was elected president of the Cambridge College of Physicians.

These facts are relevant to Harvey's scientific contribution because, had Harvey's professional career been truncated for political/religious reasons, it is possible that his entire body of work might have been suppressed and indeed closed off to medical and scientific history. It is a commonplace of scientific and cultural history that Galileo, originator of the scientific method, was obliged by the Catholic Church to recant his views in order to escape prosecution as a heretic. Harvey, who was equally revolutionary from a science viewpoint, did not face this dilemma. However, his views were not immediately accepted. Harvey's works were banned in Geneva, Paris, and all of Italy, for religious reasons. Only in the late twentieth century, indeed, was Galileo declared right and the Catholic Church "scientific" tradition wrong in the controversy that surrounded his view of the motion of the planets, inc...

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The Major Scientific Contributions of William Harvey. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 08:31, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1709554.html