Health & biology · 1628

Blood circulation

William Harvey showed the heart pumps the same blood around the body in a closed loop.

Harvey's De Motu Cordis of 1628 used measurement and experiment to prove circulation, calculating that the heart pumps more blood in an hour than the body contains. It overturned Galen and became a model of quantitative physiology.

See it in the living tree Wikipedia

Arcs above join it to what it stood on, arcs below to what it led to. The bar places this stretch on the tree's whole timeline.

What it built on 2

Scientific method 1620
Vesalius's anatomy 1543

Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

Life expectancy in the UK since 1543 Latest: 81.3 years (2023) Source: Our World in Data