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William Harvey Influence On Religion

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There were many men of the late Renaissance and early Enlightenment, who contributed to the world of science. However, it was William Harvey, who changed the way the world looked at the body as a whole, through his continued lifetime research as he moved away from observation to dissection. In this essay, I will argue that William Harvey starts this new era of the scientific breakdown of information, as a result, pushing away from previous Aristotelian and Galen philosophical views of science. In order to prove Harvey’s place in the history of science, I will be discussing his methods of analysis on the blood- circulating heart and effects of religion on his ideas of embryonic development through the changes in popular belief. Firstly, …show more content…

T. However, William Harvey's research into reproduction began to cast doubt on spontaneous generation as he believed that all life reproduced sexually. Upon his experimentation, Harvey discovered that the hen laid an egg ten days after interaction with the male, Hence, he concluded that the male did fertilize more than one of the yolks. Harvey was also the first to theorize that humans and other mammals reproduced via the fertilization of an egg by sperm. Harvey was one of the first doctors to use quantitative and observation methods simultaneously in his medical investigations, now referred to as the scientific method. Though he was extremely skeptical of spontaneous generation when proposing that all animals originally came from an egg, his experiments with chick embryos were the first to suggest the theory of epigenesis, the theory that an individual is developed by successive differentiation of an unstructured egg rather than by a simple enlarging of a preformed. This was completely different from Aristotle’s view that the fathers contribute the essential characteristics of their offspring while mothers contribute only a material substrate of the egg when it is fertilizing. That view would have been emphasized in the mainly patriarchal society of that time. Also in accordance to Pickstone , one can see that Aristotle stayed more on the cosmological way of analyzing aspects of life, while Harvey was more about systematic rationale. Though Harvey’s account of fertilization was more theoretical rather than descriptive, the idea was a breakdown of past ideas created by Aristotle and basic principles gained from active observations and

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