1628 - Medicine

Medicine

Essay on the Motion of the Heart and Blood (Exercitatio de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis) by English physician William Harvey, 50, is published at Frankfurt-am-Main. Harvey's 75-page treatise is based on his Lumleian lecture of 1616; it establishes that the human heart is muscular despite earlier theories to the contrary, and that its regular mechanical contractions drive the blood out into the blood vessels. Harvey acknowledges the 1559 work of Renaldo Columbus, who first used the term "circulation," and he destroys the old idea that the liver converts food into blood, but Harvey does not offer a satisfactory new explanation for the creation of blood. Harvey follows Galileo Galilei's principle of measuring what can be measured and shows that the heart contains two ounces of blood and, at 65 heartbeats per minute, that it pumps 10 pounds of blood out into the body in less than 1 minute, an amount greater by far than can be sustained by production from food consumed. But while eminent physicians and philosophers from Denmark, England, France, and the German states rally to Harvey's thesis, it is roundly attacked by Scottish physician James Primrose and by the Paris Faculty of Medicine, whose dean Guy Patin calls Harvey's theory "paradoxical, useless, false, impossible, absurd, and harmful." Primrose, Patin, and other skeptics say that if the heart were a powerful pump as Harvey claims then surely its action would be audible.

Bubonic plague kills half the population of Lyons. The Black Death will kill a million in the northern Italian states in the next 2 years (see 1630).