BOOK REVIEW : Pioneering Physician Is Vividly Recalled : DIARY OF WILLIAM HARVEY: The Imaginary Journal of the Physician Who Revolutionized Medicine <i> by Jean Hamburger</i> , Rutgers University Press $35 hardback; 255 pages

William Harvey, the first modern physician, ministered to King Charles I, Shakespeare, Van Dyke and Hobbes as well as to simple Englishmen and women remembered only for their medical anomalies.

His fame and his position at court brought Harvey into contact with the cream of early 17th-Century society. But unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not confide his experiences in a diary.

This omission has been remedied by “Diary of William Harvey” by Dr. Jean Hamburger, the late president of the Institut de France and a pioneer in kidney transplant. Harvey is well-served by Hamburger, who scrupulously adheres to documents (and explains in wonderful notes when he takes liberties) to produce a vivid account of six of the last 10 years of Harvey’s life.

The diary starts on Harvey’s 70th birthday in 1647. A lonely widower, Harvey laments the king’s exile in Oxford as Cromwell’s army and the forces of religious fanaticism gain power. In the days that follow, Harvey follows the royal forces and then the king through his incarceration and execution.

Pondering the events of his long life, Harvey recalls his personal triumphs--especially his discovery of the circulation of the blood as it is pushed through the body by the action of the beating heart (an idea he got when he could not avoid listening to the clack of a pump near his London house).

Harvey’s early experiments on eels and then fish proved that the liver--the organ previously believed to be the powerhouse of the body--could simply not produce the 149 pounds that he found the heart pumps every half hour.

Looking back on 50 years of practice, Harvey conveys his joy in medicine and defends his discovery. Although still largely unaccepted, it was a triumph of observation and experimentation over slavish adherence to the authority of Aristotle and Galen.

He replaced their abstractions with the experimental method, the use of animal models and the idea of “methodical doubt,” which he had found in Descartes, a man he never met but to whom he was grateful for defending his work before a hostile European community. A new kind of doctor--what we would call today a scientific physician--Harvey believed that “the best fertilizer for medicine is the progress of other and quite different sciences.”

Harvey was above all a physician familiar with the pain of disease. He writes about confiding to King Charles that he traveled with a supply of laudanum to hasten his death in the event that he found himself in terrible pain.

When the king asks if “the right to choose the moment of one’s own death is as natural as you seem to believe?” Harvey replies, “Man’s destiny is precisely to play at being a god, since man is the only living creature who invents his own laws.”

Harvey was talking about his own death, not anyone else’s. Saddened by news of the king’s decapitation, he writes: “Medicine is an unremitting battle for life. The physician sees life as a permanent miracle that must not be allowed to flee before the normal hour; he comes to be in love with this miracle, and the idea that men may cut it short in order to appease their political or religious passions causes him suffering.”

Hamburger accomplishes two goals in this extraordinary book. He explains Harvey’s scientific genius and sets him squarely in his own time, a time not so different from our own.

At coffeehouses, newly introduced to England and in which Harvey was an early habitue, he savors the bean and recalls the artists whose works he admires.

He has trouble with Da Vinci. In contrast to Keats, who wrote in the early 19th Century that “beauty is truth, truth beauty,” Harvey worries that “a man of science who allowed himself to be guided by the desire for beauty would run the risk of confusing the beautiful with the true, whereas the true may have the outward appearance of ugliness, and the beautiful may be imaginary.”

This reader was very sorry when the diary, and Harvey’s life, came to an end and was solaced to learn that within three years of his death, his favorite nephew received a title at the restoration of James II. On the other hand, the library and museum that he carefully designed and paid for as an addition to his beloved College of Surgeons went up in flames in the Great Fire of London in 1666.

The monument that remains, of course, is his contribution to medicine, which survived the turmoil of civil wars and natural disaster.