William Harvey's Natural Philosophy

This is the first full study for over twenty-five years of William Harvey's doctrine of the action of the heart and of the circulation of the blood.

Roger French (Author)

9780521455350, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 August 1994

408 pages
23.6 x 15.7 x 2.7 cm, 0.722 kg

"French's careful analysis of the Demotu cordis itself, separating the discoveries of the 'forceful systole' and of the pulse from the inference to the circulation, seems especially significant for the understanding both of Harvey's discovery itself and of the many misunderstandings that followed." Isis

William Harvey's natural philosophy was a view of the world that he had put together during his education in Cambridge and Padua. It contained ways of structuring knowledge, formulating questions and arriving at answers that directed the programme of work in which he discovered the circulation of the blood. This book, the most extensive discussion of Harvey to be published for over twenty-five years, reports extensively on the views of those who wrote for and against him. It is a study of a major change in natural philosophy and of the forces which acted for and, equally important, against change. In a period traditionally central to historians of science, it is argued here that natural philosophy and particularly Harvey's speciality within it - anatomy - was theocentric. Harvey's contribution was experiment; and the revolution which occurred in the seventeenth century was concerned not with science but with experiment and the status of natural knowledge.

List of figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Natural philosophy and anatomy
2. Harvey's sources in Renaissance anatomy
3. Harvey's research programme
4. The anatomy lectures and the circulation
5. The structure of De motu cordis
6. Early reactions in England
7. Overseas
8. Two natural philosophies
9. Circulation through Europe
10. Back to Cambridge
11. Harvey and experimental philosophy
Index.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX]