THE LIFE OF WILLIAM HARVEY, M.D.

William Harvey, the immortal discoverer of the Circulation of the Blood, was the eldest son of Thomas Harvey and Joan Halke, of Folkstone, in Kent, where he was born on the 1st of April, 1578.[3] Of the parents of Harvey, little is known. His father, in our printed accounts, is generally designated Gentleman,[4] and must have been in easy circumstances; inasmuch as he had a numerous family, consisting of seven sons and two daughters, all the males of which he felt himself competent to launch upon life in courses that imply the possession of money wealth. William, the first-born, adopted the profession of physic. Five of his brothers,—Thomas, Daniel, Eliab, Michael, and Matthew—were merchants, and not merchants in a small and niggardly way—non tenues et sordidi, as Dr. Lawrence has it in his Life of Harvey,[5] but of weight and substance—magni et copiosi, trading especially with Turkey or the Levant, then the main channel through which the wealth of the East flowed into Europe. The Harveys were undoubtedly men of consideration in the city of London, and several of them, in the end, became possessed of the most ample independent fortunes.[6] The son, whose name does not appear in the list given above, was John, the immediate junior to William. He, too, was a man of note in his day, having been one of the King’s receivers for Lincolnshire, having sat as member of parliament for Hythe, and for some time held the office of King’s footman. Of the two sisters—Sarah died young; of the fate of Anne, or Amy, nothing is known.

Great men seem, in almost all authenticated instances, to have had noble-minded women for their mothers. We have not a word of his age or generation to assist us in forming an estimate of Harvey’s male progenitor; but the inscription on his mother’s monumental tablet, in Folkstone church, assures us that she, at least, was a woman of such mark and likelihood, that it was held due to her memory to leave her moral portrait to posterity in these beautiful words, penned, it may be, by her illustrious eldest son:

“A.D. 1605, Nov. 8th, dyed in yᵉ 50th yeere of her age, Joan, Wife of Tho: Harvey. Mother of 7 Sones & 2 Daughters. A Godly harmles Woman: A chaste loveing Wife: A charitable quiet Neighbour: A co~fortable frendly Matron: A p~ovident diligent Huswyfe: A careful te~der-harted Mother. Deere to her Husband; Reverensed of her Children: Beloved of her Neighbours: Elected of God. Whose Soule Rest in Heaven: her Body in this Grave: To Her a Happy Advantage: to Hers an Unhappy Loss.”

Epitaphs may not always be authorities implicitly to be relied on; but we unhesitatingly accept of everything to the credit of William Harvey’s mother as a portion of our faith.

At ten years of age, Harvey was put to the grammar school of Canterbury, having, doubtless, already imbibed the rudiments of his English education at home under the eye of his excellent mother. In the grammar school of Canterbury he was, of course, initiated into a knowledge of the Latin and Greek languages—the routine practice then as now; and there he seems to have remained until he was about fifteen years of age. At sixteen he was removed to Caius-Gonvil College, Cambridge,[7] where he spent from three to four years in the study of classics, dialectics, and physics, such discipline being held peculiarly calculated to fit the mind of the future physician for entering on the study of the difficult science of medicine. At nineteen (1597) he took his degree of B.A. and quitted the University. Cambridge, in Harvey’s time, was a school of logic and divinity rather than of physic. Then, even as at the present day, the student of physic obtained the principal part of his medical education from another than his alma mater. In the 16th and 17th centuries, France and Italy boasted medical schools of higher repute than any in Europe; and to one or other of these must the young Englishman who dedicated himself to physic repair, in order to furnish himself with the lore that was indispensable in his profession. Harvey chose Italy; and Padua, about the year 1598, numbering such men as Fabricius of Aquapendente, Julius Casserius, and Jo. Thomas Minadous among its professors, Harvey’s preference of that school was well founded. There, then, it was, under these and other able masters, that our Harvey drank in the elementary knowledge which served him as a foundation for that induction which has made his name immortal; for without detracting from the glory of Harvey, but merely in recognizing the means to an end, we may admit that, but for the lessons of his master, Fabricius, Harvey might have passed through life, not unnoticed, indeed,—for such as Harvey was in himself, he must still have been remarkable,—but his name unconnected with one of the most admirable and useful inferences ever given to the world.

Having passed five years at Padua, Harvey, then in the twenty-fourth year of his age (1602), finally obtained his diploma as doctor of physic, with licence to practise and to teach arts and medicine in every land and seat of learning. Having returned to England in the course of the same year, and submitted to the requisite forms, he also received his doctor’s degree from his original University of Cambridge; and then coming to London, and taking to himself a wife in his six and twentieth year, he entered on the practice of his profession.

History is all but silent in regard to the woman of our great anatomist’s choice. We only know that she was the daughter of a physician of the day, Dr. Lancelot Browne, and that Harvey’s union with her proved childless. He himself mentions his wife incidentally as having a remarkable pet parrot, which must also, if we may infer so much from the pains he takes in specifying its various habits and accomplishments, have been a particular favorite of his own.[8]

In 1604, Harvey joined the College of Physicians, his name appearing on the roll of candidates for the fellowship in that year; and three years afterwards, 1607, the term of his probation having passed, he was duly admitted to the distinction to which he aspired.

We do not now lose sight of Harvey for any length of time: for a number of years, in the beginning of his career, he was probably occupied, like young physicians of the present day, among the poor in circumstance and afflicted in body, taking vast pains without prospect of pecuniary reward, but actuated by the ennobling sense of lightening the sum of human misery, and carried away, uncaring personal respects, by that ardent love of his profession which distinguishes every true votary of the art medical. Harvey, however, had not only zeal, talents, and accomplishments; he had, what was no less needful to success: powerful friends, united brothers, with the will and the ability to help him forward in the career he had chosen.

In the beginning of 1609, he made suit for the reversion of the office of physician to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, then held by Dr. Wilkinson, and backing his suit by such powerful missives as the king’s letters recommendatory to the governors of the house, and farther, producing testimonials of competency from Dr. Adkinson, President of the College of Physicians, and others, his petition was granted, and he was regularly chosen physician in futuro of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. Dr. Wilkinson having died in the course of the year, Harvey was first appointed to discharge the physician’s duties ad interim, and by and by he was formally elected to the vacant office, 14th October, 1609.

In his new position Harvey must have found ample scope for acquiring tact and readiness in the practical details of his profession; though St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in his day appears to have borne a nearer resemblance to the dispensary of these times than to the hospital as we now understand the term. Harvey was now in his thirty-second year, and, brought before the public at so suitable an age, in an office of such responsibility, he must soon have risen into eminence as a physician and come into practice. Harvey, indeed, appears subsequently to have been physician to many of the most distinguished men of his age, among others to the Lord Chancellor Bacon, to Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, &c.

In the year 1615, Harvey, then in the thirty-seventh year of his age, was happily chosen to deliver the lectures on anatomy and surgery at the College of Physicians, founded by Dr. Richard Caldwal, and it is generally allowed that in the very first course he gave, which commenced in the month of April of the following year, he presented a detailed exposition of the views concerning the circulation of the blood, which have made his name immortal. Long years had indeed been labouring at the birth which then first saw the light; civilized Europe, ancient and modern, had been slowly contributing and accumulating materials for its production; Harvey at length appeared, and the idea took fashion in his mind and emerged complete, like Pallas, perfect from the brain of Jove.

The circulation, it would seem, continued to form one of the subjects in the lectures on anatomy, which Harvey went on delivering for many years afterwards at the College of Physicians; but it was not till 1628 that he gave his views to the world at large in his celebrated treatise on the ‘Motion of the Heart and Blood,’[9] having already, as he tells us in his preface, for nine years and more, gone on demonstrating the subject before his learned auditory, illustrating it by new and additional arguments, and freeing it from the objections raised by the skilful among anatomists.

Some few years after his appointment as their lecturer by the College of Physicians, Harvey must have been chosen one of the physicians extraordinary to the reigning sovereign, James I. The fame of Harvey’s new views of the motions of the heart and blood could not but speedily have reached the wide-open ears of King James, and this of itself, to lay no stress on the powerful city interest of the illustrious anatomist, might suffice to ensure him such a mark of distinction as that just named. Of the precise date of his appointment as physician extraordinary to the king we are not informed; but in the letter of James bearing date the 3d of February, 1623, it is spoken of as a thing foregone—that had taken place some time ago; for in this letter Doctor Harvey is charged in common with the physicians in ordinary, with the care of the king’s health; and he is further guaranteed the reversion of the office of ordinary physician whenever, by death or otherwise, a vacancy should occur. To the promised dignity, however, Harvey did not attain for several years, not till after the demise of James, and when Charles had already occupied the throne of his father for some five or six years.

