![\"William_Harvey\"](\"http:\/\/www.improvementscience.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/William_Harvey.jpg\")
<\/a>William Harvey was from yeoman stock. The salt-of-the-earth. Loyal, honest and hard-working free men often owned their\u00a0land –\u00a0but who\u00a0were way down the social pecking order. They were the servant class.<\/p>\nWilliam\u00a0was the eldest\u00a0son of Thomas Harvey from Folkstone\u00a0who had a burning ambition to raise the station of his family from yeoman to gentry.\u00a0This implied that the family was allowed to have their own coat of arms. To the modern mind this is almost meaningless – in the 17th Century it was\u00a0not!<\/p>\n
And Thomas was\u00a0wealthy enough to have William formally educated and the dutiful\u00a0William worked hard\u00a0at his studies and was rewarded by gaining a place at\u00a0Caius College in Cambridge University.\u00a0 John Caius (1510-1573) was a physician who had studied\u00a0in Padua,\u00a0Italy – the birthplace of modern medicine. William did well and after graduating from Cambridge in 1597 he too travelled through Europe to study in Padua. There he saw Galenic dogma\u00a0challenged and defused\u00a0using empirical evidence. This was at the same time that Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was challenging the geocentric dogma of the Catholic Church using\u00a0empirical evidence gained by simple celestial observation with his new telescope. This was the Renaissance. The Rebirth\u00a0of Learning. This was the end of the Dark Ages of Dogma.<\/p>\n
Harvey brought this “new thinking” back to Elizabethan England and decided to focus his attention on the heart. And what Harvey discovered was that the accepted truth from the ancients about how the heart worked was wrong. Galen was wrong. Hippocrates was wrong.<\/p>\n
But this was not the\u00a0most interesting part of the story.\u00a0 It was the\u00a0how he proved it that was radically different.\u00a0He used evidence from reality to disprove the rhetoric. He used the empirical method espoused by Francis Bacon (1561-1626): what we now call the Scientific Method.\u00a0In effect what\u00a0Harvey said was “If you do not believe or agree with me then all you need to do is\u00a0repeat the observation yourself<\/em>.\u00a0 Do an autopsy<\/em>“.\u00a0 [aut=self and opsy=see]. William Harvey saw and conducted human dissection in Padua, and practiced both it and\u00a0animal vivisection back in England – and by that means he discovered how the heart actually<\/strong> worked.<\/p>\n Harvey opened a crack in the cultural ice that\u00a0had frozen\u00a0medical innovation for 1500 years. The crack in the paradigm was a seed\u00a0of doubt planted by a combination of curiosity and empirical experimentation:<\/p>\n Q1:\u00a0If Galen was wrong about the heart then what else was he wrong about? The Four Humours too? Looking back with our 21st century perspective these are meaningless questions.\u00a0 To a person in the 17th Century these were fundamental paradigm-challenging questions.\u00a0 They rocked the whole foundation of their belief system.\u00a0 The believed that illness was a natural phenomenon and was not caused by magic, curses and evil spirits; but\u00a0they believed that celestial objects, the stars and planets,\u00a0were influential.\u00a0In 1628 astronomy and astrology were the same thing.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n And Harvey was savvy. He was both religious and a devout\u00a0Royalist and he knew that he would need the support of the most powerful\u00a0person in England – the monarch.\u00a0And he knew that he needed\u00a0to be a respectable member of a\u00a0powerful institution – the Royal College of Physicians (RCP)\u00a0which he gained in 1604. A remarkable achievement in itself for someone of yeoman stock. With this ticket he was able to secure a position at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in Smithfield, London and in 1615 he became the RCP Lumleian\u00a0Lecturer which involved lecturing on anatomy\u00a0– which he did from 1616.\u00a0\u00a0By virtue of his position Harvey was able to develop a lucrative private practice in London and by that route\u00a0was introduced to\u00a0the Court. In 1618 he was appointed as Physician Extraordinary to King James I. [The Physician Ordinary\u00a0was the top job].