William Harvey is one of the most widely recognized figures in the history of science, with a ‘discovery’ neatly attached – the circulation of the blood. He has also been endowed with heroic status by his many admirers, endlessly commented on, praised and toasted at commemorative dinners. He has spawned so many publications that it is impossible to put an exact figure on them. Further, Harvey has been appropriated for ‘science’, although he practised as a physician; he has been deemed a forerunner of experimental physiology and taken to have made significant contributions to biology. Into this elaborate web of anachronisms, Andrew Cunningham has ventured, with a forceful argument about the ways in which Harvey followed Aristotle, practised as an anatomist and developed modes of thought that need to be taken seriously. In other words, historians need to heed what Harvey himself says.

Cunningham has been thinking and writing about Harvey for decades – items published between 1985 and 2012 are listed in the select bibliography. Although the volume is relatively short, with the main text occupying 166 pages, readers need to stay on their toes and take the dense arguments at a steady pace in order to appreciate the claims its author makes. Thus it helps that the work is expository, going through writings by Aristotle, Fabricius and Harvey in some detail, and some repetition ensures that major points hit home. One of Cunningham's most striking assertions is that there were not two Harveys, as the old view that many of us were brought up with would have it: one, especially praiseworthy, who wrote De Motu (1628) and the other, less laudable, who published De Generatione (1651). Rather there was a single Harvey who, as he emphasizes, followed Aristotle. This is an important claim that is well made, not least since the old view that Harvey lost the plot in old age, even somehow letting the side down in his work on reproduction, is unsatisfying.

For Cunningham, Harvey was the Padua-trained anatomist whose thinking was shaped by Aristotle's De Anima and by their shared interest in ‘the animal’, and whose discovery was unexpected, even unwelcome. The kernel of Aristotle's claim was that when studying animals, whether living or dead, we can discern the soul in action; that is, actualized through their parts and what these do. This approach helps historians of what we might anachronistically refer to as the life sciences grasp what was at stake in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the impassioned reaction to mechanistic approaches. Cunningham waxes fierce about the imposition of our own categories and ways of thinking on a figure who died in 1657, having been moulded by his earlier educational and institutional experiences. At the same time, he is fully aware that historians necessarily work in their own times, resulting in the need to conscientiously struggle against anachronism while appreciating that they can never, by definition, be totally successful. One advantage of Cunningham's approach is that by being so explicit about the assumptions that Harvey and others held, he invites philosophers of science to use his historical scholarship in debates about, for example, method, discovery and experiment.

The last two chapters focus on worlds we have lost; that is, the correct understanding of Aristotle on the one hand and of Harvey on the other. Cunningham's assertion that much has been lost is surely correct and helpful; it reveals the spirit in which the book has been written and makes the originality of his contribution explicit. Inevitably there is much more to say on these matters. When writers invoke Harvey in later periods they are usually claiming kinship with him, for example through shared disciplinary concepts, such as ‘physiology’. They may be wrong according to the tenets of present-day historians of science; nonetheless it is worth working out how such claims function. So many examples invite our attention, including writings by William Osler, Silas Weir Mitchell and Kenneth Rose. Rose, a biographer whose family included medical men, published a pamphlet on Harvey in 1978 to celebrate the anniversary of his subject's birth in 1578. Weir Mitchell produced a privately printed pamphlet in 1907. Osler delivered the Harveian Oration in 1906, shortly after taking up the Regius Chair of Medicine at Oxford. Many more examples accompany statues and institutions named after Harvey. Although some commentators may well have got Harvey ‘wrong’, it is worth reflecting on what can be learned from his presence on stamps and prints as well as from the mass of documentation that surrounds him. A good example is the career of Geoffrey Keynes, upon whose biography of Harvey Cunningham relies heavily and whom he discusses briefly (p. 164). A scholar surgeon with wide interests, Keynes openly admitted that he hero-worshipped Harvey and played an active role in repatriating a portrait of Harvey (illustrated on p. 5), following its illegal export. These phenomena can help us understand how reputations are forged and sustained and may even contribute to explanations of how and why we keep getting things ‘wrong’. Thus Cunningham's book opens up many avenues for future research as well as offering stimulating, meticulous and original insights into William Harvey.

The responsible reviewer cannot stop there, however, because Cunningham has not been well served by his publishers. This is not about the price, or even the rather poor illustrations with minimal captions, but about the inconsistencies and omissions that suggest it received no copy-editing whatsoever. The index is short and incomplete; there is only a ‘select bibliography’, with one work cited in the body of the text (p. 166) and others not easy to trace, while the volume already has two parallel citation forms, with page numbers in the text plus footnotes at the end of each chapter. This double system is in principle fine, but it would be well worth entering in the bibliography every work cited. Then there's the question of quotations. It is excellent to have so many as they ground Cunningham's careful exposition, but it is only intermittently clear whose emphasis the italics represent or whose translation is being cited. A thorough copy-editing process might have removed some of the many exclamation marks! And it would have produced a volume that Andrew Cunningham's research deserves.