William Harvey (1578-1657) was an English physician who discovered the circulation of the blood. He correctly described the motion of the heart as a contraction that forced blood out of the left ventricle into the arteries and the return of the blood through the venous system to the right atrium, as well as the pulmonary circulation of blood from the right ventricle through the lungs to the left atrium. This work, first published in 1628, is commonly referred to as De Motu Cordis, or On the Motion of the Heart. Harvey establishes the circulation of blood throughout the body through observations, experiments, and measurements.

Also bound in this volume are Dissertation de corde (Rotterdam, 1648) by Jacobi de Back (1594-1658), an early Dutch adherent of Harvey's, as well as the first edition of Harvey’s Exercitationes duae anatomicae de circulatione sanguinis (Rotterdamn, 1649), his first extended defense of his discoveries since their initial publication 21 years earlier. Title pages and plates have been digitized.