‘O seditious Citizen of the Physicall Common-Wealth!’: Harvey's Royalism and His Autopsy of Old Parr

ALAN SHEPARD '0 seditious Citizen of the Physicall Common-Wealth!': Harvey's Royalism and His Autopsy of Old Parr Buried at the end of the sixty-eighth chapter of De Generatione Animalium (1651) is an easily missed lament from the erstwhile royal physician William Harvey (1578-1657).1 Begging his readers' pardon, he pauses amidst his Bildungsroman of the chick embryo to 'sigh' that in his absence from London, as he attended Charles I in exile in Oxford, Puritan soldiers have ransacked his living-quarters inside Whitehall. 'Some rapacious hands ... not only by Parliament's permission, but by its command' have destroyed not merely his household goods, but as he stresses, what is 'the heavier cause of my lament,' the records of his researches on the procreation of insects. Their loss, he asserts, shall damage 'the corrunonwealth of learning.,2 What is surprising about Harvey's aside is not its appearance in a scientificpaper,but its almost neutral affective tone. Apart from shrinking whole soldiers to a metonym - 'rapacious hands' - he otherwise swallows his anger.3 Even his metonym bears the mark of the anatomist, singling out only the distal parts of the soldiers' limbs as the agents of injury. Fellow anatomists would have recognized in that gesture a subtle departure from the Galenic attitude towards the hand then prevalent in medicine. Galen, following Aristotle and others, had promoted the hand as an instrument of the brain, of the seat of reason. In the Galenic tradition, as William Schupbach notes, the hand is by proxy thus privileged as 'the organ of civilization.,4 Yet as Harvey hasexperienced, soldiers' hands are 'rapacious': they destroy rather than create. In naming their destructiveness, however, he wilfully refuses to be their victim by substituting science for himself as the real casualty of the rape of his study. As in this mild response to having his living quarters molested, Harvey consistently fashioned himself in his writings as the apolitical scientist, and scholars have upheld that self-representation, seizing upon the episode above and others as proof of his work and life being virtually transcendent .s Indeed, in his writings Harvey is amazingly able to finesse volatile topics, keeping mostlymum on the two most tricky in seventeenth-century circles, religion and politics. In two 1etters to his friend John Nardi of Florence, for example, Harvey elides the nation's turmoil. On 15 July 1651, he apologizes, 'I should have sent letters to you sooner, but our public troubles in part, and inpart the labour of putting to press my work LIOn the UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 65, NUMBER 3, SUMMER 1996 HARVEY'S AUTOPSY OF OLD PARR 483 Generation ofAnimals," have hindered me from writing.' On30 November 1653, again responding, Harvey sent Nardi 'three books upon the subject you name' (Works, 603, 611). From Nardi's request we know that the 'subject' is the civil war, but neither it nor the titles of the three books warrant mention; the 'subject' is deliberately erased. This reticence must have helped Harvey survive the Stuarts' defeat in spite of his long and close association with them, his only political wound coming in 1644 when Parliament declared him 'delinquent' and removed him from his salaried post atSt Bartholomew's Hospital, and for a time banned him from London (Keynes, Life, 371). . This essay investigates Harvey's political discretion as it is exercised in his writings, which I suggest are more fractal than has been recognized. Part I situates Harvey in an historical context in which academic medicine is gently subsuming both professional theology and amateur science, and . it analyses some of the literary strategies of De Motu Cordis (1628) that obscure the republican implications of his cardiac research. Part 1 concludes that while Harvey's royalism is unassailable,6 his pioneering work,because it challenges classical theory on theway the heartworks, nonetheless opens him to indictment as being sympathetic to republican causes. His literary strategies seem designed to stave off misreadings or treasonous extrapolations . Building upon these historical contexts, part 2 analyses the political resonances of Harvey's autopsy report, the 'Examination of Thomas Parr' (composed 1635). I argue that it faults the ethics of the earl of Arundel...