Harvey may now be said to have become rather closely connected with the court; but whether this connexion proved truly advantageous to him as a philosopher and physiologist may fairly be questioned. The time and service which the court physician must necessarily give to royalty and greatness interfere materially with the leisure and privacy that are indispensable to study and meditation. But Harvey, who appears to have been a man of singular self-possession, not to be diverted from his purpose by trifling or merely ceremonial considerations, always speaks of his master Charles in terms of unfeigned love and respect; and everything induces us to believe that Charles in turn loved and honoured his physician. The sovereign seems even to have taken a remarkable interest in the inquiries of the physiologist; to have had several exhibitions prepared of the punctum saliens in the embryo chick and deer, and to have witnessed the dissections of many of the does which he so liberally placed at Harvey’s disposal whilst the anatomist was prosecuting his inquiries into the subject of generation. Whatever the defects in Charles’s public and political character, he must always be admitted to have been a man of elegant tastes, and of amiable temper and refined manners in private. It was certainly worthy of the Prince who appreciated, whilst he commanded, the talents of a Vandyke and a Rubens, that he also prized and encouraged the less brilliant, but not less useful genius of a Harvey.

Harvey, as a physician, must now have been at the zenith of his reputation; he was physician in ordinary to the king, and we have seen him in the same position towards some of the foremost men of the age. His general practice, too, must have been extensive, and, if we look at the sum he is stated to have left behind him in money, his emoluments large. But he had not any lengthened harvest for all his early pains; his connexion with the court by and by came in the way of his continuing to improve his position; and then, grievous to relate, the appearance of the admirable Exercises on the Heart and Blood gave a decided and severe check to his professional prosperity. John Aubrey tells us he had “heard him (Harvey) say, that after his book on the ‘Circulation of the Blood’ came out, he fell mightily in his practice; ’twas believed by the vulgar that he was crack-brained, and all the physitians were against him.”[10] Writing many years afterwards, when the causes particularly indicated above had conspired to make Harvey’s practice less, Aubrey informs us further, that “though all his profession would allow him to be an excellent anatomist, I never heard any that admired his therapeutique way. I knew several practitioners in this town that would not have given threepence for one of his bills (prescriptions), and [who said] that a man could hardly tell by his bills what he did aim at.”[11] So has it mostly been with those who have added to the sum of human knowledge! The empiric under the title of the practical man, in his unsuspecting ignorance, sets himself up and is admitted as arbiter wherever there is difficulty: blind himself, he leads the blinded multitude the way he lists. He who laid the foundation of modern medical science lost his practice for his pains, and the routineer, with an appropriate salve for every sore, a pill and potion for each particular ache and ail, would not give threepence for one of his prescriptions! did not admire his therapeutique way!! and could not tell what he did aim at!!! Ignorance and presumption have never hesitated to rend the veil that science and modesty, all in supplying the means, have still owned their inability to raise. If Harvey faltered, who of his contemporaries could rightfully presume to walk secure? And yet did each and all of them, unconscious of the darkness, tread their twilight paths assuredly; whilst he, the divinity among them, with his eyes unsealed, felt little certain of his way. So has it still been with medicine; and the world must make many a lusty onward stride in knowledge before it can be otherwise.

The first interruption to his ordinary professional pursuits and avocations which Harvey seems to have suffered through his connexion with the court, occurred in the beginning of 1630, when he was engaged “to accompany the young Duke of Lenox in his travels beyond seas.” In anticipation of a removal from London, apparently, Harvey had already, in December 1629, resigned his office of treasurer to the College of Physicians, which he seems to have filled for several years.

Of the course of Harvey’s travels with the Duke of Lenox we have not been able to gain any information. Their way probably led them to the Continent, and it may have been on this occasion and in this company that he visited Venice, as we know from himself that he did in the course of one of his journeys. Harvey must have been in England again in 1632 and 1633; for in the former year he was formally chosen physician to Charles, and in the latter we find his absence, “by reason of his attendance on the king’s majesty,” from St. Bartholomew’s Hospital complained of by the surgeons of that institution, and Dr. Andrews appointed by the governors as his substitute, but “without prejudice to him in his yearly fee or in any other respect.”[12] Such considerate treatment satisfies us of the esteem in which Harvey was held.

In the early part of 1633 Charles determined to visit his ancient kingdom of Scotland, for the ostensible purpose of being crowned King of Scots. Upon this occasion Harvey accompanied him, as matter of course, we may presume. But the absence of the court from London was not of long duration; and in the early autumn of the same year we are pleased to find Harvey again at his post in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, engaged in his own province and propounding divers rules and regulations for the better government of the house and its officers,[13] which of themselves give us an excellent insight into the state of the hospital, as well as of the relative positions of the several departments of the healing art two centuries ago. The doctor’s treatment of the poor chirurgeons in these rules is sufficiently despotic it must be admitted; but the chirurgeons in their acquiescence showed that they merited no better handling. The only point on which they proved restive, indeed, was the revealment of their SECRETS to the physician; a great outrage in days when every man had his secrets, and felt fully justified in keeping them to himself. But surgery in the year 1633 had not shown any good title to an independent existence. The surgeon of those days was but the hand or instrument of the physician; the dignitary mostly applied to his famulus when he required a wen removed, or a limb lopped, or a broken head plastered; though Harvey it seems did not feel himself degraded by taking up the knife or practising midwifery.[14] Nevertheless, in these latter days Royal Colleges of Physicians have been seen arrogating superiority over Royal Colleges of Surgeons, and Royal Colleges both of Physicians and Surgeons combining to keep the practitioner of obstetrics under.

From the year 1633 Harvey appears to have devoted much of his time to attendance upon the king and retainers of the court, so that we have little or no particular information of his movements for several years. We know, however, from Aubrey, that he accompanied Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, whose physician he was, in his extraordinary embassy to the emperor, in the year 1636.[15] In the course of this journey, Harvey had an opportunity of visiting several of the principal cities of Germany, and of making the acquaintance of many of the leading medical men of the time. The place of date of one of Harvey’s letters, that namely to Caspar Hofmann, from Nuremberg, in the month of May, 1636, has not been noticed; but his presence with the Earl of Arundel at once accounts for it; and we therefore see that Harvey’s offer to demonstrate to the distinguished professor of Nuremberg, the anatomical particulars which made the circulation of the blood a necessary conclusion was no vain boast, made at a distance, but a substantial proposition in presence of his opponent, and which there is tradition at least to assure us he was called upon to fulfil.—Harvey is reported to have made a public demonstration of his anatomical views at Nuremberg, satisfactory to all present save Caspar Hofmann himself; to whom, as he still continued to urge objections, the futile nature of which we in these days can readily understand, Harvey is further related to have deigned no other answer than by laying down the scalpel and retiring, conduct which we find in entire conformity with our estimate of the character of the man.[16]

On his return to England, in the winter of 1636, Harvey must have resumed his place near the person of the sovereign, and by and by, as in duty bound, accompanied him on his first hostile expedition into Scotland in 1639, when matters were happily accommodated between the King and his Scottish subjects, whom he had driven to take up arms so righteously in defence of their religious liberties. Harvey, as physician to the person, may be further presumed to have been with Charles when he marched towards the Border the following year, so memorable in the annals of English history, when the war with the Scots was renewed, when the king’s authority received the first check at the battle of Newbury, and when Charles, returning to his capital after his defeat, encountered the still more formidable opposition of the English Parliament.

Harvey may now be said to have become fairly involved with the Court. From the total absence of his name in the transactions of the times, it is nevertheless interesting to observe how completely he kept himself aloof from all the intrigues and dealings of the party with which he was connected. He must have held himself exclusively to the discharge of his professional duties. In the course of these he doubtless attended Charles in his third visit to Scotland in the summer of 1641, when he essayed the arts of diplomacy with little better effect than he had already attempted the weight of prerogative in the first, and the force of arms in the second visit.

On returning to London in the autumn of the same year, Charles soon brought matters to a crisis between himself and his English subjects, in the persons of their representatives, and nothing soon remained for him but to unfurl his standard and proclaim himself at war with his people. This was accordingly done in the course of the ensuing summer. But the Parliament did not yet abandon a seeming care of the royal person, and Harvey informs us himself, that he now attended the king, not only with the consent, but by the desire, of the parliament. The battle of Edge-hill, which followed, and in which the sun of fortune shone with a partial and fitful gleam upon the royal arms, is especially interesting to us from our Harvey having been present, though he still took no part in the affair, and seems indeed to have felt very little solicitude either about its progress or its issue, if the account of Aubrey may be credited. “When King Charles,” says Aubrey, “by reason of the tumults, left London, he (Harvey) attended him, and was at the fight of Edge-hill with him; and during the fight the Prince and Duke of York were committed to his care. He told me that he withdrew with them under a hedge, and tooke out of his pockett a booke and read. But he had not read very long before a bullet of a great gun grazed on the ground neare him, which made him remove his station.”[17] The act of reading a book pending an important battle, the result of which was greatly to influence his master’s fortunes, certainly shows a wonderful degree of coolness and a remarkable indifference to everything like military matters. Harvey’s own candid character, and the confidence so obviously reposed in him when he was intrusted with the care of the Prince and the Duke of York, forbid us to interpret the behaviour into any lukewarmness or indifference as to the issue; but Harvey, throughout his whole career, was a most peaceful man: he never had the least taste for literary controversy, and can scarcely be said to have replied to any of those who opposed his views; and in his indifference about the fight of Edge-hill he only further shows us that he was not

With his fine understanding and freedom from party and sectarian views of every kind, he probably saw that an appeal to arms was not the way for political right to be elicited, or for a sovereign to settle matters with his subjects. Harvey had certainly no turn for politics,[18] and when we refer to Aubrey we find that the fight of Edge-hill was hardly ended before our anatomist had crept back into his shell, and become absorbed in the subjects that formed the proper business of his life. “I first saw him (Harvey) at Oxford, 1642, after Edge-hill fight,” says our authority, “but was then too young to be acquainted with so great a doctor. I remember he came several times to our college (Trin.) to George Bathurst, B.D., who had a hen to hatch eggs in his chamber, which they opened dayly to see the progress and way of generation.” The zealous political partisan would have found no leisure for researches like these in such stirring times as marked the outbreak of the civil war in England; the politician had then other than pullets’ eggs to hatch.