<\/p>\n And\u00a0even with this level of influence, credibility and royal support his paradigm-challenging message met massive cultural and political resistance because he was challenging a 1500 year old belief.<\/p>\n Over the 12 years between 1616 and 1628 Harvey\u00a0invested a lot of time\u00a0sharing his ideas and the evidence with\u00a0influential friends and he used their feedback to deepen his\u00a0understanding, to guide his experiments, and to sharpen his arguments.\u00a0He had learned how to debate at school and had developed his skill at Cambridge so he know how to turn argments-against into arguments-for.<\/p>\n Harvey was intensely curious, he\u00a0knew how to challenge himself, to\u00a0learn, to influence others, and to change their worldview.\u00a0 He knew that easily observable phenomemon could help spread the message – such as the demonstration of venous valves in the arm illustrated in his book.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n And even with all his\u00a0passion, education, evidence, influence and effort it still took 20 years for his\u00a0message to become\u00a0widely enough accepted to survive him.\u00a0 And it did so because others resonated with the message; others\u00a0like a Rene Descartes (1596-1650).\u00a0<\/p>\n William Harvey is now remembered as one of the founders of modern medical science.\u00a0\u00a0When he published\u00a0De Motu Cordis<\/em>\u00a0he\u00a0triggered a paradim shift – one that we take for granted today.\u00a0 Harvey showed that the path to improvement is through respectfully challenging accepted dogma\u00a0with\u00a0a combination of curiosity, humility, hard-work, and empirical evidence. Reality reinforced rhetoric.<\/p>\n Today we are used to having the freedom of speech and we are familiar with using experimental data to test our hypotheses.\u00a0 In 1628 this was new thinking and\u00a0was very risky.\u00a0People were burned at the stake for challenging the authority of the Catholic Church and\u00a0the Holy Roman Inquisition was still active\u00a0well into the 18th Century!<\/p>\n Harvey was also innovative in the use of arithmetic. He showed that the\u00a0volume of blood pumped by the heart in a day was far more than the liver could reasonably generate.\u00a0\u00a0But at that time arithmetic was the domain of merchants, accountants and money-lenders and was not\u00a0seen as a\u00a0tool that a self-respecting natural philosopher would use!\u00a0\u00a0The use of mathematics as a scientific tool did not really take off until after\u00a0Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) published the Principia<\/em> in 1687 – 30 years after Harvey’s death.\u00a0[To read more about William Harvey click here<\/a>].<\/p>\n William Harvey was an Improvementologist.<\/p>\n \u00a0So\u00a0what lessons\u00a0can modern Improvement Scientists draw from his story?<\/p>\n And Harvey did not say that Galen and Hippocrates were completely<\/em> wrong – just partly<\/em> wrong. And he explained that the reason that Hippocrates and Galen could not test their ideas about human anatomy was because dissection of human bodies was illegal in Greek and Roman societies. Padua in Renaissance Italy\u00a0was one of the first places where dissection was permitted by Law.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n So which part of the\u00a0Galenic\u00a0dogma did Harvey challenge?<\/p>\n He challenged the\u00a0dogma that blood was created continuously\u00a0by the liver. He challenged the dogma that there were invisible pores between the\u00a0right and left sides of the heart. He challenged the\u00a0dogma that the arteries ‘sucked’ the blood from the heart. He challenged the\u00a0dogma that\u00a0the ‘vitalised’ arterial blood was absorbed\u00a0by the tissues. And he challenged these\u00a0beliefs with empirical evidence. He showed evidence that the blood circulated fom the right heart to the lungs to the left heart to the body and back to the right heart.\u00a0He showed evidence that the heart was a muscular pump. And he showed evidence that it worked the same way in man and in animals.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nQ2: If the heart is just a simple pump then where\u00a0does the Spirit reside?<\/p>\n<\/a>After the publication of De Motu Cordis<\/em> in 1628 his personal credibility and private practice suffered\u00a0massively because as a self-declared challenger of the current paradigm he was\u00a0treated\u00a0with skepticism and distrust by his peers. Gossip is effective.<\/p>\n\n