_WILLIAM HARVEY AND THE CIRCULATION OF THE BLOOD._
“Oft have I seen a timely-parted ghost,
Of ashy semblance, meagre, pale, and bloodless,
Being all descended to the labouring heart,
Who in the conflict that he holds with death,
Attracts the same for aidance ’gainst the enemy;
Which with the heart there cools, and ne’er returneth
To blush and beautify the cheek again.”
If the man who discovered a new material world deserves immortality,
equally meritorious is he who revealed a new world of activity, and
promulgated the first true conception of the ceaseless round of vital
processes. As Dr. Parkes says in his Harveian Oration, 1876, “When
any one examines into this discovery of Harvey’s, and gradually
recognises its extraordinary importance, he cannot but be seized with
an urgent wish to know how the mind which solved so great a problem
was constituted; how it worked and how it reached, not merely the
probability, but the certainty, of a grand natural law.... There
was no accident about it—no help from what we call chance; it was
worked out and thought out, point after point, until all was clear as
sunshine in midsummer. Nor had it been anticipated.”
WILLIAM HARVEY, eldest son of Thomas Harvey and Joan Halke, was
born at Folkestone in Kent, on the 1st of April, 1578, and that
his parents were in easy circumstances may be judged by the fact
that five of his brothers became substantial London merchants. Of
his mother it is recorded on her monumental tablet that she was “a
careful, tender-hearted mother, dear to her husband, reverenced of
her children, beloved of her neighbours.” Her eldest son, after
some years’ education at Canterbury, was entered at Gonville and
Caius College in 1593, where he remained till 1597, when he left the
university with the B.A. degree, and betook himself to Padua. This
renowned university then boasted among its professors Fabricius, the
anatomist, whose influence upon Harvey was evidently remarkable.
After five years, Harvey obtained his doctorate in medicine, couched
in terms of the utmost praise of his astonishing ability, memory,
and knowledge, and returned to England. He was admitted to the same
degree at Cambridge, and settled in practice in London, marrying the
daughter of Dr. Launcelot Browne in his twenty-sixth year—a union
which proved childless.
Having become a candidate for the Fellowship of the College of
Physicians in 1604, he was admitted in 1607 after due probation; and
we find him in 1609 seeking the reversion of the physiciancy to St.
Bartholomew’s Hospital, gaining the king’s letters recommendatory,
and producing such testimonials from the President of the College of
Physicians and others that he was chosen before the vacancy occurred,
and on the death of Dr. Wilkinson was appointed to the office,
October 14, 1609.
Harvey now rapidly advanced in general favour as a physician, and in
1615 was appointed Lumleian Lecturer at the College of Physicians,
an office then held for life. His first lectures were given in April
1616, and in this and subsequent years he gradually unfolded the
novel views on the heart and the circulation of the blood which he
was acquiring, and which he published in 1628. The novelty of his
views does not, however, consist in the idea that the blood actually
moves in the vessels. This was known before, and Shakespeare gives
expression to a current conception in the passage at the head of
this chapter. Servetus, in 1553,[4] had asserted that the blood
finds access from the right side of the heart to the left through
the lungs, thus explaining the intermixture in the heart of the two
kinds of blood appropriate to arteries and veins respectively. For
a long time the partition between the ventricles was believed to be
perforated like a sieve, so that a mixture of venous and arterial
blood could take place. But this had been completely disproved by
Berengarius and Vesalius. Consequently the two kinds of blood,
according to this view, after meeting in the head, thorax, and
abdomen, returned to the heart by the way they came, for a fresh
supply of the exhausted or enfeebled spirits on which the principal
functions of the body depended. Servetus, it is true, asserts
a communication between the pulmonary artery and veins; but he
particularly declares that “the vital spirit has its origin in the
left ventricle, the lungs assisting especially in its generation,”
and that “it is engendered from the mixture that takes place in the
lungs of the inspired air with the elaborated subtile blood which the
right ventricle of the heart communicates to the left.” The extent of
his knowledge is further shown by his statement that “the blood is
mixed in the pulmonary vein with the inspired air, and by the act of
expiration is purified from fuliginous vapours, when having become
the fit recipient of the vital spirit, it is at length attracted by
the diastole.” Still very great credit is due to the man who first
declared that “the crimson colour is imparted to the spirituous blood
by the lungs, not the heart.”
