An Anatomical Disquisition on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals — William Harvey
An Anatomical Disquisition on the Motion of the Heart & Blood in Animals, by William Harvey—A Project Gutenberg eBook You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org . If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title : An anatomical disquisition on the motion of the heart & blood in animals Author : William Harvey Author of introduction, etc. : Ernest Albert Parkyn Editor : Ernest Rhys Translator : Robert Willis Release date : January 1, 2022 [eBook #67065] Language : English Original publication : United Kingdom: J. M. Dent & Co., 1906 Other information and formats : www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/67065 Credits : Thiers Halliwell, Bryan Ness and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) *** START OF Archaic and inconsistent spellings have also been preserved except where obviously misspelled in the original. To assist readers, an additional item (‘Editor’s Introduction’) has been added to the table of contents, and an alphabetic jump-table has been inserted at the beginning of the index. Hyperlinks have been added to index entries and the table of contents, and to cross-references within the text. Page numbers are shown in the right margin and footnotes are located at the end. Footnotes are listed at the end. Spelling inconsistencies include (but are not limited to) the following: Fifty/Fiftie enjoy/enioye natural/naturall physitians/physicians book/booke aëreal/aereal/aërial Corrected misspellings include the following: preceive → perceive under-their → understand their retrogade → retrograde aditional → additional aud → and so → to Valkveld → Vlackveld slugglishly → sluggishly The cover image of the book was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain. EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY EDITED BY ERNEST RHYS SCIENCE THE CIRCULATION OF THE BLOOD WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY E. A. PARKYN THE PUBLISHERS OF EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY WILL BE PLEASED TO SEND FREELY TO ALL APPLICANTS A LIST OF THE PUBLISHED AND PROJECTED VOLUMES TO BE COMPRISED UNDER THE FOLLOWING TWELVE HEADINGS: TRAVEL ❦ SCIENCE ❦ FICTION THEOLOGY & PHILOSOPHY HISTORY ❦ CLASSICAL FOR YOUNG PEOPLE ESSAYS ❦ ORATORY POETRY & DRAMA BIOGRAPHY ROMANCE IN TWO STYLES OF BINDING, CLOTH, FLAT BACK, COLOURED TOP, AND LEATHER, ROUND CORNERS, GILT TOP London : J. M. DENT & CO. New York : E. P. DUTTON & CO. PRINTED BY HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD., LONDON AND AYLESBURY An Anatomical Disquisition on the Motion of the Heart & Blood in Animals, by William Harvey—A Project Gutenberg eBook EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION However much the renewal of classical learning in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries may have furthered the development of letters and of art, it had anything but a favourable influence on the progress of science. The interest awakened in the literature of Greece and Rome was shown in admiration not only for the works of poets, historians, and orators, but also for those of physicians, anatomists, and astronomers. In consequence scientific investigation was almost wholly restricted to the study of the writings of authors like Aristotle, Hippocrates, Ptolemy, and Galen, and it became the highest ambition to explain and comment upon their teachings, almost an impiety to question them. Independent inquiry, the direct appeal to nature, were thus discouraged, and indeed looked upon with the utmost distrust if their results ran counter to what was found in the works of Aristotle or Galen. This spell of ancient authority was broken by the anatomists of the sixteenth century, who determined at all costs to examine the human body for themselves, and to be guided by what their own observations revealed to them; and it was finally overcome by the independent genius of two men working in very different scientific spheres, Galileo and Harvey. These illustrious observers were contemporaries during the greater part of their lives, and were some years together at the famous University of Padua. Galileo and Harvey refused to be bound by the teachings of Aristotle and Galen, and appealed from these authorities to the actual facts of nature which any man could observe for himself. Their scientific work is therefore of interest, not only for the innate value of the discoveries they made, but also because it shows them as pioneers in that independent spirit of scientific inquiry to which the great advance in natural knowledge since their time is so largely due. Harvey’s work, by which his name has been made immortal, strikingly illustrates this. He was the first to show the nature of the movements of the heart, and how the blood moved in the body. He did so by putting on one side authority, and directly appealing to observation and experiment. The completeness of the success with which this independent line was taken, as exemplified in his treatise “On the Movement of the Heart and Blood,” is such as to excite the admiration of every modern physiologist. “C’est un chef-d’œuvre,” says a distinguished French physiologist, Flourens, “ce petit livre de cent pages est le plus beau livre de la physiologie. ” 1 The discovery made by Harvey was this: That the blood passed from the heart into the arteries, thence to the veins, by which it was brought back to the heart again; that the blood moved more or less in a circle, coming back eventually to the point from which it started. In a phrase, there was a Circulation of the Blood. Moreover, this circulation was of a double nature—one circle being from the right side of the heart to the left through the lungs, hence called the Pulmonary or Lesser Circulation; the other from the left side of the heart to the right, through the rest of the body, known as the Systemic or Greater Circulation. Further,