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A nuttier theory is possible. I learn from the article on Harvey in the great 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that Harvey numbered among his patients Francis Bacon; so an upholder of the theory that Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays might be led to the view that Bacon discovered the circulation of the blood and taught it to Harvey–or even that, tired of the writing of plays, he induced his stalking-horse Shakespeare to retire to the country (where indeed the latter died in 1616) and began now to write medical lectures and books, with Harvey as his new front man.
Not to continue at length with Pye-Smith’s fairly detailed discussion, the main points that were new in Harvey’s account–which he based upon a meticulous series of observations and experiments–are these: (1) that the blood in the arteries and the blood in the veins is (over the course of time) the same blood; (2) that the entire course of the blood is indeed a circulation, from the left ventricle of the heart through the arteries, then to the veins back to the right auricle of the heart, through the right ventricle, thence to the lungs and back again to the left auricle of the heart, into the left ventricle and so to repeat; and (3) that the tissues of the heart are muscle, and the heart serves as a pump that is the engine of this whole process. (Descartes, for example, who agreed with points (1) and (2) and regarded them as a great discovery, rejected (3); he gave what he claimed to be a conclusive demonstrative argument for an altogether different role of the heart in this process.) Before Harvey, it had been widely supposed that one kind of blood is manufactured by the liver, flows to the right ventricle of the heart–where it is somehow mixed with appropriate other ingredients (“spirits”)–then to the lungs, and to the body in general through the veins; and that a second kind of blood flows from the liver to the left ventricle, then to the lungs, then to the body in general through the arteries; both kinds being (largely) consumed in the parts of the body they ultimately reach.
Howard Stein