Servetus was, however, ignorant of the force by which the blood is
impelled into the arteries, and the contractile functions of the
heart were unknown. The ventricle was believed to dilate from some
undiscovered cause, and thus to suck in the purified “spiritus
vitalis.” But Servetus’s explanation, whatever it was worth, occurred
in a theological work, the issue of which led to the author’s death
at Calvin’s persecuting hands, and the work remained unknown—for
Calvin carefully burnt every copy possible—until 1694, when Sir Henry
Wotton disinterred it.
Realdus Columbus, the associate of Dr. Caius at Padua, had in 1559
published a treatise containing some advanced views, showing that the
blood once having entered the right ventricle from the vena cava,
cannot return in consequence of the opposition of the tricuspid
valves, and he further perceived the effect of the pulmonary valves;
but he still held the idea that the blood had to be converted in
the lungs into a kind of spirit, and looked upon the liver as the
fountain-head of the blood. Finally, he denied the muscular structure
of the heart.
Cæsalpinus added to this some more complete idea of the greater
circulation, but he knew nothing of the valves in the veins, and held
to the belief that there were two kinds of blood, one for the growth,
another for the nourishment of the body. He imagined that it was only
during sleep that the veins become distended while the pulsations
of the arteries become moderated. He had no idea of the connection
between the emptying of the arteries and the filling of the veins,
nor of the heart being the cause of the blood’s movement.
Fabricius, Harvey’s teacher of anatomy, had made such a distinct step
in advance in discovering the valves of the veins and the effect
they must have, that it is quite astonishing that he should not have
proceeded farther. But the fact is, that without the microscope as
developed in after years,[5] it was impossible to solve a multitude
of questions satisfactorily, and we may rather marvel that Harvey was
able to achieve so much with the means at his disposal. The principal
means he employed to this end was undoubtedly the vivisection of
animals.
Chapter i. of his celebrated treatise on the Motion of the Heart
and the Blood (Frankfort, 1628) begins emphatically, “When I first
gave my mind to vivisections, as a means of discovering the motions
and uses of the heart, and sought to discover these from actual
inspection, and not from the writings of others, I found the task so
truly arduous, so full of difficulties, that I was almost tempted to
think, with Fracastorius, that the motion of the heart was only to be
comprehended by God.[6]
“At length, and by using greater and daily diligence, having frequent
recourse to vivisections, employing a variety of animals for the
purpose, ... I thought ... that I had discovered what I so much
desired, with the motion and the use of the heart and arteries....
“These views, as usual, pleased some more, others less; some chid
and calumniated me, and laid it to me as a crime that I had dared
to depart from the precepts and opinions of all anatomists.... At
length, yielding to the requests of my friends, that all might be
made participators in my labours, and partly moved by the envy of
others, who, receiving my views with uncandid minds and understanding
them indifferently, have essayed to traduce me publicly, I have been
moved to commit these things to the press.... Finally, if any use or
benefit to this department of the republic of letters should accrue
from my labours, it will perhaps be allowed that I have not lived
idly, and, as the old man in the comedy says:—
‘For never yet hath any one attained
To such perfection, but that time, and place,
And use, have brought addition to his knowledge;
Or made correction, or admonished him,
That he was ignorant of much which he
Had thought he knew; or led him to reject
What he had once esteemed of highest price.’
“So will it, perchance, be found with reference to the heart at this
time; or others, at least, starting from hence, the way pointed out
to them, advancing under the guidance of a happier genius, may make
occasion to proceed more fortunately, and to inquire more accurately.”
In the second chapter, after a vivid description of the behaviour of
the heart, he thus declares its muscular nature. “The motion of the
heart consists in a certain universal tension—both contraction in
the line of its fibres, and constriction in every sense. It becomes
erect, hard, and of diminished size during its action; the motion is
plainly of the same nature as that of the muscles when they contract
in the line of their sinews and fibres; for the muscles, when in
action, acquire vigour and tenseness, and from soft become hard,
prominent, and thickened: in the same manner the heart.”...
