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Blood money: Harvey's De motu cordis (1628) as an exercise in accounting

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2018

MICHAEL J. NEUSS
MICHAEL J. NEUSS*
Affiliation:
Department of Internal Medicine, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, 1161 21st Avenue South, D-3100 Medical Center North, Nashville, TN, 37272, USA. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

William Harvey's famous quantitative argument from De motu cordis (1628) about the circulation of blood explained how a small amount of blood could recirculate and nourish the entire body, upending the Galenic conception of the blood's motion. This paper argues that the quantitative argument drew on the calculative and rhetorical skills of merchants, including Harvey's own brothers. Modern translations of De motu cordis obscure the language of accountancy that Harvey himself used. Like a merchant accounting for credits and debits, intake and output, goods and moneys, Harvey treated venous and arterial blood as essentially commensurate, quantifiable and fungible. For Harvey, the circulation (and recirculation) of blood was an arithmetical necessity. The development of Harvey's circulatory model followed shifts in the epistemic value of mercantile forms of knowledge, including accounting and arithmetic, also drawing on an Aristotelian language of reciprocity and balance that Harvey shared with mercantile advisers to the royal court. This paper places Harvey's calculations in a previously underappreciated context of economic crisis, whose debates focused largely on questions of circulation.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , June 2018 , pp. 181 - 203
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Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2018 

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References

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4 Robert Frank has provided a summary of the state of the literature, which, although published two decades ago, remains relevant: ‘Sometime about 1625 or 1626 Harvey seems to have realized – by what course of reasoning is still under scholarly debate – that his concepts of the heart's motion had an unforeseen, yet necessary, consequence: the blood of vertebrates must circulate throughout the body’. See Frank, Robert G., ‘Viewing the body: reframing man and disease in Commonwealth and Restoration England’, in Marshall, W. Gerald (ed.), The Restoration Mind, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997, pp. 65–110, 71Google Scholar, original emphasis. Jerome Bylebyl demonstrated similarly that Harvey's description of the systemic circulation and his quantitative argument in particular emerged subsequent to the 1616 Prelectiones on anatomy, after Harvey began his career as a courtier; see Bylebyl, op. cit. (3), pp. 427–490, 439–440.

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