The Works of William Harvey M.D. William Harvey

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