Harvey returned to England trained by the best anatomist of his day.  In London, he became attached to the College of Physicans, and taking his degree at Cambridge, he began the practice of medicine.  He was elected a fellow of the college in 1607 and physician to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in 1609.  In 1615 he was appointed Lumleian lecturer to the College of Physicians, and his duties were to hold certain “public anatomies,” as they were called, or lectures.  We know little or nothing of what Harvey had been doing other than his routine work in the care of the patients at St. Bartholomew’s.  It was not until April, 1616, that his lectures began.  Chance has preserved to us the notes of this first course; the Ms. is now in the British Museum and was published in facsimile by the college in 1886.(26)

     (26) William Harvey:  Prelectiones Anatomiae Universalis, London,
     J. & A. Churchill, 1886.

The second day lecture, April 17, was concerned with a description of the organs of the thorax, and after a discussion on the structure and action of the heart come the lines: 

W. H. constat per fabricam cordis sanguinem per pulmones in Aortam perpetuo transferri, as by two clacks of a water bellows to rayse water constat per ligaturam transitum sanguinis ab arteriis ad venas unde perpetuum sanguinis motum in circulo fieri pulsu cordis.

The illustration will give one an idea of the extraordinarily crabbed hand in which the notes are written, but it is worth while to see the original, for here is the first occasion upon which is laid down in clear and unequivocal words that the blood circulates.  The lecture gave evidence of a skilled anatomist, well versed in the literature from Aristotle to Fabricius.  In the Ms. of the thorax, or, as he calls it, the “parlour” lecture, there are about a hundred references to some twenty authors.  The remarkable thing is that although those lectures were repeated year by year, we have no evidence that they made any impression upon Harvey’s contemporaries, so far, at least, as to excite discussions that led to publication.  It was not until twelve years later, 1628, that Harvey published in Frankfurt a small quarto volume of seventy-four pages,(27) “De Motu Cordis.”  In comparison with the sumptuous “Fabrica” of Vesalius this is a trifling booklet; but if not its equal in bulk or typographical beauty (it is in fact very poorly printed), it is its counterpart in physiology, and did for that science what Vesalius had done for anatomy, though not in the same way.  The experimental spirit was abroad in the land, and as a student at Padua, Harvey must have had many opportunities of learning the technique of vivisection; but no one before his day had attempted an elaborate piece of experimental work deliberately planned to solve a problem relating to the most important single function of the body.  Herein lies the special merit of his work, from every page of which there breathes