William Harvey and the Discovery of the Circulation of the Blood

The lecture traces William Harvey's background and training, his anatomical investigations at Cambridge and Padua under Fabricius, and his experiments that demonstrated how the heart propels blood in a closed circulation. It outlines his professional career, including academic posts and a court appointment, and emphasizes the small volume of published work that nonetheless contained discoveries foundational for physiology and embryology. The account describes Harvey's empirical methods, the loss of many manuscript observations during political turmoil, and the lasting methodological shift his precise observation and experiment introduced to biological science.