Talk:William Harvey
From Academic Kids
Historical questions, worth finding some comment on: Did Harvey rediscover, know about and extend, plagiarize, or simply verify and promote the work of Ibn Nafis? And why was it ignored in the first place, when Ibn Sina and Rhazes were well known and respected? Was this because the Europeans preferred quoting Galen to acknowledging a seemingly-unimportant detail about the human body had been discovered during their "Dark Ages" by "heathens"? Like, it was a case where the difference in attitude to knowledge between Islam and Christianity had been so obvious, and the information was not diagnostically indispensible like that of Avicenna or Rhazes, so... they hid it... Harvey's experience suggests that the bias against this particular theory was strong, so it may not have been a bias against Muslim knowledge.... Okay, this was answered 30 years later.
Perhaps due credit should be given to Mateo Realdo Colombo who, indeed, gave a accurate and complete description of the pulmonary circulation AND was quoted by Harvey as a source for his own theories.
Quote from Hobbes
Basically states Harvey is the only man to have his theories accepted during his lifetime. Not the contrary, which was previously stated on the page. Basically the circulatory model of the cardiovascular system was accepted completely within 30 years.
-Other interesting factoids that I frankly don't have time to write up are are about his involvement in the royalist side of the english revolution, the destruction of the original De Motu Cordis and apparently interesting descriptions of him in Thomas Aubrey's "Brief Times"