The king’s physician, not to speak of the author of a new doctrine of the motions of the heart and blood, was sure to find favour in the eyes of the high church dignitaries of Oxford; and we accordingly find that, besides being everywhere handsomely received and entertained, Harvey had the honorary degree of Doctor of Physic conferred on him. Oxford, indeed, when the king and court were driven from the metropolis, which was now wholly in the hands of the popular party, became the head-quarters of the royal army and principal residence of the king for several years. And here Harvey seems to have quietly settled himself down and again turned his attention to his favorite subjects. Nor was the honorary distinction of doctor of physic from the university, which has been mentioned, the only mark of favour he received. Sir Nathaniel Brent, Warden of Merton College, yielding to his natural bias, forsook Oxford when it was garrisoned by the king, and began to take a somewhat active part in the proceedings of the popular party; he came forward in especial as a witness against Archbishop Laud, on the trial of that dignitary. Merton College being thus left without a head, upon the suggestion, as it is said, of the learned antiquary and mathematician, John Greaves, and in virtue of a letter of the king, Harvey was elected warden some time in the course of 1645. This appointment was doubtless merited by Harvey for his constant and faithful service to Charles; but it may also have been bestowed in some measure as a retort upon the Parliament, which, the year before, had entertained a motion for the supercession of Harvey in his office of physician to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. [19] Harvey, however, did not long enjoy his new office or its emoluments; for Oxford having surrendered to the Parliamentary forces under Fairfax the following year, Harvey, of course, resigned his charge, and immediately afterwards betook himself to London. Sir Nathaniel Brent, on the contrary, returned to Oxford; and the star of the Parliamentarians being now in the ascendant, Merton College was not slow to reinstate its old Presbyterian warden in the room of its late royalist head.[20]

From the date of the surrender of Oxford (July, 1646), Harvey followed the fortunes of Charles no longer. Of his reasons for quitting the service of his old master we know nothing. He probably felt anxious for repose; at sixty-eight, which was Harvey’s age, a man begins to find that an easy chair is a fitter resting-place than the bare ground, a ceiled roof more suitable covering than the open sky—prospects which a continuance of the strife held out. Harvey, besides, as we have seen, had no stomach for contention in any shape or form, not even in the literary arena; and he now probably resolved himself to follow the advice he had once given to his young friend Charles Scarborough, “to leave off gunning,”[21] and dedicate himself wholly to more congenial pursuits. And then Charles had long made it apparent, even to the most ardent of his adherents, that no faith was to be put in his promise, no trust to be reposed in his royal word. The wise old man, verging on the age of threescore years and ten, doubtless saw that it was better for him to retire from a responsible office, now become most irksome and thankless, and seek privacy and leisure for the remainder of his days. These Harvey found awaiting him in the houses of his affectionate brothers—now in the house of Eliab, in the City, or at Roehampton, and then in the house of Daniel, in the ‘suburban’ village of Lambeth, or at Combe near Croydon in Surrey, in each of which Harvey had his own apartments. The Harveys appear to have been united from first to last in the closest bonds of brotherly love,[22] and to have had a common interest in many of their undertakings; and Eliab, as we shall see, employed the small capital, which his brother William must have accumulated before the civil wars broke out, to such purpose, that the doctor actually died a rich man. With his brothers, then, retreating now to the “leads” of the house in the heart of the metropolis, now to the “caves” of the one at Combe, did Harvey continue to pass his days—but not in idleness; for the work on Generation, with the subject of which we saw him busied at Oxford several years before, must have found him in ample occupation. Nor was the love of ease so great in William Harvey, even at the advanced age of seventy-one, if we may credit some of the accounts, as to hinder him from again visiting the Continent, and making his way as far as Italy, a journey in which it is said he was attended by his friend the accomplished scholar and gentleman, Dr. Ent.[23]

In the beginning of 1651 appeared the second of Harvey’s great works, that, namely, On Animal Generation.[24] In this publication we have abundant proof of our author’s unabated industry and devotion to physiological science; and in the long and admirable letter to P. M. Slegel, of Hamburg, written shortly after the appearance of the work, we have pleasing evidence of the integrity of Harvey’s faculties at the advanced age of seventy-three.

The year after the publication of the work on Generation, i. e. 1652, when Harvey was looked up to by common consent as the most distinguished anatomist and physician of his age, the College of Physicians came to the resolution of placing his statue in their hall then occupying a site at Amen-corner; and measures being immediately taken in conformity with this purpose, it was carried into effect by the end of the year, when the statue, with the following complimentary inscription on the pedestal, was displayed:

GULIELMO HARVEIO Viro monumentis suis immortali Hoc insuper Collegium Medicorum Londinense posuit. Qui enim Sanguini motum ut et Animalibus ortum dedit, Meruit esse Stator Perpetuus.[25]

Harvey, in acknowledgment, it may have been, of the distinguished honour done him by his friends and colleagues, appears about this time to have commenced the erection at his own cost of a handsome addition to the College of Physicians. It was, as Aubrey informs us, “a noble building of Roman architecture (of rustic work, with Corinthian pilasters), comprising a great parlour, a kind of convocation house for the fellows to meet in below, and a library above. On the outside, on the frieze, in letters three inches long, was this inscription: Suasu et cura Fran. Prujeani, Præsidis, et Edmundi Smith, elect. inchoata et perfecta est hæc fabrica, An. MDCLIII.”[26] Nor was Harvey content merely to erect this building; he, further, furnished the library with books, and the museum with numerous objects of curiosity and a variety of surgical instruments. On the ceremony of this handsome addition to the College of Physicians being opened, which took place on the 2d of February, 1653, a sumptuous entertainment was provided at Harvey’s expense, at which he received the president and fellows, and made over to them, on the spot, his whole interest in the structure.

Dr. Prujean, the president of the college, going out of office, as usual, at Michaelmas the next year (1654), Harvey was unanimously chosen to fill the vacant chair. Having been absent when the election took place, a deputation proceeded to his apartments to apprize him of the honour his colleagues had done themselves and him, and to say that they awaited his answer on the following day. Every act of Harvey’s public life that has come down to us is marked not merely by propriety but by grace. He attended the comitia or assembly of the college next day; thanked his colleagues for the distinguished honour of which they had thought him worthy—the honour, as he said, of filling the foremost place among the physicians of England; but the concerns of the college, he proceeded, were too weighty to be intrusted to one like him, laden with years and infirm in health; and if he might be acquitted of arrogance in presuming to give advice in such circumstances, he would say that the college could not do better than reinstate in the authority which he had but just laid down, their late president, Dr. Prujean, under whose prudent management and fostering care the affairs of the college had greatly prospered. This noble counsel had fitting response: Harvey’s advice being adopted by general consent, Dr. Prujean was forthwith re-elected president.

The College of Physicians were justly proud of their great associate, and Harvey, in his turn, was undoubtedly attached to the college. Here, indeed, as their lecturer on anatomy and surgery, he had first propounded the views which had won him such distinguished credit in his life, and which have left his name as a deathless word on the lips of men; here he consorted with his nearest and dearest friends, receiving from all those remarks of respectful consideration that were so justly his due; and here, in fine, the first place among the first men of his profession had been tendered to him, and gracefully declined. To a mind like Harvey’s, and with the opportunity afforded him of making so graceful a concession, the foremost place was certainly a higher distinction unaccepted, than it had been enjoyed.—The excuse for declining the office of president was not merely personal: it was not alone that he was an old man, infirm in health, and incompetent for so great a trust; but, the affairs of the college had greatly thriven under the prudent management and constant care of the late president, and it was no more than right that he who had but just laid down should be re-established in authority.

