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Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
Small capital text has been replaced with all capitals.
The carat character (^) indicates that the following letter is
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HARVEY'S VIEWS ON THE USE OF
THE CIRCULATION OF THE BLOOD
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
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[Illustration: A portrait of William Harvey by Cornelius Jonson.
This picture forms the frontispiece of _Guilielmi Harveii Opera
Omnia_, London, 1766.]
HARVEY'S VIEWS ON THE USE
OF THE CIRCULATION
OF THE BLOOD
BY
JOHN G. CURTIS, M.D., LL.D.
FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF PHYSIOLOGY IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK
BASED ON A LECTURE DELIVERED IN 1907, BEFORE THE
JOHNS HOPKINS HOSPITAL HISTORICAL
CLUB AT BALTIMORE
[Illustration: logo]
New York
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
1915
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1915,
BY COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS.
Set up and electrotyped. Published December, 1915.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
PREFATORY NOTE
The writings of William Harvey, as published by him, and the letters
published as part of his works, are all in Latin. The passages from
Harvey's works which appear in English in the present paper are in
part translations by the late Dr. Willis, with changes, sometimes
considerable, by the present writer. In large part, however, the
translations from Harvey are not even based upon Dr. Willis's work,
but have been made by the present writer directly from the original
Latin. Naturally he assumes responsibility for whatever he prints
in English to represent Harvey's words; and to attempt, in print,
a more minute discrimination between his own work as a translator
and that of Dr. Willis would be tedious and unprofitable. Whoever
may wish to make such discrimination may readily do so, however,
as, in the present paper, a reference is made by page and line in
the case of each translated passage, not only to the Latin text of
Harvey's _Opera Omnia_, published by the Royal College of Physicians
of London in 1766, but also to Willis's English translation thereof,
published by the Sydenham Society in 1847, and entitled "The Works
of William Harvey, M.D." Such references to the Sydenham Society's
edition are indispensable for another purpose, viz.: in order that
to each translated passage from Harvey in the present paper a
context in English may readily be given by the reader.
It has seemed best that the various references to Harvey's Latin
text should be made to that of the easily accessible _Opera Omnia_
rather than to that of the rarer first editions of the several
treatises. In the case of the passages quoted from the treatise _De
Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus_ and from the treatise _De
Generatione Animalium_, the Latin of the _Opera Omnia_ has been
collated by the present writer with that of the first editions.
The first editions of the Exercises to Riolanus and of the various
letters have not been accessible to him.
Much use has here been made of Harvey's private lecture notes, first
published in 1886 by the Royal College of Physicians of London.
All the passages (except those from the Scriptures) quoted in the
present paper from writers other than Harvey have been translated
into English by the present writer directly from the original Greek
text or the original Latin text, as the case may be.
JOHN G. CURTIS.
EDITORIAL NOTE
Professor Curtis, to whom I am indebted for much kindly help
extended during a warm friendship of nearly thirty years, died
September 20, 1913. One of his final requests was that his younger
colleague arrange for the publication of the present paper, upon
which its writer had been engaged for a period of several years
and which happily was practically completed. This request, coming
to me after the death of my friend, could be considered only as a
command. It has, therefore, fallen to me to make a careful study of
his text, to fill in with my own words occasional slight gaps, to
make occasional verbal changes, to certify to the correctness of
his numerous references, and to make the manuscript, written and in
places rewritten many times with his own hand, ready for the press.
This I have done with affection for his memory and with appreciation
of his scholarly attainments. Dr. Curtis's work represents a more
profound study of Harvey's ideas and comparison of them with those
of the most important of Harvey's predecessors than has heretofore
appeared. It is the work of one who from the background of the
physiological science of to-day delighted in mastering the ideas of
the fathers of modern physiology. If his work is to be summarized
in a single sentence, it may be said that he has shown Harvey to
be a disciple more of Aristotle than of Galen. Although Harvey
had the courage and the originality to break away from him whose
ideas had prevailed for fourteen centuries, and to find the truth
in regard to the movement of the blood, he found much to approve in
the master who had lived five hundred years before Galen. Harvey's
true position in the world of physiological thought has not before
been made known. Herein lies Professor Curtis's contribution to the
history of his science.
