Western Culture Global Presents

The Top 100 Heroes of Western Culture
These individuals have most contributed to replacing ignorance with knowledge, savagery with civilization, disease with health, tyranny with liberty, poverty with abundance, and despair with happiness.



#63: William Harvey (1578-1657)

William Harvey (1578-1657) was an English physician who first explained how blood is pumped from the heart throughout the body, then returns to the heart and is recirculated. He was also the first to study biology quantitatively.

Most people in Harvey’s time believed that food was converted into blood by the liver, then was consumed as fuel by the body. Through controlled and ground-breaking experiments, Harvey proved otherwise.

Harvey’s findings are the foundation for all modern research on the heart and blood vessels. Without his contributions, the development of medical science and its life-saving ability would have been severely impeded.



Go to #64: J.P. Morgan


Top 100 Western Culture Heroes — Home
Top 100 Western Culture Heroes — by Numerical Order
Top 100 Western Culture Heroes — by Century
Top 100 Western Culture Heroes — by Category