> Skip to content
  • Published: 5 April 2012
  • ISBN: 9781448138470
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

Circulation

William Harvey’s Revolutionary Idea




Winner of the Wellcome Trust Book Prize 2012, this is the vivid and visceral biography of William Harvey, the Renaissance anatomist who discovered the circulation of the blood.

"What I am really anxious to hear is the final cause of your monstrous fiction. For your false invention seems to have no purpose. What reason can you give me for the circulation of the blood?"

William Harvey’s theory of circulation was as controversial in its day as Copernicus’ idea that the earth revolved around the sun. Unleashing intellectual anarchy, derailing established ideas, & gaining currency far beyond the walls of the College of Physicians, Harvey’s revolutionary theory went on to permeate the culture and language of 17th century England.

Circulation charts the remarkable rise of the yeoman’s son who demolished beliefs held by anatomists since Roman times, going on to become arguably the greatest Englishman in the history of science after Darwin & Newton.

  • Published: 5 April 2012
  • ISBN: 9781448138470
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

About the author

Thomas Wright

Thomas Wright was educated at Saint Thomas More School, Bedford and Magdalen College, Oxford. He is the author of Table Talk; the groundbreaking Oscar's Books, a biography of his hero Oscar Wilde through his reading; Circulation, a biography of William Harvey, which won the Wellcome Trust Book Prize in 2012. He lives in Oxford.

Also by Thomas Wright

See all

Praise for Circulation

[An] acute, imaginative book

John Carey, Sunday Times

A book that combines scholarly science with narrative excitement to spectacular effect

Mark Lawson

A concise, skilful and eloquent book

Charles Nicholl, Guardian

A vivid biography of William Harvey, which reveals his complex character

Patricia Fara, BBC History Magazine

An engaging and lively account of an endlessly curious man

Independent

As soon as I started this book, I was gripped with curiosity

William Leith, Spectator

Excellent and often bloodthirsty... A highly readable account of a great Englishman

Tablet

In Circulation, Wright tells a good story, warts and all

Duncan Wu, Independent

It’s a pretty gruesome story – told very well here by Thomas Wright

William Leith, Evening Standard

The little man of 'perpetual movement' has found a fine advocate in Thomas Wright, whose highly readable Circulation combines recent scholarship with more than a touch of drama

Times Literary Supplement

Thomas Wright's book opens brilliantly and bloodily and continues in the same vein...a captivating intellectually gripping journey into our country's scientific past

Druin Burch, Mail on Sunday

Thomas Wright's lively little book on Harvey's revolutionary idea is a panegyric to the man's whirring mind, and to the excitements of thinking more generally

Helen Brown, Daily Telegraph

Thomas Wright's lucid biography...deftly puts Harvey into his cultural context

Hermione Eyre, Prospect
penguin pop image
penguin pop image