Harvey, we have said, was childless; his wife, though we have not the date of her death, he had certainly lost by this time. His only surviving brother Eliab was rich; his nephews were prosperous merchants and on the road to the independence and titles which several of them afterwards achieved: he, therefore, determined to make the College of Physicians not only heirs to his paternal estate, worth, at that time, 56l. per annum, but to bestow it on them in free gift during his life. This purpose he carried into effect by means of a formal instrument, which he delivered to the college in the month of July, 1656; the special provisions in the deed settling one sum, by way of salary for the librarian, and another sum, for the delivery of a solemn oration annually, in commemoration of those who had approved themselves benefactors to the college, and, by extension, who had added aught to the sum of medical science in the course of the bygone year.[27]

Having thus accompanied Harvey over so much of the way in his mortal career, let us, before proceeding further, briefly advert to his Writings, to the influence they had in the republic of letters during his life-time, to the fruits they have since produced, and to the impression still made on the mind that holds communion through their means with the mind that dictated them so many years ago.—The intellectual endowment of a man necessarily appears in his writings; it is not always from them that so true a conception of his moral character can be formed. Harvey, however, though in his long life he accomplished but a small fraction of all his literary designs, has still left us sufficient from which to form an estimate of him as a philosopher, as a physiologist, and it may also be said as a man. Let us take a brief survey of his writings, then, and wind up our account of his life with such personal notices as we can gather from contemporaries, or as we can infer from his own conduct and written word.

ON THE HEART AND BLOOD.

Harvey’s great work, though by no means the largest in bulk, is the one on the Motions of the Heart and Blood. It has been said, happily, by a recent critical writer, that “men were already practising what Bacon came to inculcate,” viz. induction upon data carefully collected and considered; and it would not be easy to adduce a more striking example of the way in which ultimate rational truth is arrived at by a succession of inferences than is contained in Harvey’s Essay on the Heart and Blood. Had Bacon written his Novum Organum from Harvey’s work as a text, he would scarcely have expressed himself otherwise than as he has done, or given different rules for philosophizing than those which he has laid down in his celebrated treatise.[28]

In his introduction, and by way of clearing the ground, Harvey exposes the views of preceding physiologists, ancient and modern, in regard to the motions of the heart, lungs, and blood, to the state of the arteries, &c.—in short, he gives the accredited physiology of the thoracic viscera, with comments, which prove it a mass of unintelligible and irreconcilable confusion. There is room, therefore, for another interpretation, consonant with reason and with anatomical fact, and susceptible of demonstration by the senses. When he first essayed himself to comprehend the motions of the heart, and to make out the uses of the organ from the dissection of living animals, he found the subject so beset with difficulties that he was almost inclined at one time to say with Fracastorius, that these motions and their purpose could be comprehended by God alone. By degrees, however, by repeating his observations, using greater care, and giving more concentrated attention, he at last discovers a way out of the labyrinth, and a means of explaining simply all that had previously appeared so obscure. Hence the occasion of his writing. Such is the burthen of the proem and first chapter. With Harvey’s admirable work now put in an accessible shape into his hands, we should (did we proceed with an analysis) but anticipate the intelligent reader in the great pleasure he will have in following the author through the different steps of his argument until the conclusion is reached, and the inference presents itself as inevitable, namely, that the blood must circle round and round in one determinate course, in the body as in the lungs, incessantly. For Harvey, it must be here observed, left the doctrine of the circulation as an inference or induction only, not as a sensible demonstration. He adduced certain circumstances, and quoted various anatomical facts which made a continuous transit of the blood from the arteries into the veins, from the veins into the arteries, a necessary consequence; but he never saw this transit; his idea of the way in which it was accomplished was even defective; he had no notion of the one order of sanguiferous vessels ending by uninterrupted continuity, or by an intermediate vascular network, in the other order. This was the demonstration of a later day, and of one who first saw the light in the course of the very year when Harvey’s work on the Heart was published.[29]

The appearance of Harvey’s book on the Motion of the Heart and Blood seems almost immediately to have attracted the attention of all the better intellects among the medical men of Europe. The subject was not one, indeed, greatly calculated to interest the mass of mere practitioners; had it been a book of receipts it would have had a better chance with them; but the anatomists and physiologists and scientific physicians would seem at once to have taken it up and canvassed its merits. The conclusions come to in the work, there can be no question, took the medical world by surprise; it was not prepared for such a proposition as a ceaseless circular movement of the blood, with the heart for the propelling organ; for the latter point, be it understood, was even as great a novelty as the former.

Coming unexpectedly, and differing so widely from the ancient and accepted notions, we cannot wonder that Harvey’s views were at first rejected almost universally. The older intellects, in possession of the seats and places of authority, regarded them as idle dreams; and upon the faith of this conclusion, their author was set down and treated by the vulgar as a crackbrained innovator. Two years, however, elapsed before aught in contravention of the new doctrines saw the light, and this came at length not from any of the more mature anatomists of Europe—their minds were made up, the thing was absurd—but from a young physician, of the name of Primerose, of Scottish descent, but French by birth. Primerose had been a pupil of Joannes Riolanus, professor of anatomy in the University of Paris; he had doubtless listened to his master’s demonstration of the absurdity of the Harveian doctrine of the circulation, and by and by he set himself down, by way apparently of exercising his ingenuity, to try the question, not by fact and experiment, but by the precepts he had imbibed from his teacher and the texts of the ancients. The essay of Primerose[30] may be regarded as a defence of the physiological ideas of Galen against the innovations of Harvey. It is remarkable for any characteristic rather than that of a candid spirit in pursuit of truth; it abounds in obstinate denials, and sometimes in what may be termed dishonest perversions of simple matters of fact, and in its whole course appeals not once to experiment as a means of investigation.—Harvey, having already, and in the very outset of his work, demonstrated the notions untenable which it was Primerose’s purpose to reassert and defend, of course deigned him no reply; he could never dream of going over the barren ground he had already trodden, in the hope of convincing such an antagonist.

Æmylius Parisanus, a physician of Venice, was the next to assail the Harveian doctrine of the circulation,[31] and still with the old instruments,—the authority of Galen and the ancients generally. Parisanus perceived Harvey’s views as directly contravening an hypothesis to which he had formerly committed himself, namely, that the spleen was the organ of sanguification and the furnisher of nutriment to the heart; on this ground may Parisanus have been led to enter the lists against the new opinions. But he proved a most flimsy antagonist. Ignorant of some of the commonest points of anatomy, and frequently misinterpreting the writer he combats, writing himself in a style the most elaborately involved, and consequently obscure, it is frequently difficult even to guess at his meaning. Like his countryman of the poet, Signor Gratiano, he

“Speaks an infinite deal of nothing; more than any man in all Venice: his reasons are two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff; you shall seek all day ere you find them; and when you have them they are not worth the search.”

Had not Dr. Ent, in his Apology for the Circulation, given the name a place on his title-page, Parisanus’s opposition would scarcely have merited mention here.

Nearly at the same time with Parisanus, Caspar Hofmann, the learned and laborious professor of Nuremberg, attracted particular attention, both in his teaching and his writings, as the opponent of the Harveian doctrine. The opposition here is the more remarkable from Hofmann’s having shaken himself wholly free from the authority of Galen, and, as Slegel says, even admitted the lesser circulation of the blood through the lungs; but this must have been at a later period of his life, for in his works, up to Harvey’s time, the idea he had of the motion of the blood may be gathered from his likening it to a lake or sea agitated by the wind, the veins being the conduits of the nutrient blood, the arteries of the vital spirits. Hofmann was an adversary whom Harvey held worthy of notice; and accordingly we have seen that our immortal countryman took advantage of the opportunity, whilst attending the Earl of Arundel and his party, to visit Hofmann at Nuremberg, and make a demonstration of the new views before him. Unhappily this was done in vain, for Hofmann continued unconvinced, though, towards the end of his very long life, he did show some signs of yielding.[32]

Joannes Veslingius, professor in the University of Padua, and one of the best anatomists of the age, about this time, addressed two letters to Harvey, in which he politely but candidly states his objections to the new doctrine. One great difficulty with Veslingius was the remarkable difference between the colour of the arterial and the venous blood. It did not seem possible to him that the fluid, which was of a bright scarlet in the arteries, could be the same as the dark-coloured fluid which is found in the veins. In the course of his letter, Veslingius takes occasion to animadvert on the uncivil tone and indifferent style of the productions of Primerose and Parisanus.[33]

But the theory of the double circulation was not now to meet with opposition only; the comprehensive intellect that had seized and worked that theorem to a rational demonstration was no longer to be left alone against the world in its defence. Roger Drake, a young Englishman, had the honour of appearing in his inaugural dissertation, proposed under the auspices of Joannes Walæus, the distinguished professor of Leyden, in 1639, as the enlightened advocate of the Harveian views; and in the course of the same year, H. Regius (Leroy) also came forward at Utrecht with certain Theses favorable to the doctrine of the circulation. Ten years had not lessened Primerose’s enmity to Harvey and his views; for, on the appearance of these academical essays, he speedily showed himself again in the field as their opponent, publishing distinct animadversions upon each of the inaugural dissertations in the course of the year.[34] Regius (Leroy), a man of much less mind and information than Drake, if we may decide from their works, was, in turn, not slow to encounter Primerose;[35] and the spirit in which he did so, as well as the temper and taste of the reply which Primerose, true to his controversial nature, very soon produced,[36] may, to a certain extent, be imagined from the titles of their several productions, which are given below.

