William Harvey

William Harvey was born the eldest of the nine children of Thomas Harvey, a prosperous merchant and jurat of Folkestone.

Harvey entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, on a medical scholarship and received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1597.

Harvey studied at Padua under the anatomist Hieronymus Fabricius, whose work on venous valves influenced his later research, and graduated as Doctor of Medicine in 1602.

Harvey married Elizabeth Browne, daughter of Lancelot Browne, physician to Queen Elizabeth I; the marriage produced no children.

Harvey became physician in charge at St Bartholomew's Hospital, a post he held for over three decades.

Harvey was named Lumleian Lecturer, responsible for anatomy lectures, and in these lectures began developing his ideas on the motion of the heart and blood.

Harvey was appointed Physician Extraordinary to James I in 1618 and continued in royal service under Charles I, whom he attended through the Civil War.

In Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus, published in Frankfurt, Harvey demonstrated experimentally that blood circulates continuously, pumped by the heart.

Harvey's treatise on the generation of animals advanced the doctrine that all life develops from the egg, summarized in the phrase 'ex ovo omnia'.

Harvey died of a stroke at his brother's house at Roehampton and was buried in the Harvey Chapel at Hempstead, Essex.