VII 

 HARVEY 



WE have seen how nearly all of the early advances in 

 physiology and anatomy were made at the University of 

 Padua. The medical school there was undoubtedly the 

 best of the time. As the sixteenth century was closing, 

 a young Cambridge graduate named William Harvey 

 entered as a student at the University where Vesalius, 

 Falloppius, Columbus, and Fabricius had taught and 

 worked. This young man was destined to change all 

 the current ideas of the working of the body, and to 

 revolutionise the practice of medicine and of all the 

 sciences connected with it. 



William Harvey was born at Folkestone in 1578, the 

 eldest of the nine children of Alderman Thomas Harvey. 

 He was educated at the King's School at Canterbury, 

 and went to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 

 1593. That college had already a strong link with Padua. 

 Gonville College, as it had been previously called, had 

 been refounded in 1557 by Dr. John Caius, whose name is 

 now attached to it. Caius had studied in Padua under 

 Vesalius as far back as 1539. Full of the stimulus of the 

 great teacher, he had returned to England and lectured 

 on anatomy in London from 1544 to 1564. Caius was, 

 moreover, one of the most prominent agents in this 

 country of the revived knowledge of Greek. An en- 

 thusiast for the study, he had himself translated and edited 

 several of Galen's anatomical works. The tradition of 



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