Still more illustrious advocates of the Harveian circulation presented themselves in Werner Rolfink,[37] professor of anatomy at Jena, and the celebrated Renatus Descartes. Rolfink, from his position and his popularity as a teacher, had immense influence in disseminating the new doctrine over Europe; and Descartes, under the ægis of his powerful name, was no less effective by means of his writings.[38] Opposed in his advocacy of the Harveian views by Vopiscus Fortunatus Plempius, professor of Louvain, Descartes made himself still more thoroughly master of the subject, and when he next appears as its advocate, which he does by and by, he even appeals to the experiments he had made on living animals in support of his convictions and conclusions.

The controversy on the circulation had been carried on up to this time abroad rather than at home; Harvey seems to have won over to his side all the men of his own country who, by their education and acquirements, might have been fitted to array themselves against him: his lectures at the College of Physicians had apparently satisfied all his contemporaries. But now one of Harvey’s own countrymen made his appearance as the vindicator of the circulation from the misrepresentations and misapprehensions of its adversaries. This was Dr. afterwards Sir George Ent, a good scholar, a respectable anatomist, conversant with physical science generally, a gentleman by his position and profession, acquainted with all the leading men of letters and science of his time, and in particular, enjoying the friendship of William Harvey. Ent’s work is entitled ‘An Apology for the Circulation of the Blood, with a Reply to Æmylius Parisanus.’[39] In his letter to Harvey, which stands in front of the work, Ent lets it appear that he was anxious to come before the world as the advocate of the circulation; he first thought of making Primerose the particular object of his animadversions, but as this opponent had already been very effectually handled by Henry Leroy, he preferred taking Parisanus to task, the rather as in dealing with him he could also controvert Primerose where it was necessary.—Ent’s Apology is, undoubtedly, a learned, though perhaps a somewhat pompous and pedantic book; still the writer occasionally shows both wit and fancy in handling his antagonist, and always learning enough in dealing with his subject. “Nothing, indeed,” to quote Dr. Lawrence,[40] “can be more unlike than Parisanus and Ent; and it is not wonderful, therefore, that one utterly ignorant of physical science confronted by one thoroughly conversant therein—that one, without power of utterance, opposed by one gifted with eloquence—that one, sluggish and inert, in the hands of one active and full of energy, should be effectually vanquished and overcome.” We may imagine, nay, we may be certain, that Harvey was not unacquainted with Ent’s purpose to appear as the advocate of his discovery, nor with the Apology before it saw the light.

Having observed the appearance of certain academical dissertations in defence of the circulation, we perceive the apostles of all new truths, namely, the youthful, at work. Were there not successive generations of men, the world would stand still; the death of the individual was not merely a necessary condition to the enjoyment of life by successive generations, but essential also to the onward progress of mankind. No man who had attained to the age of 40 years, it is said, was found to adopt the doctrine of the circulation; it had to win its way under the safeguard of the Drakes and Leroys especially, that is to say, of the youthful and unprejudiced spirits of the age.

Twenty years after the publication of the ‘Exercitatio de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis,’ Joannes Riolanus, the younger, was delivered of his ‘Encheiridium Anatomicum’ (8vo. Lugd. Batav. 1648), in which he makes a vain attempt to supplant the Harveian doctrine by a new and most extraordinary one of his own, so incongruous and unlikely, that in these days we are irresistibly led to form no very high estimate of the intellect that could have engendered it. It looks to us, indeed, at this time, like condescension on the part of the great English anatomist, that he noticed the abortion of such a tyro in animal physics as the French professor here approves himself. Harvey’s genius could surely have felt no real respect for the illogical intellect of Riolan. But Harvey, when he noticed Riolan’s publication, was in want of a good occasion for a farther development of his own views; and so he seized on the Parisian professor, respectable from his position in the university, and as physician to the queen mother of France, and made him his vehicle—his placard bearer. Harvey, besides, was personally acquainted with Riolan, who had accompanied Mary de Medicis to England on a visit to her daughter the Queen of Charles the First; on which occasion Harvey and Riolan had even held conversations on the subject of the circulation, to which it is said that Riolan when face to face with the propounder, made no objection.

Riolan is by no means totally opposed to a circulation of the blood; he would only limit it to certain arbitrary regions, into which he divides the body: whilst it goes forward in one, it has no existence in another. The nature of his ideas can be gathered from Harvey’s comments on them in his First Disquisition, addressed to the Coryphæus of Anatomists, as he politely designates the Parisian professor.

Having disposed of the original notions of the author of the ‘Encheiridium Anatomicum,’ in this first disquisition, Harvey, in his second, returns to his own views, which he proceeds still further to illustrate and confirm by additional arguments, observations, and experiments. In this admirable essay, we obtain innumerable glimpses of the clearness of Harvey’s judgment, of his admirable powers of observation, and the diligent and excellent use he made of them; we at the same time become aware of the great loss we have sustained through the destruction of his Medical Observations. Riolan, in his Encheiridium, proposed to point out in the structure of the healthy body the seats of the various diseases, and to discuss their nature in conformity with the opinions that had been entertained of them. This was obviously at once a barren and an impracticable route: the matters he had in hand could never have been other than abstractions, and his own observations criticisms on opinions, never on facts. How much more natural and judicious the course which Harvey proposes to himself, when he informs us 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.” This was precisely what Morgagni lived, in some considerable measure, to achieve, and it is that which it has been the business of modern pathology, through the illustrious line of the Baillies, Laennecs, Andrals, Louis, Cruveilhiers, Carswells, Richard Brights, and many others, to render more and more complete.

Riolan never replied to Harvey; but neither did the Parisian Professor attempt to vindicate his views, nor did he exhibit such candour as to own himself otherwise convinced or converted. His doctrine had no abettors, and never bore fruit; it stood a barren ear amidst the lusty, green, and copious harvest, that had already sprung up and overspread the lands.

Harvey must now, indeed, have seen his views assured of general reception at no distant date. The same year in which he himself answered Riolan, Dr. James de Back, of Amsterdam, published his work on the Heart,[41] which is written entirely in harmony with the Harveian doctrines, and the celebrated Lazarus Riverius, Professor of Medicine in the University of Montpellier, publicly defended and taught the circulation of the blood.[42] The following year, Paul Marquard Siegel, of Hamburg, produced his commentary on the Motion of the Blood,[43] in which he addresses himself particularly to a refutation of Riolanus, whose scholar he had been, and at the same time shows himself so thoroughly at home in the general question, that he is able to throw additional light on it by new and ingenious considerations and experiments.

Harvey appears to have been pleased with Slegel’s production; for by and by he sends the Hamburger his new work on Generation, accompanied by an admirable letter, which has happily been preserved.[44] No one in reading that remarkable epistle could suppose that the pen which set it down was in the hand of a man in the 75th year of his age.

The young men of 1628 and 1630, who had been educated in unbelief of the circulation, were now coming into possession of professorial chairs and places of distinction; and having long escaped from leading-strings and made inquiry for themselves, were beginning in many of the European universities to proclaim the better faith through further knowledge that had sprung up within them. Harvey had himself received the seeds of his discovery in Italy; but the fructifying mother was slow to recognize him whom she had so powerfully concurred to form. It was not till 1651 that Harvey’s views were in any way admitted beyond the Alps, when Trullius, a Roman professor, expounded and taught them. About the same time, John Pecquet,[45] of Dieppe, and Thomas Bartholin, the Dane,[46] men of original mind in the one case, of extensive learning and great research in the other, gave in their adhesion to the new doctrine, and spread it far and near by their writings. The victory for the circulation may finally be said to have been won, when Plempius, of Louvain, the old antagonist of Descartes on the subject, retracted all he had formerly written against it, convinced of its truth, as he so candidly informs us, by the very pains, he took to satisfy himself of its erroneousness, and publicly proclaimed his conversion: “Primum mihi hoc inventum non placuit,” says the worthy Plempius—“This discovery did not please me at all at first, as I publicly testified both by word of mouth and in my writings; but by and by, when I gave myself up with firmer purpose to refute and expose it, lo! I refute and expose myself, so convincing, not to say merely persuasive, are the arguments of the author: I examine the whole thing anew and with greater care, and having at length made the dissection of a few live dogs, I find that all his statements are most true.”[47]

From the first promulgation of the doctrine of the circulation, its progress towards ultimate general acknowledgment can scarcely be said for a moment to have been interrupted. The hostility of the Primeroses and Parisanuses and Riolans never interfered with it in fact; the more candid spirits were rather led to inquire, by the virulence of these weak and inconsistent opponents, who thus hastened the catastrophe of their own discomfiture, and the triumph of the truth. If men’s minds were once in danger of being led astray, it was only for an instant, and not so much through the opposition of enemies, as by an erroneous generalization, which a short interval of time sufficed to correct. Cæcilius Folius, a Venetian physician, having met with one of those anomalous instances of pervious foramen ovale in an adult, immediately and without looking farther, jumped to the conclusion that this structure or arrangement was normal, and that the blood passed in all cases by the route he had discovered, from the right to the left side of the heart. Many Italians received with favour the account which Folius immediately published of his discovery;[48] and the natural philosopher, Gassendi, having about the same period had another instance of the kind which Folius encountered, shown to him, concurred with this writer in his views, and by a variety of arguments and objections, strove to damage, and did temporarily damage, the Harveian doctrine.[49] But this was only for a brief season; for Domenic de Marchettis[50] soon after showed that Folius had mistaken an extremely rare occurrence for a general fact, and that if the open foramen ovale might afford a passage from the right to the left side of the heart in one case, closed it would suffer no such transit in hundreds of other instances. Gassendi, moreover, by getting still more out of his depth, soon afterwards showed that familiarity with general physics did not imply a particular knowledge of anatomy, nor give the power of reasoning sagely on subjects of special physiology; so that in his eagerness to assail Harvey he did injury in the end only to his own reputation. In short, Harvey in his lifetime had the high satisfaction of witnessing his discovery generally received, and inculcated as a canon in most of the medical schools of Europe; he is, therefore, one of the few—his friend Thomas Hobbes says, he was the only one within his knowledge—“Solus quod sciam,”[51] who lived to see the new doctrine which he had promulgated victorious over opposition, and established in public opinion. Harvey’s views, then, were admitted; the circulation of the blood, through the action of the heart, was received as an established fact; but envy and detraction now began their miserable work. The fact was so; but it was none of Harvey’s discovering; the fact was so, but it was of no great moment in itself, and the merit of arriving at it was small; the way had been amply prepared for such a conclusion.

