William Harvey's Impact On Modern Medicine

THE IMPACT EARLY MEDICAL CONTRIBUTORS HAD ON MODERN MEDICINE

William Harvey one of the first founding fathers of modern medicine to correctly state how blood circulated the body through the dissection of animals. Born in Folkstone, England April 1, 1578 he was the oldest son out of ten brothers born to a very wealthy family. His father Thomas was a successful businessman turned Mayor and his mother Joane a housewife. Harvey earned is education at a small elementary school moving along to the King’s Grammar School. William at the age of 15, in 1593 enrolled himself in the University of Cambridge as a medical student on a six year full ride scholarship. He attended Cambridge till the age of 21 where he enrolled in the University of Padua where

he met his teacher Hieronymus Fabricius the greatest influence in his studies. Hieronymus was a skilled anatomist and surgeon. Fabricius taught Harvey that dissection offered a better understanding of the human body. Hieronymus discovered valves in human veins in 1574 but it wasn’t until 1603 after Harvey Graduated Padua as a Doctor of Medicine. Hieronymus Fabricius once stated that “[Harvey] had conducted himself so wonderfully well in the examination, and had shown such skill, memory and learning that he had far surpassed even the great hopes which his examiners had formed of him. They decided therefore that he was skillful, expert, and most efficiently qualified both in arts and medicine…”
William eventually returned to England where he was awarded a Doctor of Medicine Degree making that the second degree in 1602 following him joining the College of Physicians in 1604.

In 1615 at the age of 37 Harvey became the Lumleian Lecture specializing in Surgery. William Harvey discovered his finding of the Circulation of Blood by ignoring medical textbooks and dissecting animals. He gained all or most of his learnings from observations of cutting open veins and arteries of living animals. Many people of this modern time thought because there weren’t any anesthetics that Harvey was cruel for cutting open living animals. I think that if it wasn’t for William Harvey and all of his studies and dissections that we wouldn’t be able to learn teach and save as many people as we can today. We as people have learned a lot from the many studies and dissections throughout Harvey’s lifetime. We have learned that blood, arteries, and veins are all within the same origin, blood in the arteries sent to the tissues are not stay there, the body‘s circulation mechanism was designed for the movement of liquid and that blood carrying air is still blood, the heart moves all movements of blood not the liver, hearts contract the same time as the pulse is felt, ventricle’s squeeze blood into main arteries, the pulse is formed by blood being pushed into arteries making them bigger, there are no vessels in the heart’s septum, lastly there is no to in from of blood in the veins there is only

constant flow through the heart. William Harvey’s contribution to modern medicine today has caused ways for doctors to give billons of patients’ blood transfusions, creation of dialysis machines, blood infusion pumps, and many of manmade machines designed to help doctor’s in hospitals circulate patients blood.