“These things, therefore, happen together or at the same instant:
the tension of the heart, the pulse of its apex, which is felt
externally by its striking against the chest, the thickening of its
parietes, and the forcible expulsion of the blood it contains by the
constriction of its ventricles.”
In further chapters he establishes separately, and in a masterly
manner, the facts that the pulse in the arteries depends on the
contraction of the ventricles; that when the left ventricle ceases
to contract, the pulse in the arteries also ceases; that the two
auricles contract together, and also the two ventricles together,
but the ventricles following the auricles in a certain rhythm; that
the heart accomplishes a transfusion of the blood from the veins to
the arteries; and that the blood sent into the lungs from the right
ventricle passes through the porous structure of the lungs and back
to the left ventricle.
In his eighth chapter, Harvey feels himself to be bringing forward
considerations of so novel a character, that “I tremble,” he says,
“lest I have mankind at large for my enemies, so much doth wont and
custom, that become as another nature, and doctrine once sown and
that hath struck deep root, and respect for antiquity influence all
men: _still the die is cast, and my trust is in my love of truth,
and the candour that inheres in cultivated minds_.” He found it
impossible to account for the constant influx of blood into the
arteries, and the return of blood to the heart, unless there was “a
motion, as it were, in a circle.” And he shows by calculations of
the quantity passing through the heart in an hour, that it is much
more than the whole body contains, and that there is no way except
by communications taking place from arteries to veins in every part
of the body. Finally, he clearly shows how the valves in the veins
promote the return of blood to the heart.
Throughout the whole of this treatise considerations from comparative
anatomy, from the phenomena of human diseases, and from natural
philosophy, are thickly interspersed, and imagery of the most
suggestive character is called into requisition; the whole forming
a treatise that every scientific man might well read, and that
no doctor should consider himself fully educated without having
attentively perused. In a subsequent letter to John Riolan the
younger, Professor of Anatomy in the University of Paris, Harvey lays
down—in opposition to those who repudiate the circulation because
they cannot see the efficient nor final cause of it, and who exclaim,
_Cui bono?_—the fundamental scientific axiom, “Our first duty is to
inquire whether the thing be or not, before asking wherefore it is.”
Again, “He who truly desires to be informed of the question in hand,
and whether the facts alleged be sensible, visible, or not, must
be held bound, either to look for himself, or to take on trust the
conclusions to which they have come who have looked; and indeed there
is no higher method of attaining to assurance and certainty.”
Everything that Harvey wrote shows him to have been pre-eminently an
example of the scientific mind, that which submits everything to the
test of experiment and observation. Anatomy he professed to learn and
teach, not from books, but from dissections, not from the positions
of philosophers, but from the fabric of Nature. In the introduction
to his Treatise on Generation he praises the “more excellent way”
of those “who, following the traces of nature with their own eyes,
pursued her through devious but most assured ways till they reached
her in the citadel of truth. And truly in such pursuits,” he goes
on, “it is sweet not merely to toil, but even to grow weary, when
the pains of discovering are amply compensated by the pleasures
of discovery. Eager for novelty, we are wont to travel far into
unknown countries, that with our own eyes we may witness what we
have heard reported as having been seen by others, where, however,
we for the most part find that the presence lessens the repute. It
were disgraceful, therefore, with this most spacious and admirable
realm of nature before us, and where the reward ever exceeds the
promise, did we take the reports of others upon trust, and go on
coining crude problems out of these, and on them hanging knotty and
captious and petty disputations. Nature is herself to be addressed;
the paths she shows us are to be boldly trodden; for thus, and whilst
we consult our proper senses, from inferior advancing to superior
levels, shall we penetrate at length into the heart of her mystery.”