Let us look as impartially as we may at each of these statements.

They who deny the originality of Harvey’s induction, very commonly confound the idea of a Motion of the blood, with the idea of a Continuous Motion in a Circle. It would seem that even from remote antiquity, and by common consent, mankind had recognized the blood to be in motion. We have this fact declared to us by all antiquity, and it is even particularly referred to in various passages of the grand observer of his age, the depositary of the popular science of all preceding ages—Shakespeare. Brutus speaks thus to Portia:

language not more touching and beautiful than physiologically correct. And again, with more of involution and ellipsis, yet with a meaning that is unmistakable, Warwick, by the bedside of the murdered Gloster, proceeds,—

These passages have actually been cited, to prove that Shakespeare was not unacquainted with the circulation; and there have not been wanting some[52] who have even argued that Shakespeare had his knowledge direct from the fountain-head—from Harvey himself, with whom, for several years at least, he was contemporaneous.[53]

The passages quoted above are referred to all the more willingly, from their having preceded the teaching of Harvey by a few years only; but Shakespeare probably referred to nothing more than the accredited opinion that the blood was in motion within the vessels, particularly the veins of the body. In ancient times, indeed, the veins were regarded, as they are esteemed by the vulgar at the present hour, as the principal vessels of the body; they only were once believed to contain true blood; the arteries were held to contain at best but a little blood, different from that of the veins, and mixed accidentally in some sort with the vital spirits, of which they were the proper conduits.

In former times, farther,—times anterior to Harvey whether more remotely or more nearly,—the liver, as the organ of the hæmapoësis, was regarded as the source of all the veins, i. e. of all the proper blood-vessels; the heart, as the generator of heat and the vital spirits, was viewed as the mere cistern of the blood, whence it was propelled by the act of inspiration, and whither it reverted during the act of expiration, its flow to this part of the body or to that, being mainly determined by certain excitations there inherent or specially set up. By and by, however, the liver was given up as the origin of the venous system generally; but such anatomists as Jacobus Sylvius, Realdus Columbus, Bartholomæus Eustachius, and Gabriel Fallopius, may be found opposing Vesalius in regard to the origin of the vena cava, and asserting that it takes its rise from the liver, not from the heart, as the great reformer in modern anatomy had maintained.

In the progress of anatomical investigation, the valves in the interior of the heart, at the roots of the two great cardiac arterial trunks, and in the course of the veins at large, were perceived and their probable uses and actions canvassed. The general and prevalent notion was that they served to break or moderate the force of the current in the interior of the vessels or parts where they were encountered; though Berengarius of Carpi,[54] in describing the cardiac valves, had already said that the effect of the tricuspid valves, between the right auricle and ventricle, must be to prevent the blood in the former cavity from escaping into the latter; whilst the office of the semilunar valves, at the origins of the pulmonic artery and aorta, he declared, from their position, must be to prevent the entrance of the blood of the great arterial trunks into the heart. Fabricius, the master of Harvey, may be said to have perfected anatomical knowledge in regard to the valves of the veins—for he by no means first directed attention to their existence, or discovered them, as is generally asserted. Fabricius believed that their function was to act as obstacles to congestions of blood, as strengtheners of the veins and preventives to their becoming over-distended.

Another long and much agitated point in the anatomy of the sanguiferous system, was the state of the septum ventriculorum of the heart, in respect of permeability or impermeability. The reason of the vast importance attached to this point was connected with the ancient, and, in Harvey’s time, generally accredited hypothesis of the Three Spirits—the natural, the vital, and the animal. The hypothesis to be brought into play, was presumed to require the intermixture in the heart of the two kinds of blood that were held appropriate to the two ventricles and to the arteries and veins respectively, and that were farther believed to meet in the cavities of the cranium, thorax, and abdomen, from which they returned to the heart by the way they came, for a fresh supply of the spirits (now exhausted or enfeebled), under the agency of which all the important operations of the body were believed to be accomplished.

Now, Galen, the author of this hypothesis, in order to obtain an admixture of the two kinds of blood, feigned and described the partition between the two ventricles, either as perforated like a sieve, or as filled with depressions of depth sufficient to entitle them to be viewed as constituting a kind of third ventricle—the last assumption doubtless to accommodate each order of spirits with its own particular officine or workshop. With the revival of anatomical knowledge in modern Europe, however, the partition of the ventricles was soon perceived not to be porous or cribriform, but, as was first said, to be so nearly solid that any filtration of blood through it was well nigh impossible (Berengarius, 1521), and next, to be so completely solid that all permeation of blood was impossible (Vesalius, 1555), and another means must therefore be found for securing the necessary admixture of the two kinds of blood in order to effect the engenderment of the natural, animal, and vital spirits.

Such was the state of anatomical science and physiological belief on this particular point when Michael Servetus came upon the stage, and suggested the transit of the blood through the lungs from the right side of the heart to the left, with a view of meeting the difficulty which the undeniable solidity of the septum ventriculorum opposed to the presumed necessary admixture of the two kinds of blood. Servetus’s idea, consequently—if at the distance of three hundred years we may presume to follow the mental process that led to the penning of the remarkable and often-quoted passage which occurs in his works—appears to be nothing more than a suggestion or proposition as a means of meeting a difficulty; it is very much as though he had said: If you cannot go straight through, you must even go round about. To so much and to no more, do Servetus’s claims to be considered a discoverer, in the sense we would attach to that word, amount. The passage from the ‘Restitutio Christianismi’ of Servetus, 1553, if viewed from the point proposed, will not fail to set his title to be regarded as the discoverer of the lesser circulation in its true light—in a light under which it has not yet been seen. We translate so much of the passage as bears on the question under review. “The vital spirit has its origin in the left ventricle, the lungs assisting especially in its generation. It is a subtile spirit * * * 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. But this communication takes place, not by the middle septum of the heart, as is commonly believed, but by a remarkable artifice; the subtile blood of the right side of the heart is agitated in a lengthened course through the lungs, whereby it is elaborated, from which it is thrown of a crimson colour, and from the vena arteriosa (pulmonary artery) is transfused into the arteria venosa (pulmonary veins); it is then mixed in the arteria venosa itself 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. Now, that the communication and preparation take place as stated through the lungs, is proclaimed by the various conjunctions and communications of the arterial vein with the venous artery. The remarkable size of the arterial vein (pulmonary artery) confirms this, a vessel which could neither have its actual constitution nor dimensions, nor transmit such a quantity of the purest blood direct from the heart itself, for the mere nourishment of the lungs. Neither would the heart supply the lungs in such proportion, (especially when we see the lungs in the embryo nourished from another source) by reason of those membranes or valves which remain unopened until the hour of birth, as Galen teaches. The blood, consequently, from the moment of birth, is sent, and in such quantity is sent, for another purpose from the heart into the lungs; from the lungs also it is not simple air that is sent to the heart, but air mixed with blood is transmitted through the arteria venosa (pulmonary vein). In the lungs consequently does the mixture take place. The crimson colour is imparted to the spirituous blood by the lungs, not by the heart. There is not room enough in the left ventricle of the heart for so important and so great an admixture; neither is there space there for the elaboration into the crimson colour. Finally, the septum medium, seeing that it is without vessels and properties, is not adapted to accomplish that communication and elaboration, although something may transude through it.”

The discussion in this passage from Servetus obviously concerns the generation of the vital spirit, not the pulmonic circulation properly so called—that is altogether secondary and subordinate. His mention of “numerous communications between the vena arteriosa and the arteria venosa,” is plainly conjectural; neither he, nor any one else for a century after him, saw such communications. The course through the lungs, then, as suggested by Servetus, was a mere hypothetical proposal for getting over the difficulty of the solid, or nearly solid, septum ventriculorum. As to the means by which such a transfusion as he suggests, is effected, Servetus, as he was profoundly ignorant himself, so does he leave his readers entirely in the dark. The transmission of the blood from the right to the left side of the heart, which Servetus proposed, is in fact, no great improvement on the old efflux and reflux, like the tides of Euripus, betwixt Attica and Eubœa. He had no conception of a circle of the blood beginning and ending in the heart. On the contrary, he regarded the liver as the fountain-head of the blood; and if he has any reference to a moving power in connexion with the heart, it is nothing more than the diastole or dilatation of the organ that is named—a passive state therefore considered as an active and efficient cause, which is absurd.

