brandishing a sixteen-inch silver-tipped whalebone wand that he used as a
pointer during presentations. His elegant attire of “black cloak, full
doublet, ribbed stocking of black silk, and long high-heeled boots fringed
at the top” set Harvey apart from less important Londoners.
Harvey’s professional success fueled his avocational diversions, and by
his mid-thirties, he settled into a routine of daily medical practice and
evening home-based private research. His childhood fascination with
plants and animals endured, and his London collection of aquatic life,
terrestrial specimens, and barnyard animals became the provenance of
future discoveries. An important transformation was occurring; Harvey
was, in essence, bringing Padua to London, and his home laboratory was
becoming a sort of Palazzo del Bo.^5 A revolution was brewing, and within
a few years of research, Harvey would make one of mankind’s greatest
discoveries.
Completely self-motivated and endlessly curious, Harvey dissected
almost nightly, even completing a program of the comparative anatomy of
the anus of various species of birds. An ornithologist in a 21st-century
NIH-funded lab could stomach such a topic if it led to a fount of published
articles and tenure, but as a private program of exploration?
Another Paduan anatomist, Realdo Colombo (1515–1559), a pupil of
Vesalius, had been a pioneer in describing the flow of blood to and from
the lungs, stating, “Blood is carried to the lung by the pulmonary vein, and
in the lung it is refined, and then together with the air it is brought through
the pulmonary vein to the left ventricle of the heart.”^6 Although not
completely correct, Colombo’s breakthrough insight was to deny that only
air returned in the great vessels from the lungs; it was “refined” blood that
returned from the lung in the large pulmonary veins. Colombo was also
refuting the Aristotelian and Galenic hope that blood bypasses the lung
and travels across pores in the middle of the heart.
With Colombo as his exemplar, Harvey set about to investigate the
heart and its machinations. He had witnessed the pulsations of blood in
fish and small animals, but a critical breakthrough occurred when he
secured the corpse of a hanged criminal through his connections with the
College of Physicians. Hauling the body to his private research area in his
Ludgate home, Harvey placed the body on his dissection table, and with
candlelight, sliced open the chest and cracked open the ribs.