ut etAnimalibus 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
