died in 1541, Copernicus in 1543, Luther in 1546, Hans Holbein in
1554, and Melancthon in 1560. Mercator, who introduced a new method of
cartography, died in 1594, Tycho Brahe in 1601, Keppler in 1631, Van
Dyck in 1641, Grotius, the great scholar, in 1645, Rembrandt in 1668
and Spinoza in 1677.
In philosophy, scepticism was the prevailing doctrine in the time of
Harvey. It had been founded a hundred years previously by Montaigne,
and continued by Charron, the chaplain of Queen Margaret of Navarre,
who died in 1603, and who declared all religion to be opposed to human
reason;--a remarkable attitude for a chaplain to assume. Opposed to the
scepticism of Harvey's day was the mystic, Cabalistic or supernatural
philosophy especially represented by Böhme, a peasant shoemaker,
uneducated and yet wonderfully gifted. He had been the philosophical
colleague of that great Meistersinger, Hans Sachs. Later philosophers
and thinkers, yet belonging to Harvey's time, were Pascal, the great
Jansenist, who discovered the variations of atmospheric pressure at
different levels, and Malebranche, who figures prominently in the
history of philosophy.
Descartes, who died in 1650, held the pineal gland to be the seat of
the soul. He was the discoverer of the laws of refraction of light
and furnished the explanation for the rainbow. He attained greatest
eminence in mathematics, physics and philosophy, and was one of
the inventors of modern algebra. One of his greatest opponents was
that noble Jew, Spinoza, whose colleagues had expelled him from the
Sanhedrim to the sound of the trombone.
The Italian Dominican Campanella, who died in 1639, considered
the foundation of knowledge to be supernatural revelation and its
perception by the senses. In spite of these views he came before The
Inquisition on a charge of heresy and of cooperation with the Turks,
was tortured by the rack, and imprisoned for thirty years.
The mystic or Cabalistic notions of Harvey's day have just been
mentioned. Under them we may recognize many degenerate products and
amalgamations of the real doctrines of Paracelsus. The doctrines of
the Rosicrucians, as well as of Zoroaster and the Cabala, were revived
and made to do strange work. There was, for instance, that Sir Kenelm
Digby, who died in 1605, a King's chamberlain, who posed among the
English as a so-called Rosicrucian. It was he who suggested the famous
"_sympathetic powder_," which was to be applied to the weapon by which
a wound had been inflicted, after which the _weapon_ was anointed and
dressed two or three times a day, while the wound itself was carefully
bound up with dressings and left alone for a week. This was perhaps
much the better course, but it will show what strange notions prevailed
in those days.
What it meant to run counter to ecclesiastical policy and theological
dogma appears not only in such tragedies as terminated the lives
of Bruno and many other martyrs to science, but in such facts as
these; for instance, when in 1624, just when Harvey was preparing to
publish his work, some young chemists in Paris, seeing the benefit
of the experimental method, broke away from Aristotle and the canons
of theological reasoning, the faculty of theology appealed to the
Parliament of Paris, which latter prohibited all such researches, under
the severest penalties.
This was the time too when such exhibitions as the following were
altogether too frequent;--One Quaresimo, of Lodi, came out with
a ponderous work entitled "A Historical, Theological and Moral
Explanation of the Holy Land," in which he devoted great space to the
question of The Dead Sea and the salt pillar supposed to represent
Lot's wife, dividing a long chapter upon the subject into three parts,
dealing with the method and the locality of this transformation and the
question of the existence at that time of her saline remains. Thus,
with his peculiar powers of reasoning, he was able to decide the exact
point where the saline change took place, and finally showed that the
statue _was still in existence_.
Lord Bacon was also an older contemporary of Harvey, having been born
in 1561 and dying in 1626, shortly after the appearance of Harvey's
great work. His services to analytic science need no description here,
but it is worth while to remember that Harvey, like many others, must
have come under his influence and have profited by his teachings in
logic and analysis.