The first modern anatomist of high repute, who treats particularly of the motion of the blood, may be said to be Realdus Columbus;[55] for Servetus, though educated to the medical profession, had long forsaken it for divinity, and only uses his old anatomical knowledge as a means of illustrating a theological dogma. Columbus, in treating of the heart and lungs, has certainly much that is remarkable, and much that is true; and had he said nothing more than we find in single detached sentences or paragraphs of his book, he must have been regarded as having gone a great length in the right direction. The blood, he says, once it has entered the right ventricle from the vena cava, can in no way again get back; for the tricuspid valves are so placed that whilst they give a ready passage to the stream inwards, they effectually oppose its return. The blood continuing to advance from the right ventricle into the vena arteriosa or pulmonary artery, once there cannot flow back upon the ventricle, for it is opposed by the sigmoid valves situate at the root of the vessel. The blood, therefore, agitated and mixed with the air in the lungs, and having thus in some sort acquired the nature of spirit, is carried by the arteria venosa or pulmonary vein into the left ventricle, from whence, being received into the aorta, it is, by the ramifications of this vessel, transmitted to all parts of the body.

This much taken by itself looks very like an exposition of the circulation of the blood as understood at the present time, though we still see that the blood must be made to participate in the nature of spirit before it enters the arteries, and is not the blood which is contained in the veins, and which nourishes the body; but when we go farther and turn to other parts of his writings, we see that Columbus could never have conceived any proper idea of the circulation. For example, he continues, with Galen, to regard the liver as the origin of all the veins. The vena portæ, he says, arising by innumerable roots from the concavity of the liver, proceeds to carry blood from this organ by different branches to the stomach, spleen, and intestines, to the end that it may convey nourishment in the first case, black bile in the second, and in the third serve a double function—viz. supply nourishment to the intestines at once, and by a kind of imbibition, obtain nutritive matter, which is forthwith sent back to the liver for elaboration into blood. The vena cava again, he describes as arising from the convex aspect of the liver, whence, by its ramifications, it carries the blood that is requisite to nourish and maintain every part of the body.

This of itself is enough. But when, in addition, we find that Columbus denies the muscular nature of the heart, we are fully qualified to form a true estimate of the conception which he could have had of the motion of the blood, and of his right to be regarded as the discoverer of its ceaseless circular movement.

The next who is brought upon the scene with the imputed honour of having had a knowledge, not only of the lesser, but of the greater or systemic circulation also, is Andreas Cæsalpinus,[56] of Arezzo. The account which this celebrated peripatetic philosopher gives of the passage of the blood from the right to the left side of the heart is essentially the same as that given by Columbus. From the right ventricle the blood passes into the pulmonic artery, and from this, by numerous anastomoses, into the pulmonic veins, which transmit it to the left ventricle. Cæsalpinus says well that it is absurd to call the pulmonary artery by the name of vena arteriosa, on the mere ground of its taking its departure, like the vena cava, from the right ventricle; it is a true artery, and is, in all respects, analogous to the aorta. The title of arteria venosa, again, given to the pulmonic vein is not less ridiculous; inasmuch as this vessel, though it end in the left ventricle, has all the properties of the veins at large.

So far it looks as if Cæsalpinus had an exact idea of the pulmonary circulation; indeed, he uses the word Circulation in reference to the transit of the blood through the lungs; but when we discover him still speaking of the permeation of the septum ventriculorum by the blood, our faith in the extent and accuracy of his knowledge begins to waver.

With reference to the greater or systemic circulation, again, Cæsalpinus speaks of the swelling of the veins between the circle of pressure and the extremities of the vessels, when a ligature is thrown round a limb; and he even goes so far as to state that the common opinion which admitted a progressive motion—i. e. a motion from trunks to branches—of the blood in the veins was erroneous. Did we go no farther we should be led to conclude, as in Columbus’s case, that Cæsalpinus believed in the continuous movement of the blood in the veins in one direction only; and, as he has already spoken of the exit of the blood from the left ventricle, and of its reception by the aorta for general distribution, it might forthwith be inferred that, possessed of the essential elements of the greater circulation, he must, as matter of course, have been familiar with this as an ultimate result. And such an inference has indeed been drawn for him by high authority; but Cæsalpinus came not himself to any such conclusion; it was arrived at by others in his behalf, and after the lapse of almost a century from the date of his first publication. When we find Cæsalpinus, in other and closely connected passages of his writings, singing the old cuckoo note about a flux and reflux of the blood in the veins, and even using the accredited word—Euripus—to express his idea of its tide-like nature; when we further perceive that he was ignorant of the existence of the valves of the veins, and finally arrive at his explanation of the cause of the swelling which takes place in the veins of an extremity beyond a ligature,—the cause with him consisting in an effort of the blood to get back to the focus or centre, lest, through the compression of the veins, it should be cut off and suffocated,—we not only feel that we were warranted in entertaining a wholesome scepticism of the conclusion come to by the admirers of Cæsalpinus in regard to his knowledge of a circulation of the blood; but waxing in our infidelity as we become farther acquainted with his thoughts on the constitution of the blood, we find everything opposed to the likelihood of his having arrived at the same result as Harvey; and, at length, we discover that he neither had nor could have had any true knowledge of the circulation. Starting from the Aristotelian doctrines of growth and nutrition (of which so much will be found in Harvey’s work on Generation), Cæsalpinus held that there were two kinds of blood, one for the growth, another for the nourishment of the body. The blood which went to augment the body, and which he designated alimentum auctivum, or aliment of increase, flowed from the liver into the vena cava, which he seems to have thought was connected with the heart only, ut inde virtus omnis a corde descendat—that a sufficiency of virtue might be thereby communicated to it. The auctive blood, he farther thought, was attracted into the ventricles of the heart by the inherent heat of the organ. The dilatation of the heart and arteries he imagined to be due to “an effervescence of the spirit;” and the cause of their “collapse”—not systole, be it observed, in the active sense—was the appropriation by the parts of the body of the nutritive and augmentative matter. Again, though Cæsalpinus speaks of the intercommunication of the minute arteries and veins, he still thought that it was only during sleep that the blood mixed with the spirits passed from the former into the latter class of vessels; for it is during sleep, he says, that the veins become distended, whilst the pulsations of the arteries are then moderated. He plainly sees no connexion between a delivery by the artery and a filling by the vein. It is along with all this, and as if to settle the question of the kind of knowledge Cæsalpinus had of the movement of the blood, that he uses the old word Euripus, to express his idea of its alternating or tide-like motion.

Cæsalpinus, let us add, had no conception of the heart as the efficient cause of any motion which the blood might have. In the often-quoted passage from the work ‘De Plantis,’[57] it is still the spirit inherent in, or associated with, the blood, that is the cause of its motion.

Cæsalpinus, consequently, tried by a very moderately searching criticism, presents himself to us as but very little farther advanced than the ancients in his ideas on the motion of the blood.—The interpretation which successive generations of men give to a passage in a writer, some century or two old, is very apt to be in consonance with the state of knowledge at the time, in harmony with the prevailing ideas of the day, and, doubtless, often differs signally from the meaning that was in the mind of the man who composed it. The world saw nothing of the circulation of the blood in Servetus, Columbus, Cæsalpinus, or—Shakespeare, until after William Harvey had taught and written.

The truth is, that some of the foremost grounds of Harvey’s claims to rank as a discoverer are very commonly overlooked. We always associate his name and fame with the development of the ultimate fact of the circulation of the blood. But Harvey, as a step to this conclusion, first demonstrated the heart as the means by which the circulation was effected; and he farther showed that there was but one kind of blood, common to both the arteries and the veins. Up to his time the heart was regarded as the passive cistern of the blood, and the elaboratory of the vital spirits; it was not known as the moving instrument in any efflux or reflux of the blood, or even of any lesser circulation that had been previously asserted or conjectured. The moving power was still the respiratory act. Harvey may be said to have first broached, as he also essentially completed the physiology of the heart’s actions. The circular motion of the blood followed as a necessary corollary from these. The “motion of the heart” has even precedence in the title of his immortal work; the chapter in which he first enters properly on his subject (Chap. 2), is devoted to its consideration. And then, no physiologist up to Harvey’s time had questioned the existence of two kinds of blood, one appropriate to each order of vessels, and answering different ends in the economy.

