A gruesome sort

Everybody knows that the heart pumps blood around the body, and that a man called William Harvey somehow discovered this fact. Before Harvey, people thought that blood moved around the body in a sluggish fashion. But then Harvey — who was born 14 years after Shakespeare — noticed that, actually, blood shoots out of the heart with great force, travels through the arteries, and then makes its way back to the heart through the veins. To find this out, in an age before X-rays, sonograms or heart monitors, you would, if you think about it, have had to be a pretty gruesome sort of person.

As soon as I started this book, I was gripped with a curiosity I should, I realised, have had all along. How did Harvey make his discovery? I had to wait until about halfway through the book to find out. Meanwhile Thomas Wright, a decent biographer, got me acquainted with Harvey — who, after Newton, Darwin, Einstein and Galileo, is one of the most important scientists who ever lived. Born in Kent in 1578, he had six brothers and two sisters. His father was a pushy sheep farmer, desperate for social recognition. William was extremely bright, so he was sent to the King’s School, Canterbury, where he toiled away at the classics.

At 16, he was accepted into Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he lived the spartan life of the commoner, sleeping in a cramped attic, waking at 4 a.m. and grinding away at Latin and Greek texts for up to 18 hours a day. It is thought that he speed-read standing up, and lived on porridge and cheap cuts of meat. He was fiery and driven. After a year, he won a scholarship.