Heart of renaissance

William Harvey’s circulation theory encapsulated the beating heart of renaissance Britain. Wright’s account of Harvey’s relentless quest to prove that blood circulated around the human body, with the heart as its pulsating hub, is intertwined with the 17th-century belief in the body politic. As a natural philosopher, Harvey thought society could be likened to the human body and that the heart was as important for the body politic as the king was for the commonwealth.

Wright paints a vivid picture of the aspirational Harvey progressing from Kentish yeoman to physician extraordinary at the Court of St James. Even though regal acceptance satisfied his need for social recognition, intellectual renown was his ultimate goal.

Harvey’s eureka moment came when he was able to confidently assert that blood was ejected by the aorta, via the heart and then transferred to the veins before being returned to the heart in a “circular motion”.

Although the College of Physicians opposed his theory, it was the pragmatist Descartes, with his belief in the mechanical versus the spiritual, who was the first natural philosopher to champion his work.

The author ensures, though, that this is more than a medical text. The reader’s emotions are disturbed by the macabre live theatre of animal vivisection, yet this provides historical context that would have today’s animal rights activists up in arms.

We are left wondering at the enormity of Harvey’s achievement when some of his “empirical research” seems on a par with a GCSE biology lesson.

Ultimately though, his epitaph captures the magnitude of his achievement as the “only man perhaps that ever lived to see his own doctrine established during his own lifetime”.