Circle and Circulation: The Language and Imagery of William Harvey's Discovery

CIRCLE AND CIRCULATION: THE LANGUAGE AND IMAGERY OF WILLIAM HARVEY'S DISCOVERY* PETER M. JUCOVYf One mode of entry into the mind of the innovative scientist is to study his language, to study how his inherited language binds him to the assumptions of his times and how his breaks with that language liberate him from those assumptions and enable him to make his contribution. This paper attempts to apply a critical verbal analysis to one of the earliest discourses of modern biomedical science, the Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus [An anatomical disquisition on the motion of the heart and blood in animals (1628)] of Dr. William Harvey [I]. In this famous treatise, Harvey announces his discovery of the circulation of the blood and recounts the empirical evidence—commonsense observation, dissection, vivisection, and calculation upon in vivo measurements—lying behind his formulation of the discovery. The purpose of my essay is, simply, to read again what Harvey is telling us about the living body and about a seventeenth-century mind which is seeking to know that body. Harvey's writings deserve the especially close attention of the modern scientist, not only because he can be seen to be the first scientist to practice a consistent physiology of quantities rather than ofqualities—and may therefore be taken to be the first modern experimental physiologist—but also because, more than most modern experimentalists, Harvey is clearly style conscious. The range and flexibility of Harvey's prose, his constant awareness ofwho his audience might be and the adjustments he makes accordingly, his deliberateness in word choice and in sentence formation, his hesitancy to publish the results of his findings until he is entirely happy not only with the validity of his work but also with his manner of describing it—all these attributes recommend his texts for a study of the language of modern scientific discourse. Harvey's texts do far more than describe an object world under investigation: they reflect, almost as if by design, an investigating, deliberating subject as well. *This essay received honorable mention in the first Perspectives Writing Award for authors under 35. tResident in pathology, Temple University Hospital, 3401 North Broad Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19140. 92 I Peter M. Jucovy · Circle and Circulation /. The Scope of"De Motu Cordis" and the Role ofAnalogy in Harvey's Thinking Harvey dedicates De Motu Cordis both to King Charles I of England and to a Dr. Argent, the president of the Royal College of Physicians. The two dedications, the first lavishly rhetorical, the second pragmatically direct, serve as appropriate introductions to a treatise which almost single-handedly transformed the study of animal physiology into a modern experimental science. They emphasize graphically Harvey's transitional position in scientific thought: one points back to his intellectual origins in classical and Renaissance philosophy; the other looks ahead to his influence on modern science and medicine. Beyond that, they suggest at the outset the breadth of Harvey's thinking. Indeed, the companion dedications anticipate the reconciliation Harvey achieves in the body ofDe Motu Cordis between a novel methodology and an old—to many of Harvey's contemporaries, an already dead—philosophy. Harvey addresses Charles I in the standard metaphorical language of the Renaissance. The separate spheres of macrocosm (the world or the universe), body politic, and microcosm (the body of man) are all linked by a multitude of functional and symbolic correspondences, so that the reality of one sphere may influence or interpret the reality of another. Adhering to these conventions, Harvey writes: The heart of animals is the foundation of their life, the sovereign of everything within them, the sun of their microcosm, that upon which all growth depends, from which all power proceeds. The King, in like manner, is the foundation of his kingdom, the sun of the world around him, the heart of the republic, the foundation whence all power, all grace doth flow. What I have written here of the motions of the heart I am the more emboldened to present to your Majesty, according to the custom of the present age, because almost all things human are done after human examples, and many things in a King...