Medicine

An Anatomical Disquisition on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals

by William Harvey

William Harvey, physician to James I, showed in this short book of 1628 that the heart is a pump, and that the blood goes round the body in a circle, out through the arteries and back through the veins. Part of his argument was arithmetic: in half an hour the heart sends out more blood than the whole body holds. It overturned teaching that had come down from Galen for fourteen hundred years.

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Reading time

About 5 hours

Where to find it

The Medicine Room

Edition

Project Gutenberg, eBook #67065. In the public domain in the United States.