Harvey e Padova: Atti del convegno celebrativo del quarto centenario della laurea di William Harvey (Padova, 21–22 novembre 2002) (review)

Celebratory volumes are entitled to be a bit festive. After all, they are put together to celebrate an important event, dangerously poised between frivolity and gravitas. The event celebrated in this volume is William Harvey’s laurea in philosophy and medicine at the University of Padua in April 1602, and inevitably some essays are too flattering whereas others are too obsequious. A good number of essays, though, make the collection valuable, especially the ones that avoid being celebratory, patriotic, and parochial. By all means, nobody believes any longer in the old story that Harvey went to study experimental science with Galileo Galilei, professor in Padua at the time when Harvey was a student there from around 1599, and that he learned the gist of the hypothetico-deductive method from him. In his refreshingly demythologizing essay, Ugo Baldini takes care to debunk, one by one, all of the various urban legends that have accrued around Harvey’s stay in Padua. If Harvey had a teacher in Padua, it was Girolamo Fabrici d’Acquapendente, as Andrew Cunningham appropriately reminds us. Relying on the results of his previous investigations on what he calls the Paduan “Aristotle’s project” in anatomical teaching and research, Cunningham demonstrates that Fabrici was the greatest influence on Harvey “not only for his own work and example,” but above all “because Fabrici presented himself as the great interpreter of Aristotle in anatomy” (p. 131).

Nancy Siraisi, to whom the University of Padua has deservedly conferred the laurea honoris causa for her achievements in the field of history of science and medicine, describes how dramatically the landscape of the early modern history of medicine has changed in the past decades. One of the greatest changes she notes is that writing history of medicine without paying attention to social and cultural background would now be unimaginable. Enrico Berti, renowned historian of Aristotle and Aristotelian traditions, tempers some of the most notorious views that dented Walter Pagel’s otherwise refreshingly innovative approach, namely, the almost obsessive tendency to unearth elements of “monism” and “vitalism” in Harvey’s natural philosophy. However, if it is correct to eliminate the intrusive label of vitalism—a typically nineteenth-century idea—this revision should not affect the important insight that Harvey started a coherent and sophisticated research program focused on the material roots of life, a program that was to be continued by such not-very-Oxonian Harveians as George Ent, Francis Glisson, and Thomas Wharton.

Studies on Harvey are affected by a sort of obstinate infatuation with his De motu cordis (1628). Conversely, his magnificent De generatione animalium (1651) remains neglected in discussions about the legacy of Harvey’s work. Unfortunately, this book perpetuates the stereotype. De generatione animalium, one of the most fascinating books written during the seventeenth century on the meaning of life, is once again used to assess how cardiocentric Harvey was in the last part of his life and how properly he responded to René Descartes’s challenge. This should not happen, unless we want to reconfirm once again the old mythology that in the Paduan milieu Harvey developed an obsession for “circular” reasoning that persisted throughout his intellectual career.