Note 37 — Chapter II

In March, 1823, the late Earl of Winchilsea presented to the College some anatomical preparations which belonged to his ancestor Dr. Harvey; for the niece of Harvey was married to the Lord Chancellor Nottingham, of whom the late Earl was the direct descendant, and possessed his property. At Burleigh on the Hill, where these curious preparations had been carefully kept, is a fine picture of the illustrious physician. Lord Winchilsea, in presenting them to the College of Physicians, expressed a hope that these specimens of the scientific researches of Harvey might be deemed worthy of their acceptance, and thought that they could nowhere be so well placed as in the hands of that learned body, of which he had been so distinguished a member. The preparations themselves consist of six tables or boards, upon which are spread the different nerves and blood-vessels, carefully dissected out of the body: in one of them the semi-lunar valves of the aorta are distinctly to be seen. When Harvey delivered his Lumleian Lectures, he may frequently have exhibited these preparations, and by their help explained some points of his new doctrine of the circulation of the blood. They were most probably made by Harvey himself; and he might have learned the art in Italy, for he studied at Padua in 1602. A few years afterwards, on his return to England, he was appointed anatomical and surgical lecturer to the College of Physicians, and in 1616, read a course of lectures there, of which the original manuscripts are preserved in the British Museum. In the College of Surgeons are some preparations similar to these of Harvey, which originally belonged to the Museum of the Royal Society, kept at Gresham College. They were the generous gift of John Evelyn, Esquire, who bought them at Padua, where he saw them, with great industry and exactness (according to the best method then used) taken out of the body of a man, and very curiously spread upon four large tables. They were the work of Fabritius Bartoletus, then Veslingius’s assistant there, and afterwards physician to the King of Poland. Vide Catalogue or Description of the natural and artificial Rarities belonging to the Royal Society, etc. By Nehemiah Grew, 1681.

Since the time of Harvey, the method of preserving different parts of the body has undergone many changes, and much improvement; and the history of the art would be a subject of curious investigation.

In the Philosophical Transactions for May 7, 1666, Mr. Boyle mentions a method he had invented of preserving or embalming the embryo of a chick in a glass filled with spirit of wine, to which he sometimes added a little sal armoniack, as he observed it never coagulated the spirit of wine.

Ruysch, the professor at Amsterdam, if not the discoverer of the use of injections, for the display of vascular and other structure, contributed, together with the suggestions of De Graaf and Swammerdam, by his own ingenuity and industry, to introduce that important practice among anatomists. His museum became ultimately the most magnificent that any private individual had ever, at that time, accumulated, and was the resort of visitors of every description. Generals, ambassadors, princes, and even kings, were happy in the opportunity of visiting it. It was purchased in 1717, by the Czar Peter the Great, for thirty thousand florins, and sent to Petersburg.

Dr. Frank Nicholls, who married a daughter of Mead’s, was the inventor of corroded anatomical preparations. He was at one time professor of anatomy at Oxford, and author of a treatise De Animâ Medicâ.