William Harvey and the Circulation of the Blood

Synopsis: Uses historical documents, portraits, and sequences specially filmed on location in Padua as well as in England to describe Harvey’s education at Canterbury, Cambridge and Padua, and the influence of his various teachers. Uses animated diagrams to illustrate the theories of the movement of the blood in the body up to Harvey’s time, theories which had originated over a thousand years before from the teachings of Galen, the Greek physician. The second part of the film reconstructs Harvey’s experimental work in proof of his hypothesis put forward in ‘De Motu Cordis’ in 1628; the commentary is derived from his own writings.
Language: English
Country: Great Britain
Medium: Film; Video; Film. 16mm. sd. col. 30 min. Videocassette. Standard formats. col. 30 min.
Technical information: Black-and-white / Sound
Year of production: 1972
Availability: Hire
Sale
Notes: The original production of 1928 (16mm, st, b/w) and a VHS copy are held in the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine.
Uses: MSc courses in 17th- and 18th-century theories of man and nature; undergraduate courses in science and medicine since the 17th century.*
Subjects: Medical sciences
Keywords: blood; blood circulation; Harvey, William; history of medicine; physiology - animal; physiology - human

Name: Wellcome Film
Email: misc@wellcome.ac.uk
Web: http://wellcomelibrary.org/about-us/about-the-collections/moving-image-and-sound-collection/ External site opens in new window
Phone: 020 7611 8766
Fax: 020 7611 8577
Address: Moving Image & Sound Collections
Wellcome Library
183 Euston Road
London
NW1 2BE

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British Universities Film & Video Council