Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. William Harvey's Natural Philosophy
  • Cited by 79
      • Show more authors
      • You may already have access via personal or institutional login
    • Select format
    • Publisher:
      Cambridge University Press
      Publication date:
      31 March 2010
      26 August 1994
      ISBN:
      9780511628245
      9780521455350
      9780521031080
      DOI:
      https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511628245
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.722kg, 408 Pages
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.587kg, 408 Pages
      • Subjects:
      History, History of Ideas and Intellectual History
    You may already have access via personal or institutional login
    • Selected: Digital
    Add to cart View cart Buy from Cambridge.org
    Subjects:
    History, History of Ideas and Intellectual History
    Information

    Book description

    William Harvey's natural philosophy was a view of the world that he had put together during his education in Cambridge and Padua. It contained ways of structuring knowledge, formulating questions and arriving at answers that directed the programme of work in which he discovered the circulation of the blood. This book, the most extensive discussion of Harvey to be published for over twenty-five years, reports extensively on the views of those who wrote for and against him. It is a study of a major change in natural philosophy and of the forces which acted for and, equally important, against change. In a period traditionally central to historians of science, it is argued here that natural philosophy and particularly Harvey's speciality within it - anatomy - was theocentric. Harvey's contribution was experiment; and the revolution which occurred in the seventeenth century was concerned not with science but with experiment and the status of natural knowledge.

    Reviews

    "...a fascinating book." Choice

    "Roger French gives us a learned, intellectual history of William Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood and its eventual acceptance. It can be used as a handy summary of Harvey's ideas and contemporary debates about them, but it also introduces an important argument about the leading place of learned medicine in the development of experimental natural philosophy....French's book ought to be welcomed both for his sound summary of the course of the early modern arguments over the motion of the heart and the circulation of the blood, and for his arguments placing Harvey (and medicine more generally) at the heart of the scientific revolution of early modern Europe." Harold J. Cook, American Historical Review

    "French's careful analysis of the Demotu cordis itself, separating the discoveries of the 'forceful systole' and of the pulse from the inference to the circulation, seems especially significant for the understanding both of Harvey's discovery itself and of the many misunderstandings that followed." Isis

    Refine List

    Actions for selected content:

    Select all | Deselect all
    • View selected items
    • Export citations
    • Download PDF (zip)
    • Save to Kindle
    • Save to Dropbox
    • Save to Google Drive

    Save Search

    You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

    Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
    Cancel
    ×

    Contents

    Contents

    Metrics

    Altmetric attention score

    Full text views

    Total number of HTML views: 0
    Total number of PDF views: 0 *
    Loading metrics...

    Book summary page views

    Total views: 0 *
    Loading metrics...

    * Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

    Usage data cannot currently be displayed.

    Accessibility standard: Unknown

    Why this information is here

    This section outlines the accessibility features of this content - including support for screen readers, full keyboard navigation and high-contrast display options. This may not be relevant for you.

    Accessibility Information

    Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this book is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.