Harvey was born in Folkestone, Kent, probably on April 1. He studied arts and medicine at Cambridge from 1593 to 1599, before going to Padua where he received his M.D. in 1602, mainly under Hieronymus Fabricius of Aquapendente. In 1604 he married Elizabeth Browne with whom he had no children. In 1607 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, London. From 1609 to 1643, he was a practicing physician at St. Bartholomew's Hospital. The Lord Chancellor, Francis Bacon, and the Earl of Arundel were among his private patients. From 1615 to 1656, he acted as professor and demonstrator in anatomy and surgery at the Royal College of Physicians. From 1616 onward, almost biannually, Harvey gave a series of Lumleian Lectures on which his Universal Anatomy manuscript was based. He was court physician to both James I and Charles I and dedicated his epoch-making Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals (1628) to the latter. During the 1630s he traveled widely throughout Europe. In 1642, during the Civil War, while he attended King Charles, he lost a great deal of written work when Parliamentary troops ransacked his house in Whitehall. In 1651 his second major opus was published as Anatomical Exercises on the Generation of Animals. Harvey died a widely honored man on June 3, 1657.

Harvey's singular discovery of the one-way circulation of the blood during the early 1620s was the final result of a comprehensive flash of insight combined with decades of painstaking anatomical and physiological investigations. At Padua, Fabricius had demonstrated the newly emerged valves in the veins under his student's very eyes. Fabricius's short illustrated treatise On the Valves of Veins (1603) is of interest here for understanding Harvey's mental struggles and blockades. Fabricius contended that two-way valves diminish the speed of the blood in the veins to prevent the pooling up of nutritive blood in the extremities. He agreed with Galen's long-standing idea that venous blood flows from the liver to the whole fabric of the body. In his first Lumleian Lectures of 1616, Harvey still endorsed this view, noting that “the valves set in contrary direction break off the pulse both in the heart and in the other veins” (1964, 273).