The only name still wanting in this historical sketch, till we come to Harvey, is that of Fabricius of Aquapendente, his teacher in anatomy. Fabricius had given particular attention, among other subjects, to the anatomy of the valves of the veins, which he entitled ostila venarum. Fabricius, indeed, possessed so thorough a knowledge of the valvular elements of the vascular system, that it is really astonishing, as an able writer[58] has remarked, that he should not have had clearer ideas on the functions, among other things, of the pulmonary veins, and should have continued a rigid adherent to the prejudices which prevailed before his time. Fabricius could observe, and he could describe; but he wanted the combining intellect that infers, the imagination that leads to new ideas—to discovery. Though he did little himself, however, to advance the sum of human knowledge, he proved a tooth in the wheel that has since put in motion the whole machinery of modern medical science. He it was who sowed the seed, little dreaming of its kind, which, finding one spot of congenial soil, sprung up a harvest that has continued to nurture the world of physiological science to the present hour.[59]

Having now disposed of the claims that have been set up in behalf of one or another as the discoverer of the circulation, and shown, we trust satisfactorily, that these are all alike untenable, we should now proceed to discuss the question of the cui bono?—but this meets us in so forbidding an aspect, brimful as is our mind with a sense of the all-importance of the knowledge we had from Harvey, and seems so little to belong to our subject, that we gladly pass it by unnoticed; though it be only to find ourselves encountered by that other topic, but little more congenial to our mood of mind and intimate persuasion: The merit of Harvey as a discoverer. Few, very few have been found to question this; but as one man of undeniable learning and eminence in his profession,[60] has very strangely, as it seems to us, been led to do so, it will not be impertinent if we cast away a few words on this matter.

Discovery is of several, particularly of two kinds: one sensible or perceptive; another rational or inductive; the former an act of simple consciousness through an impression made on one or more of the senses; the latter a conclusion come to by the higher powers of the understanding dealing with data previously acquired by the senses and perceptive faculties.—We look through a telescope, for example, and we perceive a star which no one else had seen before; we note the fact, and so become discoverers of a new star. The merit here is not, surely, very great, though the added fact may be highly important. Again, one of the planets is subject to such perturbations in its course that to compose exact tables of its orbit is held impossible. These perturbations are referable to none of the known perturbing causes. A great astronomer suggests the influence of an exterior and unknown planet as their cause. A consummate mathematician and physical astronomer makes trial of this suggestion: he assumes the ascertained perturbations as elements, he combines these under the guidance of knowledge and reason, and at length he says, if the cause suggested be well founded, there or thereabouts must it exist; and lo! on turning the far-seeing tube to the point in space which he had indicated, there in verity gleams a new world, then first seen, though launched by God from Eternity to circle on the verge of our creation; and he who bade us look becomes the discoverer of a new planet. Who will dispute the merit here? Truly, man does show the God within him when he uses his faculties—God-like in themselves—in such God-like fashion. But Harvey’s merit, according to our idea, was of the selfsame description in another sphere. The facts he used were familiarly known, most of them to his predecessors for nearly a century, all of them to his teachers and immediate contemporaries; yet did no one, mastering these facts in their connexion and sequence, rising superior to prejudice, groundless hypothesis, and erroneous reasoning, draw the inference that now meets the world as irresistible, until the combining mind of Harvey gave it shape and utterance. To our apprehension Harvey was as far above his fellows as the eye of poetic intelligence, that exultingly absorbs the beauties of the starry sky and the green earth, is above the mere physical sense that distinguishes light from dark. The late Dr. Barclay, a fervent admirer of Harvey, whose name he never uttered without the epithet immortal, has put the question of Harvey’s merit both happily and eloquently, and it affords us pleasure to quote the passage from the writings of our old and honoured teacher in anatomy. “The late Dr. Hunter,” says Dr. Barclay,[61] “has rather invidiously introduced Harvey along with Copernicus and Columbus, to show that his merit as a discoverer was comparatively low. But what did Copernicus, and what did Columbus? Not in possession of more numerous facts than their contemporaries, but endowed with nobler and more vigorous intellects, the one developed the intricate system of the heavenly bodies and the other discovered an unheard-of continent. Was it not in the same way, by the exertion of superior intellect, that Harvey made his immortal discovery? I know not what has happened in the world unseen; but if I may judge from the records of history and the annals of fame, the spirit of Bacon, the spirits of Columbus, Copernicus and Newton have not been ashamed to welcome and associate with the congenial spirit of Harvey.” To this fine passage there is little to be added: Harvey’s discovery was of the rational and inductive and therefore higher class, according to our estimate; it was made in virtue of the intellectual powers which peculiarly distinguish man, possessed in a state of the highest perfection.

THE WORK ON GENERATION.

In our account of Harvey’s public career we found him busy with the subject of Generation at Oxford in 1642; but he had certainly turned his attention that way at a much earlier period, for one of the chief causes of his regret, as expressed to Dr. Ent, for the destruction of his papers during the civil war, is the loss of his Observations on the Generation of Insects, which could only have been made and reduced to form many years previously, probably before his engagement to accompany the Duke of Lennox on his travels. And then we see that all his notes on the gestation of the hind or doe were made in the palmy days of the first Charles, before the differences between him and the people of these countries had come to the arbitrement of arms. Harvey probably occupied a good deal of his leisure in arranging and writing the work on Generation, after quitting the service of Charles in 1646; his practice at this period was not extensive, and he seems to have passed much of his time in the country. Harvey appears to have been little inclined to the publication of this work, and only to have ventured it out of his hands with reluctance. Without the solicitations of Ent, indeed, it would certainly have been left unpublished during his lifetime. Ent, however, succeeded in carrying off the prize which his illustrious friend had showed him, and lost no time in getting it into types, taking on himself the task of correcting the press, and sending it forth according to his own ideas in fitting form, with a frontispiece, and a highflown dedication to the President and Fellows of the College of Physicians. Ent’s account of his interview with Harvey on the occasion of obtaining his consent to the publication, though highly theatrical, is still extremely interesting. Saluting the great anatomist, and asking if all were well with him, Harvey answers, somewhat impatiently as it seems: “How can it, whilst the Commonwealth is full of distractions, and I myself am still in the open sea? And truly,” he continues, “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.” (p. 145.) Let the reader turn to the page from which the above quotation is taken, and to the one which follows it, for thoughts and views that clearly bespeak the greatness of intellect, the nobleness of sentiment that distinguished William Harvey. When Ent proceeds to say that the learned world, aware of his indefatigable industry, were eagerly looking for other works at his hands, the fervid genius of the poet or discoverer still appears in his reply: “And would you be the man,” said Harvey, smiling, “who should recommend me to quit the peaceful haven, where I now pass my life, and launch again upon the faithless sea? 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.” (p. 147.) By and by, however, he produces his Exercises on the Generation of Animals, and though he makes many difficulties at first, urging, among other things, that the work must be held incomplete, as containing nothing on the generation of insects, Ent, nevertheless, prevails in the end, and receives the papers with full authority, either speedily to commit them to the press, or to delay their publication to a future time. Ent set about his office of midwife, as he has it, forthwith, and the following year (1651) saw the birth of the work on Generation.

Physiological science generally was not sufficiently advanced in Harvey’s time to admit of a truly great and enduring work being produced on a subject so abstruse, and involving so many particulars as that of Generation. On the doctrine of the circulation the dawn had long been visible; Harvey came and the sun arose. On the subject of animal reproduction, all was night and darkness two centuries ago; and though the light has still been waxing in strength since Harvey wrote, it is only in these times that we have seen it brightening into something like the day. In Harvey’s time the very means and instruments that were indispensable to the investigation were not yet known, or were used of powers inadequate to bring the prime facts within the cognizance of the senses. Harvey doubtless did as much as any man living could have accomplished when he wrote. He announced the general truth: Omne animal ex ovo; he showed the cicatricula of the egg as the point where the reproductive process begins; he corrected numerous errors into which his master Fabricius had fallen; he further pointed out the path of observation and experiment as the only one that could lead to satisfactory results in the investigation of a subject which gradually displayed itself as one of natural history; and, it may be added, by his wanderings in the labyrinth of the metaphysics of physiological science, he did enough to deter any one from attempting to tread such barren ground again. In his work on the Heart and Blood, Harvey had all the essential facts of the subject clearly before him, and he used them at once in such masterly-wise, that he left little or nothing for addition either by himself or others. Secure of his footing here, he could well dispense with “vital spirits,” “innate heat,” and other inscrutable agencies, he could leave “adequate and efficient causes,” and other metaphysical phantoms on one side—it was physics that he was dealing with, and the physician was at home. With the information we now possess, we see clearly how indifferently weaponed was the physiologist of the year 1647 for encountering such a subject as Animal Generation; a Leeuwenhoek and a De Graaf, a Spallanzani and a Haighton, a Wolff, a Purkinje, a Von Baer, a Valentin, a Rudolph Wagner, a Bischoff, and many more, had successively to appear, before the facts of the subject could be ascertained, and a Schleiden and a Schwann were further necessary as ultimate interpreters of the things observed before they could be either rightly or wholly understood. No wonder then that The Physiologist of the 17th century, meets us in the guise of one rather puzzled with the burthen he has made up his mind to bear, and, contrary to his former wont, eking out the lack of positive knowledge by reiterated disquisitions on topics where certainty is unattainable.