True and scientific as the Treatise on the Heart and the Circulation
was, or rather because it was so true and scientific, its
publication gave a decided and severe check to Harvey’s professional
prosperity. It was believed by the vulgar, says Aubrey, that he was
crack-brained. Writing many years after the publication, Aubrey says
that though he was allowed to be an excellent anatomist, nobody
admired his therapeutic methods. It was said by practitioners that
they could not tell by his prescriptions what he aimed at. Yet he
continued well in favour with the court, and with numerous persons
of distinction. Having become Physician Extraordinary to James I.
in 1618 or earlier, he was in 1623 promised the reversion of the
office of Physician in Ordinary when a vacancy should occur. But his
accession to this post only took place in 1630 under Charles I.[7]
Harvey became Treasurer of the College of Physicians in 1628, but
resigned this office and also procured the appointment of a deputy
at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in 1630, when he was commanded by
the King to attend the young Duke of Lennox in his travels on the
Continent. Having returned from this expedition, in 1632 he was sworn
in Physician in Ordinary for his Majesty’s household, and in 1639
we find a letter in the Lord Steward’s office, giving orders for
settling a diet of three dishes of meat a meal with all incidents
thereunto belonging upon Dr. Harvey. But later on, in 1640, the
King when at York makes another arrangement, devoting £200 a year
to Dr. Harvey, the three dishes of meat probably not having been
readily forthcoming just then. In 1632-3 a deputy had again to be
appointed at St. Bartholomew’s; in 1636 he was required to accompany
the Earl of Arundel on his embassy to the Emperor of Germany. This
gave him an opportunity of personally explaining the circulation to
various eminent physicians in the principal German cities. On one
of these occasions, at Nuremberg, we find it recorded that Harvey
gave a public demonstration of the circulation, which satisfied all
except Caspar Hofmann.[8] Returning to England, Harvey accompanied
Charles I. in his expeditions, such as that to Scotland in 1639;
and we may remark that, being in such close proximity to the royal
person, he contrived very skilfully not to become involved in court
intrigues, his best protection being his devotion to his medical and
physiological investigations.[9] Even when war had broken out, Harvey
became in no way obnoxious to the Parliament, for he tells us himself
that he attended the King not only with the consent but by the desire
of Parliament. In this way Harvey was present on the very field at
the battle of Edgehill.
“During the fight,” says Aubrey, “the Prince and Duke of York were
committed to his care. He told me that he withdrew with them under
a hedge, and took out of his pocket a book and read. But he had not
read very long before a bullet of a great gun grazed on the ground
near him, which made him remove his station.” We cannot but admire
the coolness and serenity of mind which could thus occupy itself with
reading in the midst of carnage, having evidently no sort of belief
in, or vocation for, the employment of force in the arbitrament
between opposing opinions. Accompanying Charles to Oxford, he found
congenial society, and was incorporated Doctor of Medicine on the
7th December, 1642. “I first saw him at Oxford,” says Aubrey, “1642,
after Edgehill fight; but was then too young to be acquainted with
so great a doctor. I remember he came several times to our college
(Trinity) to George Bathurst, B.D., who had a hen to hatch eggs in
his chamber, which they opened daily to see the progress and way of
generation.”
Thus we see Harvey continuing engaged in that study of the mysteries
of reproduction and development to which he devoted so many years and
so many toils. He must have commenced his studies on this subject at
least early in Charles’s reign.
In 1645, while the King and his physician still remained at Oxford,
Sir Nathaniel Brent having quitted Merton College, of which he was
Warden, and taken the Covenant, Harvey was appointed Warden in his
place by virtue of a royal mandate. He had indeed lost more than
his time in following the royal fortunes, and deserved any reward
the King could bestow upon him. At the close of the sixty-eighth
section of his treatise on Generation Harvey says, “Let gentle minds
forgive me if, recalling the irreparable injuries I have suffered,
I here give vent to a sigh. This is the cause of my sorrow: whilst
in attendance on his Majesty during our late troubles and more than
civil wars, not only with the permission but by the command of the
Parliament, certain rapacious hands stripped not only my house of all
its furniture, but what is subject of far greater regret with me, my
enemies abstracted from my museum the fruits of many years of toil.
