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BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
Harvey William. Biography of a scientist
Directory / Biographies of great scientists
There are truths that today, from the heights of our knowledge, seem completely obvious, and it is even difficult to imagine that there was a time when people did not know them, but, having discovered them, still argued about something. One of these truths - the systemic circulation in living organisms - was born especially painfully and difficultly. During the one and a half thousand years of the domination of the cult of Galen in medicine, obviously the longest and most reactionary cult in the history of science, people believed that arterial and venous blood are different liquids, and if the first "carries movement, heat and life", then the second is called "nourish the organs". Dissenters were intolerant. The Spanish physician Miguel Servet in his essay devoted several pages to blood circulation and described the pulmonary circulation discovered by him. In the same year, 1553, the clergy burned it as a "apostate" along with the "heretical" book he had written, and only three copies did not fall into the Protestant fire, which incinerated its author in Geneva. Indeed, those who came to the circle of blood circulation have gone through seven circles of hell. There were several of them, these courageous pioneers, to whom people erected monuments: in Madrid - to Miguel Servet, in Bologna - Carlo Ruini, in Pisa - Andrea Cesalpino, in England - to William Harvey - the one who put the last point. William Harvey was born April 1, 1578 at Folkestone, Kent, the son of a prosperous merchant. The eldest son and chief heir, he, unlike his brothers, was indifferent to the price of silk and was weary of conversations with the captains of chartered schooners. William gladly changed his “case” first to the narrow bench of Canterbury College, and then for many years voluntarily imprisoned himself under the arches of Cambridge. At twenty, burdened with all the "truths" of natural philosophy and medieval logic, having become a highly educated person, he still does not know how. He is attracted by the natural sciences; he intuitively feels that it is in them that he will find space for his sharp mind. According to the custom of schoolchildren of that time, Harvey sets off on a five-year journey, hoping to strengthen himself in distant lands in a vague and timid attraction to medicine. He goes to France, then to Germany. In 1598 he went to the University of Padua. Here William is fascinated by the lectures of the famous anatomist Fabrizio d'Akvapendente. This scientist discovered special valves in the veins. True, he did not understand their meaning, and for him they turned out to be only a detail of the structure of the veins. Harvey thought about the role of these valves. But thinking alone is not enough for a scientist. Experience is needed. And Harvey began with an experiment on himself. Tightly bandaging his arm, he saw how the arm below the bandage soon became numb, the veins swelled, and the skin darkened. Then Harvey made an experiment on a dog. He tied up both her legs with lace. And again, below the dressings, the legs began to swell, and the veins swell. When a swollen vein in one leg was cut, thick dark blood dripped from the cut. The lancet flashed again. Now the vein was incised on the other leg, but above the bandage. Not a single drop of blood came out of the cut. It is clear that below the ligation the vein is full of blood, but there is no blood in it above the ligation. What could this mean? The answer suggested itself, but Harvey was in no hurry with him. He was a very careful researcher and checked his experiments and observations many times, not rushing to conclusions. In 1602, William received his doctorate and settled in London. In 1607 he received a chair at the London College of Physicians, and in 1609 Harvey became a doctor at St. Bartholomew. A scientist with diplomas from two universities quickly becomes a fashionable doctor and marries very profitably. He practices with might and main in the noblest families of England, and friendship with Francis Bacon helps him get the place of "extraordinary doctor" of King James I. In 1623 he was appointed court physician. Favor to Harvey inherits the young Charles I. In 1625, Harvey becomes an honorary physician at his court. The royal medic - this little man with long, blue-black hair and a swarthy, as if forever tanned face - is making an excellent career, but Harvey is more interested in science. He opens various animals, most often cats, dogs, calves. The scientist also dissects the corpses of people: the prohibition to open corpses no longer existed. And every time he examined the veins and arteries, cut open the heart, studied the ventricles and atria. Every year, Harvey understood better and better the network of blood vessels, the structure of the heart ceased to be a mystery to him. In 1616, he was offered the chair of anatomy and surgery at the College of Physicians, and the very next year he expounded his views on blood circulation. During the lecture, Harvey first expressed the conviction that the blood in the body is constantly circulating - circulating, and that the heart is the central point of blood circulation. Thus, Harvey refuted Galen's theory that the liver is the center of blood circulation. About fifteen years had passed since the young doctor watched his bandaged arm swell. The riddle of the path of blood in the body has been solved. Harvey outlined the circulatory scheme. But, having told about his discovery in a lecture, he refused to publish it. The cautious scientist took up new experiments and observations. He is thorough and unhurried, and only in 1628, when Harvey was already fifty years old, not at home, in England, but in distant Frankfurt, his Anatomical Study on the Movement of the Heart and Blood in Animals was published. A thin little book - 72 pages - made him immortal. In this small book, the results of thirty years of experiments, observations, autopsies and reflections were described. Its content strongly contradicted much of what anatomists and doctors firmly believed not only in ancient times, but also in Harvey's contemporaries. Harvey believed that the heart is a powerful muscular bag, divided into several chambers. It acts like a pump that pumps blood into the vessels (arteries). Tremors of the heart are successive contractions of its departments: atria, ventricles, these are external signs of the work of the "pump". Blood moves in