1 Composition • Project-Team Leader – Olivier Beaumont, assistant professor, ENSEIRB • Staff members – Nicolas Bonichon, assistant professor, Univ. Bordeaux 1 – Lionel Eyraud, CR2 INRIA, from 09/07 – Cyril Gavoille, Professor, Univ. Bordeaux 1 – Nicolas Hanusse, CR1 CNRS, LaBRI – David Ilcinkas, CR2 CNRS, LaBRI – Ralf Klasing, CR1 CNRS, LaBRI • External Collaborator – Philippe Duchon, assistant...

Although there is abundant evidence that the critical importance of the heart was appreciated during prehistory as well as in ancient times, its function was first defined by William Harvey, a British physician. The inspiration for his seminal discovery, considered by historians as one of the scientific triumphs of the Renaissance, came from the school of great anatomists of the University of P...

While the study of Harvey's natural philosophy, in particular the analysis of the anatomy lectures and of De motu cordis, is insightful and persuasive, the section devoted to philosophy teaching in Cambridge when Harvey was a student is somewhat cursory and it is not clear why French decided to base his investigation on John Case's Ancilla, which was published in 1599-when Harvey had already mo...

modern audiences, again making it a bit more digestible at the level of undergraduates and general interest readers, although more seasoned Harvey scholars might also appreciate the added clarity, or where there is confusion, he has left the original Latin. For example, making reference to the 1928 translation by Chauncey Leake, Carty identifies confusion over the vena arteriosa and arteriae ve...

In Harvey's Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus of 1628, we see the mechanisms of the Circulation worked out more or less in full from the results of experimental demonstration, virtually complete but for the direct visual evidence of a link between the minute final terminations and initial branches of the arterial and venous systems, respectively. This would become ...