Whence it has come to pass that many observations, particularly on
the generation of insects, have perished, with detriment, I venture
to say, to the republic of letters.”[10]
The Wardenship of Merton was not long Dr. Harvey’s, for when Oxford
surrendered to the Parliamentary forces in July 1646, he quitted
the university and returned to London, and Sir Nathaniel Brent was
reinstated in his former position. Nothing has been ascertained of
the reason for Harvey’s cessation of personal attendance on the King
at this period, but it is certain that he took refuge in the homes
of his brothers, each of whom, whether in the City, at Lambeth, at
Roehampton, or at Combe, kept special apartments reserved for him.
It is most pleasing, indeed, to note the great brotherly affection
existing in this family. The earliest of them to die, Thomas Harvey,
in 1622, has the following inscription on his monumental tablet.
“As in a Sheaf of Arrows. _Vis unita fortior._ The Band of Love
the Uniter of Brethren.” Thus, leaving his financial concerns in
charge of his brother Eliab, William devoted himself, at the age of
sixty-eight, more fully to his researches on Generation, which his
friend Dr. Ent extracted from him at Christmas 1650.
Dr. Ent, addressing the President and Fellows of the College of
Physicians, writes an introduction to this work, in which he gives
us a pleasing view of Harvey in his retirement. He says: “Harassed
with anxious, and in the end not much availing cares, about Christmas
last, I sought to rid my spirit of the cloud which oppressed it by
a visit to that great man, the chief honour and ornament of our
college, Dr. William Harvey, then dwelling not far from the city. I
found him, Democritus like, busy with the study of natural things,
his countenance cheerful, his mind serene, embracing all within
its sphere. I forthwith saluted him, and asked if all were well
with him. ‘How can it,’ said he, ‘while the Commonwealth is full of
distractions, and I myself am still in the open sea? And truly,’ he
continued, ‘did I not find solace in my studies, and a balm for my
spirit in the memory of my observations of former years, I should
feel little desire for longer life. But so it has been, that this
life of obscurity, this vacation from public business, which causes
tedium and disgust to so many, has proved a sovereign remedy to me.’”
An extended conversation is recorded, in which Harvey discourses
in his wisest vein on the value of the interrogation of nature in
every possible way. Dr. Ent informed him that the learned world were
eagerly looking for his further experiments. Harvey rejoined, “You
know full well what a storm my former lucubrations raised. Much
better is it oftentimes to grow wise at home and in private, than by
publishing what you have amassed with infinite labour, to stir up
tempests that may rob you of peace and quiet for the rest of your
days.” He at last produced the treatise on generation of animals,
and Dr. Ent urging him to publish it both in consideration of his
own fame, and the public benefit, and offering to see it through
the press, the author consented to its publication at once or at
some future time. Dr. Ent was exultant, feeling, like another Jason,
laden with the golden fleece. “Our Harvey,” he says, “rather seems as
though discovery were natural to him, a thing of ease and of course,
a matter of ordinary business; though he may nevertheless have
expended infinite labour and study on his works. And we have evidence
of his singular candour in this, that he never hostilely attacks any
previous writer, but ever courteously sets down and comments upon the
opinions of each; and indeed he is wont to say, that it is argument
of an indifferent cause when it is contended for with violence and
distemper, and that truth scarce wants an advocate.”
This great work, published in 1651, begins by describing the hen’s
egg and its development, the doctrine being enunciated that all
animals as well as plants are produced from ova. Incidentally, as
well as subsequently, observations of great merit and value on
reproduction in all kinds of animals are given, and it is clearly
shown that instead of containing, from the first, excessively
minute but complete animals, eggs at first include extremely simple
structures, which by successive and gradual changes come to be like
the adults from which they have sprung. It is true that Harvey, with
Aristotle, believed that the germs of lower animals could arise out
of non-living matter; but it is only in the most recent days that
the most elaborate microscopical investigations seem finally to have
disposed of this view. The doctrine that the simply constructed germ
grows by feeding on non-living matter, converting it into living
matter, and gradually transforming it into the form characterising
the parent, was a great innovation in Harvey’s age, and it hung fire
till Caspar Wolff, in 1759, securely established it. But this has
remained till the present century to be made fruitful.