circles, always returning to the heart, and there are two of these circles. In a large circle, blood moves from the heart to the head, to the surface of the body, to all its organs. In a small circle, blood moves between the heart and lungs. There is no air in the vessels, they are filled with blood. The general path of blood: from the right atrium to the right ventricle, from there to the lungs, from them to the left atrium. This is the pulmonary circulation. It was discovered by Servetus, but Harvey did not know this: after all, Servetus' book was burned. From the left ventricle, blood exits in the path of a large circle. First, through large, then through increasingly smaller arteries, it flows to all organs, to the surface of the body. The blood makes its way back to the heart (in the right atrium) through the veins. Both in the heart and in the vessels, the blood moves only in one direction: the valves of the heart do not allow reverse flow, the valves in the veins open the way only towards the heart. How blood gets from arteries to veins, Harvey did not know - without a microscope, the path of blood in the capillaries cannot be traced. Capillaries were discovered by the Italian scientist Malpighi in 1661, i.e. 4 years after Harvey's death. But for Harvey it was clear that the transition of blood from arteries to veins must be sought where the smallest branches of arteries and veins are located. Harvey did not know the role of the lungs either. In his time, not only did they not have an idea about gas exchange, but the composition of the air was unknown. Harvey only stated that in the lungs the blood cools and changes its composition. The arguments and evidence given in Harvey's book were very convincing. And yet, as soon as the book appeared, Harvey was attacked from all sides. The authority of Galen and other ancient sages was still too great. Among the opponents of Harvey were both prominent scientists and many practitioners. Harvey's views were met with hostility. He was even given the nickname "The Charlatan". One of the first subjected Harvey to derogatory criticism was the "king of anatomists", the personal physician of Maria Medici - Riolan. For Riolan - Guy Patin (Molière avenged him for Harvey, ridiculing him in his "Imaginary Sick"), for Patin - Hoffman, Ceradini - there were much more opponents than pages in his book. "Better Galen's mistakes than Harvey's truths!" was their battle cry. Patients refused his services, anonymous letters reached the king, but, to the credit of Charles I, he did not believe the slander and even allowed his physician to catch fallow deer in Windsor Park for experiments on embryology. Harvey had to endure many troubles, but then more and more began to be reckoned with his teachings. Young doctors and physiologists followed Harvey, and at the end of his life the scientist waited for the recognition of his discovery. Medicine and physiology have embarked on a new, truly scientific path. Harvey's discovery created a fundamental change in the development of medical science. Court relations often tore Harvey away from professional pursuits. So, in 1630-1631, he accompanied the Duke of Levnox on a trip to the mainland. In 1633 he traveled with Charles I to Scotland, and in 1636 he was in the retinue of the Count of Arondel, who was sent as ambassador to Germany. When the revolution began, the king left London and Harvey followed him. The London population plundered Whitehall and Harvey's apartment: at the same time, his works on comparative and pathological anatomy and embryology, the result of many years of research, were destroyed. Harvey was under Charles I during the Battle of Edgegil, and then settled in Oxford, which for a while became the main apartment of the king. Here he was appointed dean of the Merton College, but in 1646 Oxford was taken by parliamentary troops and the scientist had to leave the post of dean. Since that year, he completely abstained from politics, in which, however, he had not taken an active part before, and moved to London. Here he built a house for the London College of Physicians, in which the library was placed and meetings of the society took place. Harvey also donated a collection of natural history preparations, tools, and books to the institution. In the last years of his life, the scientist was engaged in embryology. In 1651, Harvey published his second remarkable work, Studies on the Birth of Animals. In it, he describes the development of embryos, although not in all details, because he did not have a microscope. Nevertheless, he made a number of discoveries in the history of the development of the embryo, and most importantly, he firmly established that all living things develop from an egg. From the egg develop not only animals that lay eggs, but also viviparous. Harvey did not see the egg of a mammal - it was discovered only in 1826 by the Russian scientist Karl Baer - but he boldly asserted that the embryo of mammals is also formed from an egg. The seeds of plants were equated to the eggs of animals. "All living things from an egg!" - read the inscription on the drawing that adorned Harvey's book. This was the main idea of the book and became the slogan of a new direction in science, a slogan that dealt a heavy blow to the proponents of spontaneous generation and lovers of stories about frogs born in the mud and other miracles. In recent years, Harvey lived in seclusion. You no longer had to fight for your discovery. The new generation of English physiologists and physicians saw him as their patriarch; poets - Dryden and Cowley - wrote poems in his honor. The London Medical College erected a statue of him in the meeting room, and in 1654 elected him as their president. But he refuses the honorary chair: "... this duty is too heavy for the old man ... I too take to heart the future of the college to which I belong, and I do not want it to fall during my chairmanship." Harvey did not like titles and never solicited them. He continues to work. Sometimes, having toiled in a creaking stagecoach, he came to his brother Eliab in a village near Richmond, talked and drank coffee with him. The scientist was very fond of coffee. And in the will, he separately noted the coffee pot for Eliab: "In remembrance of the happy moments that we spent together, emptying it." On June 3, 1657, upon waking up, Harvey found himself unable to speak. He realized that this was the end, he said goodbye to his relatives simply, easily, he found a small gift for everyone and died quietly and calmly. Author: Samin D.K.
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