n Medicine, at Cambridge; and was soon
after elected Physician to St. Bartholomew's Hospital, which office he
retained till a late period of his life.

On August 4, 1615, he was appointed Reader of Anatomy and Surgery to the
College of Physicians. From some scattered hints in his writings it
appears that his doctrine of the circulation was first advanced in his
lectures at the college about four years afterward; and a note-book in
his own hand-writing is still preserved at the British Museum, in which
the principal arguments by which it is substantiated are briefly set
down, as if for reference in the lecture-room. Yet with the
characteristic caution and modesty of true genius, he continued for nine
years longer to reason and experimentalize upon what is now considered
one of the simplest, as it is undoubtedly the most important known law
of animal nature; and it was not till the year 1628, the fifty-first of
his life, that he consented to publish his discovery to the world.

In that year the "Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis" was
published at Frankfort. This masterly treatise begins with a short
outline and refutation of the opinions of former anatomists on the
movement of the animal fluids and the function of the heart; the author
discriminating with care, and anxiously acknowledging the glimpses of
the truth to be met with in their writings; as if he had not only kept
in mind the justice due to previous discoveries, and the prudence of
softening the novelty and veiling the extent of his own, but had
foreseen the preposterous imputation of plagiarism, which, with other
inconsistent charges, was afterward brought forward against him. This
short sketch is followed by a plain exposition of the anatomy of the
circulation, and a detail of the results of numerous experiments; and
the new theory is finally maintained in a strain of close and powerful
reasoning, and followed into some of its most important consequences.
The whole argument is conducted in simple and unpretending language,
with great perspicuity, and scrupulous attention to logical form.

The doctrine announced by Harvey may be briefly stated thus: The blood
circulates through the body, thereby sustaining life. The heart is
simply the pump which drives the blood through the arteries, from whence
it returns impure, and is then forced through the lungs and repurified.

The pulmonary circulation had been surmised by Galen, and maintained by
his