Throughout Harvey’s treatise it is evident how greatly the lack
of powers such as those of the microscope crippled the entire
investigation, although it is truly wonderful how much was
accomplished without its aid. Incidental remarks show the acute mind
everywhere tending towards sound procedure, as in tying the main
artery of a tumour he wished to destroy; arriving on the brink of
a discovery even when its full perception did not come, as when in
regard to the lungs he says, “Air is given neither for the cooling
nor the nutrition of animals,” contrary to the prevailing notion. But
the absence of chemical knowledge in that age prevented his going
farther.
His published works only represent a portion of Harvey’s life-work.
We find allusions to his “Medical Observations” and “Medical
Anatomy,” which, if written, were probably destroyed in the College
of Physicians at the Great Fire. In one place Harvey states that in
his medical anatomy he meant, “from the many dissections he had made
of the bodies of persons worn out by serious and strange affections,
to relate how and in what way the internal organs were changed in
their situation, size, structure, figure, consistency, and other
sensible qualities, from their natural forms and appearances, such
as they are usually described by anatomists, and in what various
and remarkable ways they were affected. For even as the dissection
of healthy and well-constituted bodies contributes essentially to
the advancement of philosophy and sound physiology, so does the
inspection of diseased and cachectic subjects powerfully assist
philosophical pathology.” Thus it appears that, had we possessed
Harvey’s pathological observations, he would also have merited the
title of founder of pathology.
About the time of the publication of the Treatise on Generation,
Harvey’s work on the Heart and Circulation was gaining continued and
widespread adhesion on the Continent. In Italy, Trullius, a Roman
professor; in France, John Pecquet of Dieppe; in Leyden, Thomas
Bartholin, were occupied in promulgating Harvey’s views. A notable
convert was Plempius of Louvain, who, having given himself up to the
refutation of Harvey, found himself compelled to retract when he
himself made some experiments on living dogs.
Harvey was constantly solicitous for the welfare of the College
of Physicians, before which he continued to deliver the Lumleian
Lectures up to 1656. At an extraordinary meeting held on 4th July,
1651, Dr. Prujean, the President, read to the Fellows the following
anonymous proposal: “If I can procure one that will build us a
library, and a repository for simples and rarities, such a one as
shall be suitable and honourable to the college, will you assent
to have it done or no?” The offer was of course unanimously and
gratefully accepted, but it does not appear at what period it
transpired that Harvey was the munificent donor. However, on 22d
December, 1652, the college decreed a statue to him, which was
executed in his doctor’s cap and gown, inscribed “Viro monumentis
suis immortali.” It was not, however, till the 2d of February,
1653-4, that the new building was opened, consisting, as Aubrey
tells us, of a noble building of Roman architecture (of rustic work
with Corinthian pilasters), comprising a great parlour, a kind of
convocation-room for the Fellows to meet in below, and a library
above. Harvey was present on the opening occasion, having provided a
handsome entertainment, and formally handed over the title-deeds and
entire interest in the building in a speech of the utmost benevolence
and goodwill. He had contributed not merely the building, but also a
considerable library, and many surgical instruments and objects of
interest to the museum.
On the 30th September, 1654, Harvey was elected in his absence to the
presidency of the college, which, however, he declined on the next
day, owing to his age and growing infirmities, and recommending the
continuance in office of Dr. Prujean, who nominated him as one of the
council, which office he did not refuse. He continued to lecture,
although his strength was diminished by severe attacks of gout, but
in July 1656 he resigned his lectureship. In taking leave of the
college, at a grand banquet which he gave, he presented it with his
patrimonial estate at Burmarsh in Kent. One special provision settled
a salary for a librarian, and another established what has since been
known as the Harveian Oration, delivered yearly in commemoration of
benefactors to the college, and now extended to those who have added
to medical science during the year.
The long and truly fortunate career of Harvey—for fortunate he must
be deemed, who, like Darwin, having enunciated an epoch-making
discovery, lived to see it inculcated as a canon—was now drawing to
a close. In several of his later letters he expresses his feelings
of infirmity. Writing in 1655 to Dr. Horst, at Hesse-Darmstadt, he
speaks of “advanced age, which unfits us for the investigation of
novel subtleties, and the mind which inclines to repose after the
fatigues of lengthened labours.” Later, on the 24th April, 1657,
writing to Dr. Vlackveld, at Harlem, he says: “It is in vain that
you apply the spur to urge me, at my present age—not mature merely,
but declining—to gird myself for any new investigation. For I now
consider myself entitled to my discharge from duty.”
