William Harvey was born on the 1st of April, 1578, at Folkstone, on the
southern coast of Kent. He was the eldest of nine children; of the rest
little more is known than that several of the brothers were among the
most eminent merchants in the city of London during the reigns of the
two first Stuarts. His father, Thomas Harvey, followed no profession. He
married Joanna Falke at the age of twenty, and lived upon his own estate
at Folkstone. This property devolved by inheritance upon his eldest son;
and the greatest part of it was eventually bequeathed by him to the
college at which he was educated.
At ten years of age he commenced his studies at the grammar school in
Canterbury; and upon the 31st of May, 1593, soon after the completion of
his fifteenth year, was admitted as a pensioner at Caius College,
Cambridge.
At that time a familiar acquaintance with logic and the learned
languages was indispensable as a first step in the prosecution of all
the branches of science, especially of medicine; and the skill with
which Harvey avails himself of the scholastic form of reasoning in his
great work on the Circulation, with the elegant Latin style of all his
writings, particularly of his latest work on the Generation of Animals,
afford a sufficient proof of his diligence in the prosecution of these
preliminary studies during the next four years, which he spent at
Cambridge. The two next were occupied in visiting the principal cities
and seminaries of the Continent. He then prepared to address himself to
those investigations to which the rest of his life was devoted; and the
scene of his introduction to them could not have been better chosen than
at the University of Padua, where he became a student in his
twenty-second year.
The ancient physicians gathered what they knew of anatomy from
inaccurate dissections of the lower animals; and the slender knowledge
thus acquired, however inadequate to unfold the complicated functions of
the human frame, was abundantly sufficient as a basis for conjecture, of
which they took full advantage. With them every thing became easy to
explain, precisely because nothing was understood; and the nature and
treatment of disease, the great object of medicine and of its subsidiary
sciences, was hardily abandoned to the conduct of the imagination, and
sought for literally among the stars. Nevertheless, so firmly was their
authority established, that even down to the close of the sixteenth
century the naturalists of Europe still continued to derive all their
physiology, and the greater part of their anatomy and medicine, from the
works of Aristotle and Galen, read not in the original Greek, but
re-translated into Latin from the interpolated versions of the Arabian
physicians. The opinions entertained by these dictators in the republic
of letters, and consequently by their submissive followers, with regard
to the structure and functions of the organs concerned in the
circulation, were particularly fanciful and confused, so much so that it
would be no easy task to give an intelligible account of them that would
not be tedious from its length. It will be enough to say, that a
scarcely more oppressive mass of mischievous error was cleared away from
the science of astronomy by the discovery of Newton, than that from
which physiology was disencumbered by the discovery of Harvey.
But though the work was completed by an Englishman, it is to Italy that,
in anatomy, as in most of the sciences, we owe the first attempts to
cast off the thraldom of the ancients. Mundinus had published a work in
the year 1315, which contained a few original observations of his own;
and his essay was so well received that it remained the text-book of the
Italian schools of anatomy for upwards of two centuries. It was enriched
from time to time by various annotators, among the chief of whom were
Achillini, and Berengarius, the first person who published anatomical
plates. But the great reformer of anatomy was Vesalius, who, born at
Brussels in 1514, had attained such early celebrity during his studies
at Paris and Louvain, that he was invited by the republic of Venice in
his twenty-second year to the chair of anatomy at Padua, which he filled
for seven years with the highest reputation. He also taught at Bologna,
and subsequently, by the invitation of Cosmo de’ Medici, at Pisa. The
first edition of his work ‘De Corporis Humani fabricâ,’ was printed at
Basle in the year 1543; it is perhaps one of the most successful efforts
of human industry and research, and from the date of its publication
begins an entirely new era in the science of which it treats. The
despotic sway hitherto maintained in the schools of medicine by the
writings of Aristotle and Galen was now shaken to its foundation, and a
new race of anatomists eagerly pressed forward in the path of discovery.
Among these no one was more conspicuous than Fallopius, the disciple,
successor, and in fame the rival, of Vesalius, at Padua. After him the
anatomical professorship was filled by Fabricius ab Aquapendente, the
last of the distinguished anatomists who flourished at Padua in the
sixteenth century.
Harvey became his pupil in 1599, and from this time he appears to have
applied himself seriously to the study of anatomy. The first germ of the
discovery which has shed immortal honour on his name and country was
conceived in the lecture-room of Fabricius.
He remained at Padua for two years; and having received the degree of
Doctor in Arts and Medicine with unusual marks of distinction, returned
to England early in the year 1602. Two years afterwards he commenced
practice in London, and married the daughter of Dr. Launcelot Browne, by
whom he had no children. He became a fellow of the College of Physicians
when about thirty years of age, having in the mean time renewed his
degree of Doctor in Medicine at Cambridge; and was soon after elected
Physician to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, which office he retained till a
late period of his life.
On the 4th of August, 1615, he was appointed Reader of Anatomy and
Surgery to the College of Physicians. From some scattered hints in his
writings it appears that his doctrine of the circulation was first
advanced in his lectures at the college about four years afterwards; and
a note-book in his own handwriting is still preserved at the British
Museum, in which the principal arguments by which it is substantiated
are briefly set down, as if for reference in the lecture-room. Yet with
the characteristic caution and modesty of true genius, he continued for
nine years longer to reason and experimentalize upon what is now
considered one of the simplest, as it is undoubtedly the most important,
known law of animal nature; and it was not till the year 1628, the
fifty-first of his life, that he consented to publish his discovery to
the world.
In that year the ‘Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis’ was
published at Frankfort. This masterly treatise begins with a short
outline and refutation of the opinions of former anatomists on the
movement of the animal fluids and the function of the heart; the author
discriminating with care, and anxiously acknowledging the glimpses of
the truth to be met with in their writings; as if he had not only kept
in mind the justice due to previous discoveries, and the prudence of
softening the novelty and veiling the extent of his own, but had
foreseen the preposterous imputation of plagiarism, which, with other
inconsistent charges, was afterwards brought forward against him. This
short sketch is followed by a plain exposition of the anatomy of the
circulation, and a detail of the results of numerous experiments; and
the new theory is finally maintained in a strain of close and powerful
reasoning, and followed into some of its most important consequences.
The whole argument is conducted in simple and unpretending language,
with great perspicuity, and scrupulous attention to logical form.