The Works of William Harvey M.D. William Harvey

(p. 426.)

      In Harvey the religious sentiments appear to have been active; the exordium to his will is unusually solemn and grand. He also evinces true and elevated piety throughout the whole course of his work on Generation, and seizes every opportunity of giving utterance to his sense of the immediate agency and omnipotence of Deity. He appears, with the ancient philosophers, to have regarded the universe and its parts as actuated by a Supreme and all-pervading Intelligence. He was a great admirer of Virgil, whose works were frequently in his hands, and whose religious philosophy he seems also, in a great measure, to have adopted. The following beautiful and often-quoted passage of his favorite author may be said to embody his ideas on this subject, as they appear repeatedly in the course of the work on Generation:—

      “Principio cœlum ac terras camposque liquentes,

       Lucentemque globum lunæ, Titaniaque astra,

       Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus

       Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet.”

      —The heavens and earth, and ocean’s liquid plains,

       The moon’s bright orb, and the Titanian stars,

       Are fed by intrinsic spirit: deep infused

       Through all, mind mingles with and actuates the mass.

      Upon the purely Deistic notions of antiquity, however, Harvey unquestionably ingrafted the special faith in Christianity. In connexion with the subject of the “term utero-gestation,” he adduces the highest recorded examples as the rule, and speaks of “Christ, our Saviour, of men the most perfect;”[69] in the will he farther “most humbly renders his soul to Him that gave it, and to his blessed Lord and Saviour Christ Jesus.”

      Harvey was very inquisitive into natural things and natural phenomena. When he accompanied the Earl of Arundel, we have seen that he would still be wandering in the woods, making observations on the strange trees and herbs, and minerals he encountered. His industry in collecting facts was unwearied, and the accuracy with which he himself observed appears in every page of his writings; though we sometimes meet him amiably credulous in regard to the observations of others—as in that instance where he suffers himself to be imposed upon by the traveller’s tale of the “Genus humanum caudatum”—the race of the human kind with tails.[70] Harvey was the first English comparative anatomist; in other words, he was the first physiologist England produced whom superiority of natural endowment led to perceive the relations between the meanest and the highest of created things, and who made the simplicity of structure and of function in the one, a means of explaining the complexity of structure and of function in the other. “Had anatomists,” he says, “only been as conversant with the dissection of the lower animals as they are with that of the human body, many matters that have hitherto kept them in a perplexity of doubt would, in my opinion, have met them freed from every kind of difficulty.” (On the Heart, p. 35.) Harvey makes frequent and most effectual use of his knowledge of comparative anatomy in his earlier work; and if the reader will turn to the one on Generation (p. 423), and peruse what is said on the subject of ‘parts not essential to the being of the individual,’ and will then visit the Hunterian Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, he will find that the great comparative anatomist and physiologist of the 19th century had a herald in the great comparative anatomist and physiologist of the 17th century. Aubrey mentions particularly Harvey’s having “often said that of all the losses he sustained, no grief was so crucifying to him as the loss of his papers (containing notes of his dissections of the frog, toad, and other animals,) which, together with his goods in his lodgings at Whitehall, were plundered at the beginning of the rebellion.” Harvey’s store of individual knowledge must have been great; and he seems never to have flagged in his anxiety to learn more. He made himself master of Oughtred’s ‘Clavis Mathematica’ in his old age, according to Aubrey, who found him “perusing it, and working problems not long before he dyed.”

      Aubrey says “he understood Greek and Latin pretty well, but was no critique, and he wrote very bad Latin. The Circuitus Sanguinis was, as I take it, done into Latin by Sir George Ent, as also his booke de Generatione Animalium; but a little booke, in 12mo, against Riolan (I thinke) wherein he makes out his doctrine clearer, was writ by himself, and that, as I take it, at Oxford.”[71] Aubrey, in his gossiping, is doing injustice both to the scholarship and to the candour of Harvey. He heard or knew that Harvey wrote an indifferent hand, and this forsooth he turns into writing indifferent Latin. Everything points to the year 1619 as the period when the book De Motu Cordis et Sanguinis (Aubrey does not even know the title!) was written; Ent, born in 1603, was then a lad of sixteen, and in all likelihood had never heard of Harvey’s name; in 1628, when the work came forth at Frankfort, he was but twenty-five, and scarcely emancipated from the leading strings of his instructors. The Exercises to Riolan, which Aubrey cites as a specimen of Harvey’s own latinity, are at least as well written as the Exercises on the Heart. And then our authority evidently speaks at random in regard to the time and place when these Exercises were composed. Harvey never resided at Oxford after 1646, and Riolan’s Encheiridium Anatomicum, to which Harvey’s Two Exercises were an answer, did not appear till 1648! Harvey’s reply could not have been written by anticipation. It came out at Cambridge the year after Riolan’s work—in 1649.

      With regard to the work on Generation, again, had Ent received it in English and turned it into Latin, this fact would certainly have been stated; whereas, there is only the information that he played the midwife’s part, and overlooked the press. More than this, from what Ent says, it is evident that the printer worked from Harvey’s own MS. “As our author writes a bad hand,” says Ent, “which no one without practice can easily read, I have taken some pains to prevent the printer committing any very grave blunders through this—a point which, I observe, has not been sufficiently attended to in a small work of his (The Exercitatio ad Riolanum) which lately appeared.”[72] Harvey was a man of the most liberal education, and lived in an age when every man of liberal education wrote and conversed in Latin with ease at least, if not always with elegance. Harvey’s Latin is generally easy, often elegant, and not unfrequently copious and imaginative; he never seems to feel in the least fettered by the language he is using.

      Harvey, if eager in the acquirement of knowledge, was also ready at all times to communicate what he knew, “and,” as Aubrey has it, “to instruct any that were modest and respectful to him. In order to my journey (I was at that time bound for Italy) he dictated to me what to see, what company to keep, what bookes to read, how to manage my studies—in short, he bid me go to the fountain head and read Aristotle, Cicero, Avicenna, and did call the Neoteriques s—t-breeches.”[73]

      Harvey was not content merely to gather knowledge; he digested and arranged it under the guidance of the faculties which compare and reason. “He was always very contemplative,” pursues Aubrey, “and was wont to frequent the leads of Cockaine-house, which his brother Eliab had bought, having there his several stations in regard to the sun and the wind, for the indulgence of his fancy. At the house at Combe, in Surrey,” which, by the way, appears to have been purchased of Mr. Cockaine, as well as the mansion in the city, “he had caves made in the ground, in which he delighted in the summer time to meditate. He also loved darkness,” telling Aubrey, “‘that he could then best contemplate.’ His thoughts working, would many times keep him from sleeping, in which case his way was to rise from his bed and walk about his chamber in his shirt, till he was pretty cool, and then return to his bed and sleep very comfortably.” He treated the principal bodily ailment with which he was afflicted (gout) somewhat in the same manner. The fever of the mind being subdued by the application of cold air to the body at large, the fever in the blood, induced by gout, was abated by the use of cold water to the affected member: “He would then sitt with his legges bare, though it were frost, on the leads of Cockaine-house, putt them into a payle of water till he was almost dead with cold, and betake himself to his stove, and so ’twas gone.”[74]

      Harvey, besides being physician to the king and household, held the same responsible situation in the families of many of the most distinguished among the nobles and men of eminence of his time—among others to the Lord Chancellor Bacon, whom, Aubrey informs us, “ he esteemed much for his witt and style, but would not allow to be a great philosopher. Said he to me, ‘He