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,
