Harvey's account of his "discovery".

Considering that it is perhaps the most celebrated passage in the whole history of medical science, it is not surprising that the opening lines of chapter 8 of William Harvey's De motu cordis' have attracted a good deal of attention from scholars. It is in this passage, after all, that we get Harvey's own account ofthe sequence of his thoughts as he came upon the idea that the blood might have "a certain movement, as it were, in a circle". What is surprising, though, is how difficult it is to derive, from that scholarship, a clear and unequivocal exposition of his account. Harvey, himself, must bear some of the blame. In this passage, the one crucial sentence that contains most of what interests us, is long, convoluted and awkward. Then there are the circumstances surrounding the book's production. A preamble to the list oferrata, found in some copies ofthe De motu cordis, seems almost calculated to undermine our confidence in the text.