At about the time when Harvey made known his discovery Bacon was
publishing his views of the laws of transmission and reflection of
sound. Great man as he was, with a keen foresight into the value of
the recent inventions of the compass, gun-powder and printing, he
nevertheless was himself so narrow, in some respects, that he placed
but little value upon the discovery of Copernicus. He, however, paved
the way for one in some respects still greater, namely Isaac Newton,
who, however, had scarcely attained man's stature when Harvey died.
How much we owe to the two great Bacons of history one cannot indicate
in this short résumé. Roger Bacon (1214-1292) seems to have been the
first great thinker along truly scientific lines. He was more than a
mere chemist while, as White says, more than three centuries before
Francis Bacon _advocated_ the experimental method Roger Bacon had
_practised_ it, and in many directions. He did more than anyone else
in the middle ages to direct thought into fruitful paths, and only
now are we finding out how nearly he reached some of the principal
doctrines of modern philosophy and chemistry. Most important of all,
his methods were even greater than his results, and this at a time
when "theological subtilizing" was the only passport to reputation for
scholarship.
It was Avicenna, the Arabian, who perhaps first announced substantially
the modern theory of geology, accounting for changes in the earth's
surface by suggesting a stone-making force, but the presence of fossils
in the rocks had been always a thorn in the sides of the theologians.
It was Leonardo da Vinci, that versatile genius in science and art,
who, previous to Harvey's generation, suggested true notions as to the
origin of fossils, while, in Harvey's time, Bernard Palissy, another
artist, vehemently contended for their correctness. Still, even at
Harvey's death, neither geology nor paleontology had come anywhere near
scientific accuracy.
The _Academia dei Lyncei_, so-called from its seal, which bore the
image of a fox, was founded in Rome in 1603. In France The Academy
of Science was not founded until 1665, in Germany The Society of
Naturalists and Physicians in 1652, and the British Royal Society in
1665.
In matters of general interest it may be worth while to say that in
architecture the general style of The Renaissance was changed for the
more substantial Barocco, while the more formal and limited style of
church music had given away to musical drama, i. e., opera, albeit
in very crude form. The first newspaper had appeared at Antwerp in
1605, the first German paper being published in Frankfort in 1615, and
The London Weekly News making its first appearance in 1620. Tobacco,
which had been brought over by Raleigh in 1560, had come into quite
general use, while coffee, tea and chocolate had gained in public
esteem. When coffee was first introduced in England it sold for about
$28 a pound. The first coffee house appears to have been established
in Constantinople, in the middle of the 16th century, while the first
coffee house in London was not opened until a century later.
The barbers still retained their ascendency, and the bath keepers had
scarcely lost their position next to the barbers. It was not until
Harvey had reached a ripe age that the barbers were required in Germany
to pass an examination, in which they had to prove not only their
knowledge but the legitimacy of their birth, and the fact that they
had studied for three years and had worked for three years more as
apprentices.
Anatomy was studied quite generally, sometimes upon human bodies. A
dissecting room had been established in Dresden in 1617, in which
stuffed bears, at that time a great rarity, were preserved with other
curiosities. In 1623 Rolfink, at Jena, arranged for public dissection
upon the bodies of all executed malefactors, delegates being present
thereat from various other institutions. It is worth while to mention
that in Frankfort, for instance, during the expiration of 65 years, but
seven dissections were made, and that these were always accompanied
by a celebration which lasted several days. Vienna did not possess a
skeleton in 1668, and Strassburg did not have one until 1671. Yet it is
of interest to remember that the anatomical plates, like those often
published to-day, which are meant to be lifted off in layers, existed
even at this period. On the other hand, botanical gardens and chemical
laboratories existed in several of the universities,--in Strassburg,
for instance, in 1619,--in Oxford in 1622.
Fabricius Hildanus, the father of German surgery, or, as he has
been sometimes called, the Ambroise Paré, of Germany, was also a
contemporary of Harvey's. His real name was Fabry and he was born in
Hilden, but he latinized his name into that form usually adopted to-day.
Scultetus was another famous surgeon of the same period.
