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GCSE Biology: William Harvey
- Born in 1578
- Discovered circulation of the blood in 1628
- Also discovered the role of the egg in reproduction although the role of the sperm was only proven in 1824 by Prevost and Dumas
- In some invertebrates blood is drawn into the heart and pumped out again using the same blood vessel
- When Harvey was alive there was no MRK or CAC scans and it was not until 1842 that Crawford Long performed the first surgery using anaesthesia so you could not observe for long during surgery so most information about humans was gained from dissecting corpses
- It was generally thought that humans had the same system that invertebrates had
- Harvey showed that there are two types of major blood vessel - arteries for blood flowing from the heart and veins for blood flowing to the heart
- He devised a now famous experiment to show that blood in a vein ran only one way. It is so famous there is a painting of him demonstrating it
- He tied a bandage just above the elbow to make the veins in the forearm stand out. He pushed down with his finders between two points on the vein and showed that blood would not flow backwards (through the valve) a bulge would appear. Blood only appeared between his fingers when he took away the finger nearest to the hand, blood could then flow from the hand towards the heart
- He wrote about his experiements in 1628
- Although William Harvey did not find or show the existence of capillaries he predicted that there would be vessels which joined arteries and veins
- Capillaries were seen and described by Marcello Malphighi at the end of the seventeenth century
- Other people whose work has had a dramatic impact on biology include James Watsib Frabcus Crick and Rosalind Franklin who discovered the structure of DNA in 1953; Charles Darwin who postulated the theory of evolution in 1859, Peyton Raus discovered Raus sarcoma virus (the first known cause for cancer) in 1913, Alexander Fleming who discovered penecillin in 1928 and Jon Snow who discovered the cause of cholera and halted an epidemic by removing a water pump handle in Victoria, London