Harvey died on the 3d of June, 1657, in the eightieth year of his
age, and the Fellows of his college followed his remains far out of
the city towards Hempstead, in Essex, where his brother Eliab had a
vault. His will is a characteristic document. He thus expresses his
Christian faith: “I do most humbly render my soul to Him that gave
it, and to my blessed Lord and Saviour Christ Jesus.” Making his
brother Eliab executor and residuary legatee, he bequeaths legacies
to all his relations with most affectionate expressions: we do not
know the date of his wife’s death (she was still living in 1645), but
she is here mentioned as “my dear deceased loving wife.” “I give to
the College of Physicians all my books and papers, and my best Persia
long carpet, and my blue satin embroidered cushion, one pair of brass
andirons, with fireshovel and tongs of brass, for the ornament of the
meeting-room I have erected.” It seems very probable that these books
and papers included some much-regretted observations of Harvey’s,
which were destroyed, with the building which he erected and the
statue to his memory, in the great fire of 1666. He left £10 to his
friend Hobbes of Malmesbury, who describes Harvey as the only one
that he knew who conquered envy and established a new doctrine in his
lifetime.
“The private character of this great man,” says Aikin, in his
Biographical Memoirs of Medicine in Great Britain, “appears to have
been in every respect worthy of his public reputation. Cheerful,
candid, and upright, he was not the prey of any mean or ungentle
passion. He was as little disposed by nature to detract from the
merits of others, or make an ostentatious display of his own, as
necessitated to use such methods for advancing his fame. The many
antagonists whom his renown and the novelty of his opinions excited
were, in general, treated by him with modest and temperate language,
frequently very different from their own; and while he refuted
their arguments, he decorated them with all due praises. He lived
on terms of perfect harmony and friendship with his brethren of the
college; and seems to have been very little ambitious of engrossing
a disproportionate share of medical practice. In extreme old age,
pain and sickness were said to have rendered him somewhat irritable
in his temper.... It is certain that the profoundest veneration
for the great Cause of all those wonders he was so well acquainted
with appears eminently conspicuous in every part of his works. He
was used to say, that he never dissected the body of any animal
without discovering something which he had not expected or conceived
of, and in which he recognised the hand of an all-wise Creator. To
His particular agency, and not to the operation of general laws,
he ascribed all the phenomena of nature. In familiar conversation
Harvey was easy and unassuming, and singularly clear in expressing
his ideas. His mind was furnished with an ample store of knowledge,
not only in matters connected with his profession, but in most of the
objects of liberal inquiry, especially in ancient and modern history,
and the science of politics. He took great delight in reading the
ancient poets, Virgil in particular, with whose divine productions he
is said to have been sometimes so transported as to throw the book
from him with exclamations of rapture. To complete his character, he
did not want that polish and courtly address which are necessary to
the scholar who would also appear as a gentleman.”
According to Aubrey, who knew him well, Harvey was not tall, but
of the lowest stature; round-faced, olivaster in complexion, with
little round eyes, very black and full of spirit, his hair black
as a raven, but quite white twenty years before he died. His
portrait in the College of Physicians corresponds with this account,
indicating a nervous, bilious temperament, and showing a compact,
square, wide forehead. The general expression is highly intellectual,
contemplative, and manly.
