The Works of William Harvey M.d.translated from the Latin with a Life of the Author

In 1628, a 50-year-old English physician published a slim volume that dismantled 1,400 years of medical belief. William Harvey had spent decades dissecting living animals, timing heartbeats, and calculating blood volume. What he proved, through meticulous experiment rather than ancient authority, was that blood circulates: the heart pumps it out through arteries, it flows through the body, and returns through veins. It sounds obvious now. Then it was heresy. Harvey's "De Motu Cordis" - included here in full - launched experimental physiology as we know it. This collection gathers his revolutionary 1628 treatise, his work on animal generation, and his letters, translated from the Latin by Robert Willis. Reading Harvey's own words, you feel the danger of his position: he was arguing against Galen, against the entire medical establishment, against the body of knowledge that had governed physiology since antiquity. He was right. This is the book that made the human body knowable.