William Harvey

William Harvey studied at Padua under Fabricius, became physician to James I and Charles I, and in 1628 published, in a slim Latin book, the demonstration that the blood circulates, pumped by the heart through the arteries and returning through the veins, against fifteen centuries of Galen. On the Motion of the Heart and Blood is the founding text of experimental physiology and the reason the Great Books set puts him beside Galileo. On the Circulation answers his critics; On the Generation of Animals, from his old age, holds that every animal comes from an egg.