William Harvey

(Also goes by Melanie Ware and Corrine Rakowski)

367 Pennington Lane

London, England

Job Objective

I am a doctor. I am in the process of discovering more about how the blood circulates throughout the body. I am quite content in my current profession. I get to do what I enjoy most and I get the feeling of accomplishment when I discover things no one ever has. I am intrigued about everything having to do with the body and the reproductive system and would like to investigate more.

Qualifications/ Life Experiences

  • The first to correctly state that blood is pumped through the body. (Besides Michael Servetus whose books were burned and recovered almost a century later.)
  • Physician of the court of James I (1618-1625)
  • Personal physician to Charles I (1625-1647)
  • Served as a long time physician at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital until 1643.

Employment

  • Physician to the court of the Kings James I and Charles I
  • I became a doctor at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital at London (1609-1643).
  • At Oxford became Warden of Merton College.
  • I was a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.

Education and Training

  • The King’s School, Canterbury.
  • Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (from which I received a B.A. in 1597).
  • University of Padua where I studied under Fabricus, graduating in 1602.

Summary of Major Works

I announced my discovery of the Circulatory system in 1616. In 1628 I published Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (An Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals), where, based on scientific methodology, I argued for the idea that blood was pumped around the body by the heart before returning to the heart and being re-circulated in a closed system. I was the first person to study biology quantitatively. Based on observations in endothermic animals, whose heats beat slower and were thus easier to measure, I realized the liver would have to produce 540 pounds of blood and hour, suggesting the blood was recycled and not constantly produced. I proposed that blood flowed through the heart in to separate closed loops.

Personality References

  • “As art is a habit with reference to things to be done, so is science a habit in respect to things to be known.”
  • “All that we know is still infinitely less than all that remains unknown.”
  • “[The heart] is the householdthe divinity which, discharging its function, nourishes, cherishes, quickens the whole body, and is indeed the foundation of life, the source of all actions.”

Why I Should Receive the Award

I should achieve this award because I was in charge of royal children’s safety at the Battle of Edgehill. My work encouraged others to investigate the questions raised by my research. I was ranked #56 on Michael H. Hart’s list of most influential figures in history and I discovered the true use of valves in veins. I was also part of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur Shlesinger Jr. “10 Most Influential People of the Second Millennium” in the World Almanac and Book of Facts. Based on scientific methodology, I argued that the idea that blood was pumped around the body by the heart before returning to the heart ad being recirculated in a closed system. And lastly, I find it a noteworthy accomplishment that I had a school named after me.