Relating to or named after William Harvey, the 17th-century English physician who discovered how blood circulates through the body.
From William Harvey (1578-1657), English physician, combined with the adjective-forming suffix -ian. The term commemorates his revolutionary work De Motu Cordis (1628) on blood circulation.
Before Harvey, people thought blood was made in the liver and sloshed around like an ocean; his discovery that the heart pumps blood in a circuit was so radical that even his medical colleagues fought against it for decades.
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