FREDERIC S. LEE.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY,
June 1, 1915.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFATORY NOTE v
EDITORIAL NOTE vii
ILLUSTRATIONS xi
CHAPTER I
HARVEY'S ATTITUDE TOWARD THE QUESTION OF THE USE OF
THE CIRCULATION 1
CHAPTER II
THE CIRCULATION AND THE FEEDING OF THE TISSUES 7
CHAPTER III
RESPIRATION AND THE CIRCULATION 11
CHAPTER IV
THE CIRCULATION AND THE ARISTOTELIAN PRIMACY OF
THE HEART 42
CHAPTER V
PHYSICIANS _versus_ PHILOSOPHERS--HARVEY FOR THE
PHILOSOPHERS 55
CHAPTER VI
THE CIRCULATION AND THE PRIMACY OF THE BLOOD 64
CHAPTER VII
THE CAUSE OF THE HEART-BEAT 79
CHAPTER VIII
HARVEY'S DELINEATION OF THE VENOUS RETURN 95
CHAPTER IX
THE BLOOD THE SEAT OF THE SOUL 103
CHAPTER X
THE BLOOD THE INNATE HEAT 116
CHAPTER XI
THE INNATE HEAT NOT DERIVED FROM ELEMENTAL FIRE 139
CHAPTER XII
THE CIRCULATION OF THE BLOOD AND THE CIRCULATION
OF THE HEAVENS 154
NOTES 159
INDEX 191
ILLUSTRATIONS
Portrait of William Harvey by Cornelius Jonson _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
The Anatomical Theater at Padua 2
Page 80, right, of Harvey's _Prelectiones_, with
transcript 42
The Title-page of the _Editio Princeps_ of Harvey's
_De Motu Cordis_ 96
HARVEY'S VIEWS ON THE USE OF THE CIRCULATION OF THE BLOOD
CHAPTER I
HARVEY'S ATTITUDE TOWARD THE QUESTION OF THE USE OF THE CIRCULATION
It is a happy moment for a physiologist when the train which is
bearing him across the luxuriant plain of Venetia stops at the cry
of "Padova!" If he have not informed himself too thoroughly about
the sights which he will see at the Paduan University, he will enjoy
his own surprise when he is ushered into the Anatomical Theater of
Fabricius ab Aquapendente--a room in which standing-places rise
steeply, tier above tier, entirely around a small central oval pit.
Looking down into this, as he leans upon the rail, the traveler
will realize with sudden pleasure that William Harvey, when a
medical student, may often have leaned upon the self-same rail to
see Fabricius demonstrate the anatomy of man. The place looks fit
to have been a nursery of object-teachers, for it is too small
to hold a pompous _cathedra_; and the veteran to whose Latin the
young Englishman listened must have stood directly beside the dead
body. To an American, musing there alone, the closing years of the
sixteenth century, the last years of Queen Elizabeth of England,
which seem so remote to him when at home, are but as yesterday.
Recent, indeed, in the history of medicine is the year 1602, when
Harvey received his doctor's degree at Padua and returned to London;
but for all that we are right in feeling that our day is far removed
from his. The tireless progress of modern times has swept on at
the charging pace; but in Harvey's time books were still a living
force which had been written in days five and six times as far
removed from the student of Padua as he from us. Galen, the Greek
who practised medicine at imperial Rome in the second century of the
Christian era; Aristotle, who had been the tutor of Alexander the
Great five hundred years before Galen, when Rome was but a petty
state warring with her Italian neighbors;--these ancients were still
great working authorities in Harvey's day.[1]
It is against this persistent glow of the Greek thought that
Harvey stands out so vividly as the first great modern figure in
physiology. But it rather heightens than lowers his achievement that
it was by the ancient glow that he saw his way forward, admiring the
past, but not dazzled by it. In his old age he bade a young student
"goe to the fountain head and read Aristotle, Cicero, Avicenna";
and in talk with the same youth Harvey called the moderns by a name
so roughly contemptuous that it will not bear repeating.[2] Yet in
his old age, in the very act of extolling the ancients, he wrote as
follows:[3]--
"But while we acquiesce in their discoveries, and believe, such
is our sloth, that nothing further can be found out, the lively
acuteness of our genius languishes and we put out the torch
which they have handed on to us."
[Illustration: The Anatomical Theatre at Padua, where William Harvey
listened to the lectures of Fabricius ab Aquapendente.]
It was in 1628, the year of his fiftieth birthday, that Harvey
published, at Frankfort-on-the-Main, his famous Latin treatise
entitled: "An Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and
Blood in Animals." A reader of to-day will be inclined to skim
rapidly over the Introduction to this treatise and over much in
the last three chapters; and probably he will take only a languid
interest in the two brief Latin treatises which Harvey published in
defense of the circulation, after more than twenty years of silence,
in his seventy-first year, at Cambridge in 1649; these treatises
being entitled: "Two Anatomical Exercises on the Circulation of the
Blood, to Johannes Riolanus, Junior, of Paris."