William Gilbert, 1540-1603, had been the talented physician of Queen
Elizabeth, and was among the first to study the experimental method.
With the appearance of his book upon the magnet, in 1600, began the
science of electricity and magnetism. He was the first to teach the
fact that the earth itself was a great magnet and he distinguished
between magnetic and electric reactions. Later the great Dutch
anatomist, Ruysch, afforded corroboration of Harvey's views by
another method, when he invented and practised those beautiful minute
injections of the vascular system which made him so famous, and built
up that great collection of specimens which Peter the Great bought for
Russia at an expense of about $75,000.
Contemporary with Harvey also was Swammerdam, one of the most versatile
men of his time, famous as naturalist, savant, physiologist, linguist
and poet. It was during the fifteenth century that astronomy began to
assume an importance and degree of accuracy never hitherto known. This
was due very largely to the independence of thought and the researches
of Copernicus, who was born in Cremona in 1477, and who studied
medicine in Krakau and astronomy in Vienna. He lived to the age of 70
and was the real father of the heliocentric theory, now known as the
Copernician system, which he substituted for the previous Ptolemaic
theory, thus reversing the ancient idea that the sun circled about
the earth. Copernicus demonstrated the phases of the moon, but his
opponents claimed that if this doctrine were true Venus would exhibit
the same phenomena; to which he replied that it was true, though he
knew not what to say to these objections, but that God was good and
would in time furnish answer to them. It was Galileo's crude telescope
which, in Harvey's younger day, in 1611, furnished this answer and
revealed the phases of Venus. To illustrate how the views of Copernicus
were received we might add here that Martin Luther paid his compliments
to him by declaring that Copernicus was a fool who wished to stand
astronomy upon its head.
Copernicus was succeeded by Galileo, who was born in 1554 in Pisa,
and died 1642. He may be called the creator of dynamic astronomy
and mechanics, as well as one of the most brilliant exponents of
experimental and inductive reasoning. He was of noble birth and was, in
fact, the torch bearer of physics at the period of The Renaissance. He
gave up speculation and substituted for it the habit of observation,
reaping a large harvest of surprising facts, any one of which might
have immortalized him. He not only established the movements of the
earth on its own axis as well as around the sun, which Copernicus
had shown, but he discovered the weight of the atmosphere and first
calculated the law of gravity. He and his successors were governed
always by that aphorism which is to-day as true as ever: "Experience is
deceptive and judgment difficult."
In 1615 when he was before The Inquisition, at Rome, and when its
theologians had examined statements extracted from his letters, they
solemnly rendered their decision in these words: "The first proposition
that the sun is the centre and does not revolve about the earth is
foolish, absurd, false in theology and heretical, because expressly
contrary to The Holy Scripture. The second proposition that the earth
is not the centre, but revolves about the sun, is absurd, false in
philosophy and, from a theological point of view, at least, opposed to
the true faith." This for a pronunciamento from the _infallible_ Church!
Galileo and Bruno have by some writers both been made to stand in an
unpleasant light because of their recantation or shifting position
before The Inquisition. Bruno was the greatest philosopher and sceptic
of the latter part of the 16th century, and had outlined, withal
somewhat vaguely, that which is now known as the nebular hypothesis.
He was murdered by The Inquisition in 1600, and the views which he
enunciated seem to have been buried with him, not to reappear until
long after his sad fate had been consummated. He had, for instance,
contended for the truths of the Copernican doctrine, but it was not
until ten years after his martyrdom that Galileo proved it with his
telescope. That both these great men yielded in some respects to the
influences of The Inquisition and renounced some of their scientific
"heresies" is largely to be excused by the fact that they were both
old, broken in health from the sufferings which they had endured, as
well as from their disappointments, and that they had been, under
these circumstances, handed over to that Inquisition which knew no
mercy. Galileo could well remember the _auto da fê_ in the Piazza
dei Fiore, in Rome, the scene of Bruno's martyrdom, as well as the
tragic end of many another who had dared to have the courage of his
convictions. Let us, then, not judge him harshly, but be grateful
even that the enormous power of The Inquisition did not and could not
suppress the truth.
