“Cor microcosmi sol”

Padua, crossroads of knowledge in Europe, and the theory of the circulation of blood of William Harvey.

Modern science emerged between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Padua, with its university, made a decisive contribution to this emergence. Nicolaus Copernicus came to Padua from Poland to study, and in the first half of the sixteenth century he developed a theory in which it was no longer the Earth that was at the center of the universe, as the ancients believed, but the Sun. Galileo Galilei, a professor in Padua at the end of the century, provided experimental proof of Copernicus’ theory. In those same years, William Harvey came from England to study medicine in Padua and discovered how blood circulates in the human body through the heart, thus making it the ‘center’ of the human body, just as the Sun is at the center of the universe.

The Latin phrase, which expresses a thought that had already been expressed by Aristotle, ‘Cor Microcosmi Sol’, ‘the heart is like the sun in the microcosm’, effectively sums up this similarity, in which the human body is considered a ‘microcosm’, an organism in which all the parts of which it is made contribute to its functioning, just as the ‘macrocosm’, the Universe, is a physical reality in which the various parts, the planets and stars, are related to each other to form a unity of elements that are neatly connected. The heart in the “microcosm” is like the sun in the “macrocosm,” at the center of the two natural “systems.”

Educated at the Studium in Padua, William Harvey was deeply influenced by the cultural climate he found in this city. Here he studied anatomy with Girolamo Fabrici d’Acquapendente, a master who focused on direct observation and anatomical dissections of the human body, and breathed the atmosphere of scientific and philosophical renewal that made Padua the most important European university for medical studies.

In Padua, in fact, the solid tradition of Aristotelian studies coexisted with the new experimental method introduced by Galileo Galilei. The combination of these two souls was decisive for the formation of Harvey’s thinking: the legacy of Aristotelian philosophy based on rigorous logic and empirical observation was confronted with the rigor of experimentation born of Galilean science.