The demonstration of the circulation in the treatise of 1628 is so
irresistible that the ancient strongholds of belief crash to the
ground at that summons like the walls of Jericho, and it seems a
waste of time to scan the fragments. But for all that, the edifice
which had stood for more than thirteen centuries was a goodly
structure; and whoever shall have read Aristotle and Galen at first
hand and shall then return to Harvey, will read with interest what
the same reader treated as a mere foil for the great demonstration;
and will realize that the irresistible quality of the latter is
shared by Galen's demonstration that blood is naturally contained
in the arteries.[4] Moreover, it will be seen that if the Greek of
the second century could, like Harvey, appeal to observation and
experiment, the English physician of the Renaissance, the student
of Cambridge and Padua, was an apt pupil of the Greeks. Harvey
could, and frequently and naturally did, view things from a Greek
and ancient standpoint when proof of their nature was unattainable.
This is to be seen not only in his earlier and later exercises on
the circulation, but also in his last work, his "Exercise on the
Generation of Animals" with appended essays, published in Latin
at London in 1652, in Harvey's seventy-third year, two years
after the appearance of the exercises addressed to Riolanus. This
treatise On Generation deals also at various points with the blood
and the circulation, as do in addition Harvey's published Latin
letters. We shall find, too, the same leaning upon the ancients
as immediate precursors in thinking, if we turn back from the
publications of Harvey's old age to the very first written words
of his which we possess, private lecture notes jotted down by him
in his thirty-seventh year for use in 1616--notes happily printed
and published in 1886.[1] In these notes, written more than eleven
years before the publication of his most famous treatise, he sets
forth for the first time, though briefly, the circulation of the
blood, that physiological truth which to my mind is completely
and indisputably Harvey's own discovery. It is with Harvey as the
interpreter, not the maker, of this discovery, that I shall venture
to deal in this paper.
In his old age the great discoverer recorded his own attitude, as an
interpreter, in the following words:--
"That freedom which I freely concede to others, I demand with
good right for myself also; liberty, that is, in dealing with
obscure matters, to bring forward, to represent, the truth, that
which seems probable, until the falsity thereof shall clearly be
established."[5]
In 1636, eight years after he had published the treatise which now
seems so convincing, Harvey was in Nuremberg and wrote to Caspar
Hofmann, M.D., a professor of repute who lived there, offering to
demonstrate the circulation to him. In his letter Harvey quotes
impatient words of his German colleague, which show that in the face
of proof the circulation still seemed to some men of high standing
too useless to be true. Harvey says to Hofmann:--
"You have been pleased to reproach me rhetorically and chastise
me tacitly as one who seems to you 'to accuse and condemn nature
of folly as well as error, and to impose the character of a
most stupid and lazy craftsman on her, since he would permit
the blood to relapse into rawness and to return repeatedly to
the heart to be concocted again; and, as often, to the body at
large to become raw again; and would permit nature to ruin the
made and perfected blood in order that she may have something to
do.'"[6]
To this attack Harvey calmly rejoins as follows, speaking of the
blood:--
"As to its concoction and the causes of this its motion and
circulation, especially their final cause, I have said nothing,
indeed have put the subject by entirely and deliberately; as you
will find set down in plain words and otherwise if you will be
pleased to read again chapters VIII and IX."[7]
More than twelve years later still, in defending the circulation
against Riolanus, Harvey finds it necessary to say:--
"Those who repudiate the circulation because they see neither
the efficient nor the final cause of it, and who exclaim '_Cui
bono?_'--(As to which I have brought forward nothing so far;
it remains to be shown)--plainly ought to inquire as to its
existence before inquiring why it exists; for from the facts
which meet us in the circulation regarded as existing, its uses
and objects are to be sought."[8]
In spite, however, of these disclaimers of formal position Harvey
had repeatedly intimated, by the way, what was crossing his mind
as to the meaning of the circulation, to set forth the proofs of
which had been his main concern. Even in the eighth chapter to which
Harvey appealed in support of his disclaimer Hofmann could have
pointed to two passages as affording from his standpoint a basis for
his attack. In the second and shorter of these two passages Harvey
says of a vein as compared with an artery:--
"This is a way from the heart, that to the heart; that contains
cruder blood, effete and rendered unfit for nutrition; this,
concocted, perfect, alimentary blood."[9]
Harvey, indeed, as we shall find abundant evidence, was both an
observer and a speculator. In the latter rôle he was not far removed
from his physiological predecessors of two thousand years; as an
observer it was his great merit to lead the physiologists of his
time and to point out to those of all later centuries the path which
they must follow.