Galileo's discovery of the satellites of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn,
his experiments with the pendulum, his construction of the telescope,
as well as of the thermometer, and many other deeds, have stamped him
as one of the great figures in the history of progress and science. It
is most interesting to note that this contemporary of Harvey's, like
himself, was given to inductions obtained from experimental studies.
Another great astronomical light of Harvey's time was Keppler, who was
driven from one place to another by religious fanaticism, until he
ended his life in 1630. It was he who formulated the great principle
which underlies the motions of the planets, and who gave to the world
his so-called "laws," which so materially advanced the science of
astronomy. It was he who really discovered that comet which was later
given Hailey's name, whose periodic return he first foretold.
Such was the spirit of the times in which Harvey lived, and such
the influences which surrounded his teachers before him and himself
in turn. It makes a long preface to a consideration of what Harvey
himself accomplished, but it is not without its interest because men
and their deeds must be judged largely by their environment. Now, to
speak more particularly of Harvey himself, and what was known of the
circulation when he undertook his investigations.
The liver had been considered, from time immemorial, as the principal
factor in the production and movement of the blood. The ancients
supposed that here the veins took their origin and that through them
the blood flowed to all parts of the body, returning to its source by
an undulating movement or series of alternate waves. The arteries had
been supposed to contain only vital spirits, whose great reservoir was
the heart, although Erasistratus had admitted that in certain cases
blood might escape into the arterial channels. Later Galen showed that
the arteries always contained blood, and he knew that blood was poured
into the right side of the heart by the great veins, but believed that
only a little of it passed from the right ventricle into the lungs, the
greater part of it passing through hypothetical pores in the septum
and thus into the left ventricle. This opinion, like Galen's in other
respects, remained unchanged until the middle of the 16th century.
It was also known that valves existed within the veins, and that if
an artery were tied on a living animal blood would cease to flow and
pulsation be checked below the ligature, while if a vein were tied it
shrunk above the ligature and became distended below.
Three men before Harvey's time came very near to discovering the secret
that made him famous; in fact, they made such advances on what was
already known that history should accord them a distinguished place.
One was _Columbus_, who was born at Cremona in 1490, and died in 1559.
He was first a pupil and prosector and then a friend of Vesalius, the
great anatomist. Later he succeeded him at The University of Padua
and unfortunately, after gaining his position, ungratefully turned
upon his old teacher. He was, however, for his day a good anatomist
and especially a good osteologist. It was he who first demonstrated
experimentally that blood passes through the lungs into the pulmonary
veins and that the latter connect with the left ventricle. He thus
practically established the fact of the lesser circulation. He
suffered, however, as did Servetus, from the prevailing notion that
spirits and blood were mixed together. From Padua Columbus went to
Pisa, and then to Rome. He wrote with elegance and correctness of style
and even described the vessels which penetrate the bone cells, the
ossicles of the ear, the minute anatomy of the teeth, the ventricles
of the larynx, as well as those valves which prevent the return of
blood from the lungs to the heart. In fact, he narrowly missed the
significance of the actual facts of the case, simply failing in his
final analysis and assembling of those facts which he had already
demonstrated.
_Cesalpinus_, who lived a little later, came still nearer the mark,
having accepted the teachings of Columbus regarding the course of
the blood through the lungs. He added that the ultimate arterial
branches connect with those of the veins, and he taught that blood
and vital spirits, from which the ancients could never separate
themselves, passed from the arteries into the veins during sleep, as
was demonstrated by the swelling of the veins and the diminution of the
pulse at that time.
