From the Royal Society of Medicine: ‘moments of genius and discovery that have radically altered the way we see the world’

It is nearly 400 years since Charles I’s eminent physician William Harvey shook up classical theories about the heart. Since Roman times, it had been thought that there were two systems for the flow of blood — one from the liver, the other from the arteries — and that some kind of alchemy happened in between. With the publication of Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus (An anatomical exercise of the movement of the heart and blood in animals) in 1628, Harvey proposed that there was only one circulatory system, with the heart operating as a two-way pump.

At the time of this great discovery, the luminaries of England had a different revolution on their minds. The country was heading for civil war, and Harvey’s groundbreaking treatise would face years of resistance before being accepted by the scientific community. It was left to the radical philosopher René Descartes to recognise in the physician’s descriptions of the heart as a mechanical organ an entirely new way of thinking about the human body. Out went Aristotelian ideas about the heart being the centre of our humours and our soul, and in came descriptions of hydraulics and plumbing. We still think of the heart as a pump today.

Perversely, Harvey had never intended to upend the status quo. As a conservative and a loyal subject to Charles I, he had argued that the heart was at the centre of the body just as the monarch was at the centre of the political universe — something he was later to regret when the king was executed. Recognising the dangers, Harvey retired from public life, saying he would forgo the impulse to ‘stir up tempests’ from now on. Nonetheless, his modest little volume, printed in Latin, became one of the most influential books in the history of modern science.

On 10 December 2025, a first edition of Harvey’s discovery will be offered in Valuable Books, Manuscripts and Photographs, including Highlights from The Royal Society of Medicine at Christie’s in London. According to Books and Manuscripts specialist Mark Wiltshire, this is a ‘once-in-a-generation’ copy: ‘We haven’t seen an example on the market since 2001.’

Harvey’s doctrine is one of a number of books offered for sale from the Royal Society of Medicine to raise funds to support the institution’s future. ‘The collection celebrates those quieter moments of genius and discovery that may not have been considered significant at the time but have gone on to radically alter the way we see the world today,’ says Wiltshire.

Below, Wiltshire selects five other celebrated scientific breakthroughs in the history of medicine that feature in the sale.

The first vaccination: Edward Jenner

‘Blockheads’ is how Edward Jenner described the ‘anti-vaxxers’ who tried to ruin his reputation. The Gloucestershire physician performed his first vaccination in 1796, using ‘material’ from a pustule on the hand of a dairymaid who had cowpox. The results — showing that his vaccination would protect against smallpox — were announced to the public in 1798 in An inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, but it didn’t stop the naysayers, as testified by a collection of autograph letters (also offered in the sale) to his friend Alexander Marcet. However, the ‘pocky doctor’ had every reason to be triumphant. His conclusion that the vaccination was ‘capable of extirpating from the Earth a disease that is every hour devouring its victims’ was spot on. In 1980, the World Health Organisation declared that smallpox had been eradicated.

The recognition of Parkinson’s disease: James Parkinson

It was from his surgery in Hoxton Square in London that the doctor James Parkinson observed the symptoms of the disease that today carries his name. In An Essay on the Shaking Palsy, Parkinson identified and described the neurological condition Parkinson’s disease. Published in 1817, this slim volume outlines six case studies, describing the sufferers as having ‘involuntary tremulous motion, with lessened muscular power, in parts not in action and even when supported; with a propensity to bend the trunk forward, and to pass from a walking to a running pace: the senses and intellects being uninjured’.

‘Parkinson’s genius was in recognising that all these different ailments were the symptoms of one disease,’ says Wiltshire. ‘His work also revealed just how much can be deduced by careful observation.’

The birth of anaesthetics: William T.G. Morton

It is thanks to a proactive tooth-puller that pain-free surgery is now readily available. In 1846, a dentist called William Thomas Green Morton was keen to find a way to perform a painless tooth extraction, when he discovered the anaesthetic properties of sulfuric ether. This wonder drug put the patient into a comatose state, allowing dentists to really get to work.

When the Boston surgeon Henry Jacob Bigelow heard of Morton’s success, he arranged for a demonstration to be held at Massachusetts General Hospital. Under the gaze of the great and the good of the medical profession, Dr John Collins Warren removed a tumour from the neck of a patient who had been given ether. The results were later written up in the November 1846 edition of The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal.

The causes of cholera: John Snow

It is unusual for a second edition to be more valuable than the first, but this is the case with John Snow’s On the Mode of Communication of Cholera. When the doctor published his theory that cholera was waterborne in 1849, few were convinced, and it was not until the great cholera epidemic of 1854 that Snow was able to provide enough historical and statistical evidence to prove his theory correct.

Essential to this second edition is the dramatic discovery of a sewer near the Broad Street pump in Soho, central London, where a cluster of cholera infections occurred. The well was put out of action and the number of deaths fell. This second edition contains a map of London, showing the location of the Broad Street pump.

Handwashing to prevent disease: Ignaz Semmelweis

In the 1840s, an obstetrician in charge of two maternity wards in Vienna noticed that mothers were more likely to die if they were attended to by a doctor than a midwife. The difference, Ignaz Semmelweis realised, was that the doctors were moving between wards carrying germs on their hands. He installed washing facilities and deaths plummeted.

Unfortunately, this eminently simple solution was ignored by the Viennese authorities, who said they found no evidence to support Semmelweis’s theory. In 1861, Semmelweis published The Etiology, Contagiousness and Means of Prevention of Puerperal Fever in an effort to prove his case. The book was poorly received, and Semmelweis was dismissed as a crank. However, as this copy reveals, the doctor was not such an outsider as supposed. It is dedicated to a Dr Charles Henry Felix Routh, who trained with Semmelweis in Vienna and shared the obstetrician’s theory on the prevention of sepsis.

Valuable Books, Manuscripts and Photographs, including Highlights from The Royal Society of Medicine is on view 6-9 December 2025 at Christie’s in London