The Heartbeat of Medical Revolution: Contextualizing William Harvey’s Motu Cordis in the Tapestry of Early Modern Medicine By Alexander von Kumberg Edited By Aman Majumdar The renowned historian of medicine and professor of physiology, Kenneth J. Franklin, whose translation of Harvey’s essay is used in the following article, exclaimed: “Harvey’s Exercotatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (1682) is the most important work in the history of medicine.” The truth of such a statement can hardly be questioned. Indeed, Harvey’s genius is unveiled in his Motu Cordis. This work formulated a modern model of cardiovascular anatomy and physiology. However, the piece does not solely display Harvey’s medical and scientific prowess; rather, its majestic simplicity and embodiment of the early scientific method truly earns it its laurels. In many ways, Motu Cordis perfectly reflects the intellectual zeitgeist of the early 17th century, namely the early scientific revolution and the embers of enlightenment. In order to fully appreciate Harvey and his Motu Cordis, one must comprehend the historical backdrop behind the man and the text. William Harvey was born on April 1st, 1578, in Folkestone, England and died in 1657, an era of immense social and political pulse 3
population. With wars come political and social changes. Born early enough to see the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 – in which his father, Thomas Harvey played a role as mayor of Folkstone – Harvey was born an Elizabethan. The conclusion of the Tudor dynasty, with the death of the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I soon followed. Subsequently, Harvey witnessed the fanfare that defined James I’s Jacobean England and the early Stuarts before its polar opposite replaced it; that is, Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan theocracy. Yet, despite the brutal conflicts that orbited Harvey, new intellectual movements and ideas were simultaneously being formulated across the continent. From Galileo Galilei’s telescopes to Johannes Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, and from Antonie upheaval in Britain and the European van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope continent as a whole. By the mid-16th to Francis Bacon’s scientific century, Europe began to depart from a method, such behemoths were culture of Renaissance Humanism and William Harvey’s contemporarenter the tumultuous age of rival creeds, ies. Indeed, despite the plagues whether it be theological antitheses of and conflicts that tormented EuCatholicism and Protestantism, or the rope, Harvey lived an inquisitive rise of absolute monarchies and the birth life devoted to his patients and of recognizable nation states. Indeed, the medical sciences. this backdrop culminated in the Thirty Years War, which laid waste to central William Harvey was the eldest Europe and caused the deaths of more of nine children from Thomas than 8 million people, 20% of Europe’s Harvey’s second marriage to Joan population. Harvey also lived through Hawke. His mother – a devout the English Civil War ending in 1651 Anglican – instilled a love for and taking the lives of 7% of England’s the faith and liturgy, which in