A little later came _Michael Servetus_, who figures principally in
history as a theologian and a victim of theologians, since he perished
a martyr to Calvin's jealousy. He was, in effect, a wisely and widely
educated man who did a great deal for science, one of the offences
attributed to him being an edition of Ptolemy's geography, in which
Judea was described as a barren and inhospitable land instead of one
"flowing with milk and honey." This simple statement of a geographical
fact was made a tremendous weapon of offence by Calvin, who replied
that even if Servetus had only quoted from Ptolemy and, although
there were ample geographical proofs, it nevertheless "unnecessarily
inculpated Moses and grievously outraged The Holy Ghost." Servetus
dared to deny the passage of the blood through the septum of the heart,
and contended that that which comes into the right side was distributed
to the lung and returned to the left ventricle. He published his views,
however, in a religious treatise on Errors concerning The Trinity, a
most unfortunate place in which to inject such an important fact,
since it gave his enemies a still greater opportunity to vent and
ventilate their spleen. Had he been able to leave out that notion of
vital spirits, which prevailed with all his predecessors, he might
actually have made the great discovery left for Harvey to enunciate.
I have not been able to refer to original documents in this matter,
but it is claimed by some that his description of the circulation was
contained in another religious work concerning the Restitution of
Christianity, which was printed in Nuremberg in 1790.
Such was the actual state of knowledge concerning the movements of the
blood and the functions of the heart when Harvey published his great
work. It behooves us now to proceed with a short account of Harvey's
own life and researches.
_William Harvey_ was born at Folkestone on the first of April, 1578. He
was the eldest son of a prosperous merchant who raised a large family
and who occupied the highest positions of honor in his own town. The
son William was born to his second wife, by whom he had seven sons and
two daughters. All of these children were helped to remunerative or
honorable positions. They became merchants or politicians or secured
prominence in some way, but William was the only one to study medicine.
He was sent to the King's school at Canterbury, in 1588, and he was
admitted at Caius, in Cambridge, in 1593, where he graduated in arts
in 1597. The following year he went to Padua, which then had one of
the greatest medical schools of the time, and he obtained his medical
diploma in 1602, when twenty-four years of age. Returning to England he
received a doctor's degree at Cambridge, and shortly afterward married
a daughter of a London physician and entered upon the practice of
medicine in London.
In the great city his practice as a physician seems to have been from
the outset successful, and his knowledge and ability procured him
various valuable appointments. He was made a Fellow of The College
of Physicians in 1607. This Royal College of Physicians was given a
grant of incorporation by Henry VIII in 1518, at the intercession of
Chambers, Linacre and Ferdinand Victoria, the King's Physicians, it
being under the patronage of Cardinal Wolsey. The first meetings were
held at Linacre's house which he bequeathed to the corporation at his
death. Until this College was founded practitioners of medicine were
licensed to practise by the Bishop of London or by the Dean of St.
Paul's.
A few years later Harvey was appointed Physician-Extraordinary to King
James I, and later yet, after the publication of his great treatise
and its dedication to the King, he was made Physician-in-Ordinary to
Charles I, whom he attended during the Civil Wars.
It must have been about 1615 when Harvey first began expounding his
views on the circulation of the blood, during lectures which were
delivered at The College of Physicians, but it was not until thirteen
years later, i. e., in 1628, that his great work DE MOTU CORDIS
was published in Latin, as was customary among scholars, and at
Frankfort-on-the-Main, since that was then the great center of the book
publishing trade.
The treatise was dedicated to King Charles I, in a manner which to us
would seem servile, and yet which was according to a custom followed
by nearly all of the scholars of the day, who desired to attract not
only the attention of royalty, but, in most instances, their benevolent
assistance. It is worth while to quote at this point the first sentence
or two of his dedication:
"To the
Most Serene and Invincible
CHARLES,
of Great Britain, France and Ireland,
KING: DEFENDER of the FAITH,
Most Serene King,
"The heart of animals is the basis of their life, the principle of
the whole, the Sun of their Microcosm, that upon which all movement
depends, from which all strength proceeds. The King in like manner
is the basis of his Kingdom, the Sun of his World, the heart of the
Commonwealth, whence all power derives, all grace appears. What I have
here written of the movements of the heart I am the more emboldened to
present to your Majesty, according to the Custom of the present age,
because nearly all things human are done after human examples and many
things in the King are after the pattern of the heart."