William Harvey was born in Folkestone, Kent, in 1578 and died in London in 1637. He first studied at Cambridge, entering at the age of fifteen; subsequently traveled in France, Germany, and Italy, remaining in Padua from 1599 to 1602, in order to hear the lectures of Fabricius ab Aquapendente. With the title of "Doctor" he returned{156} and settled in London and soon became a member of the College of Medicine, of which he was made a regent in 1613; in time he became physician to James I, and, on the demise of this sovereign, to Charlçs I; to the latter he dedicated his chief work. During the civil war he was driven from place to place, and, finally, to Oxford, where he surrendered himself to the Parliamentary troops, after which he again resided in London with his brothers, who had become rich. Modesty led him to decline the high distinction of President of the College of Physicians, and he lived a quiet and retired life, occupied with his studies and, in his later years, investigations in mathematics. Soon after 1613 he began, through his lectures, to make known the doctrine of the circulation of the blood; but he did not publish the results of his researches until 1628, after submitting them to fifteen years of proofs and counterproofs{157} of every kind. So bitter was the opposition of his contemporaries to the new doctrine that he at one time lost a part of his practice, and was even held to be demented. It is characteristic of the fate of new truths, as well as of that age of dominant authority, that his first publication--_Concerning the Motions of the Heart and the Blood_--was unable to pass censorship in England, and therefore appeared in a foreign country (Frankfort, in 1628) when he was fifty years old; but his second treatise on the same subject, in reply to Riolan, a professor in the Faculty of Paris, was published in Cambridge in 1649. "So much care and circumspection in search for truth, so much modesty and firmness in its demonstration, so much clearness and method in the development of his ideas," says Renouard, "should have prepossessed every one in favor of the theory of Harvey; but, on the contrary, it caused a general stupefaction in the medical world, and gave rise to great opposition."