Harvey has the rare distinction of standing at the head of three
departments of science in England—comparative anatomy, physiology,
and medicine. When these scarcely existed, he evolved them into
living form from chaos. The extent of his achievements must be gauged
by the extent of the superstructure built upon his foundations. He
laid the foundations broad and firm, and practised the true method of
science. Notwithstanding Harvey’s infirmities, his mind in old age
was characterised by an abiding youthfulness and desire to learn,
so that Aubrey found him studying Oughtred’s “Clavis Mathematica,”
and working problems not long before he died. He was equally pleased
to communicate his knowledge to others, and, as Aubrey relates, “to
instruct any that were modest and respectful to him. In order to
my journey (I was at that time bound for Italy), he dictated to me
what to see, what company to keep, what books to read, how to manage
my studies—in short, he bid me go to the fountain-head and read
Aristotle, Cicero, Avicenna.” He was always very contemplative, and
was wont to frequent the leads of Cockaine House, which his brother
Eliab had bought, having there his several stations in regard to
the sun and the wind, for the indulgence of his fancy. At the house
at Combe, in Surrey, he had caves made in the ground, in which he
delighted in the summer-time to meditate. He also loved darkness, as
he could then best contemplate. The activity of his mind would often
deprive him of sleep, when he would rise and walk about in his shirt,
until he was cooled and could gain sleep. Similarly he treated his
attacks of gout; he would sit with his legs bare, even in frost, on
the leads of Cockaine House, and put them into a pail of water until
he was almost dead with cold, and thus he found his attacks could be
moderated.
His great works were, according to the custom of the age, written in
Latin; and Dr. Willis, who has translated all of them into English,
describes his Latin as generally easy, often elegant, and not
unfrequently copious and imaginative—he never seems to feel in the
least fettered by the language he is using.
The College of Physicians, says Dr. Munk, possesses some interesting
memorials of Harvey, two of which may be mentioned. One the whalebone
probe or rod, tipped with silver, with which he demonstrated
the parts in his Lumleian Lectures at the college. The other,
consisting of six tables of wood, upon which are spread the different
blood-vessels and nerves of the human body, carefully dissected out,
probably prepared by Harvey himself, and presumed to have been
used by him in his lectures. They were presented to the college by
the Earl of Winchelsea, one of whose ancestors, the Lord-Chancellor
Nottingham, had married the niece of Harvey.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Restitutio Christianismi.
[5] Malpighi first saw the blood circulating. In 1661 he records his
having seen the circulation of the blood in the frog’s lungs. Later
he saw it also in the frog’s mesentery.
[6] Dr. Willis’s Translation of Harvey’s Works. Sydenham Soc. 1847.
[7] Harvey’s personal history is comparatively little concerned
with the controversy which arose in establishing the truth of
his discovery. His lectures and demonstrations at the College of
Physicians were so convincing that he met with but slight opposition
from capable critics in England. Continental professors, however,
were slower to accept his teaching. “The Circulation of the Blood,”
he says in his first answer to Riolan in 1649, “has now been before
the world for many years, illustrated by proofs cognizable to the
senses, and confirmed by numerous experiments; but no one has yet
attempted opposition to it on the ground of ocular testimony. Empty
assertions, baseless arguments, captious cavillings, and contumelious
epithets are all that have been levelled against the doctrine and its
author.” We need not, therefore, follow here the history of the final
and full triumph of Harvey’s views on the Continent.
[8] That Harvey’s scientific ardour was in full operation during
this journey we also learn from a remark of Hollar the artist, who
accompanied the ambassador: “He would still be making of excursions
into the wood, making observations of strange trees, plants, earths,
&c., and sometimes like to be lost; so that my lord ambassador would
be really angry with him, for there was not only danger of wild
beasts, but of thieves.”
In a letter written on this journey, Harvey says: “By the way we
could scarce see a dog, crow, kite, raven, or any bird, or anything
to anatomize; only some few miserable people, the reliques of the war
and the plague, whom famine had made anatomies before I came.”
[9] There is every reason to believe that by this course of conduct
Harvey lost nothing of the King’s favour and regard. Harvey records
that on several occasions the King had exhibited to him the beating
heart of the chick in the shell. We learn that he placed at Harvey’s
disposal several does for his experiments, and was present on various
occasions at his dissections. Though it is not definitely recorded,
Harvey appears to have accompanied Charles on at least one of his
journeys to Scotland, and to have visited the Bass Rock. In his work
on Generation he incidentally describes the seabirds which he found
so abundant there.
[10] It is in reference to this that Cowley says:—
“O cursed war! who can forgive thee this?
Houses and towns may rise again,
And ten times easier ’tis
To rebuild Paul’s than any work of his.”