William Harvey demonstrating the palpitations of the foetal heart of a deer to Charles I. Engraving by H. Lemon, 1851, after an oil painting by R. Hannah, 1848.

In the course of his research for his Exercitationes de generatione animalium (Amsterdam and London 1651), William Harvey, physician to King Charles I, was supplied with vivisection material from the deer stock kept for the royal hunt. In chapter fifty-one of the book, Harvey discusses the manner in which the heart continues to pulsate even when removed from the body. He records displaying this phenomenon to the King in the rudimentary heart of a deer embryo, in chapter sixty-nine: "Having dissected the uterus, I have exposed this Punctum saliens, while it yet continued its palpitation, to the view of our late dread Soveraigne; which was then so small, that without the advantage of the sun-beams obliquely illustrating it, he would not perceived its shivering motion." (English translation from p. 423 of the London 1653 edition: Anatomical exercitations, concerning the generation of living creatures.) Although the subject of Hannah's painting is usually given as Harvey demonstrating to Charles I his theory of the circulation of the blood, the dissected uterus lit by a shaft of light and the deer's head on the table suggests a specific connection to Harvey's vivisection of the royal deer in order to chart the development of the foetus and the passage in his book on the generation of animals in which he describes the sharing of his observations with the King. Other representations of Harvey which refer to his research with deer are the statuette by C. B. Birch of 1886, also in the Royal College of Physicians of London, which shows Harvey with the body of a deer at his feet, and a print (Wellcome Library catalogue no. 17920i) in which Harvey demonstrates to students the circulation of the blood on a deer. Another painting with experimental science as its subject was exhibited by Hannah in 1856: Sir Isaac Newton's observation of the effect of gravity on apples