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
