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WILLIAM HARVEY UPON LORD CHANCELLOR BACON BEING A TEXT FOR SOME REFLECTIONS UPON CRITICAL THINKING AND WRITING IN MEDICINE AND THE MEDICAL SCIENCES SIR FRANCIS WALSHE, F.R.C.P., F.R.S.* In his fascinating "brieflife" of Wilham Harvey, who was his friend, John Aubrey1 tells us that Harvey "had been physitian to the Lord Chancellour Bacon, whom he esteemed much for his witt and style, but would not allow him to be a great Philosopher. Said he to me, 'He writes Philosophy like a Lord Chancellour,' speaking in derision, ? have cured him' " (i). It was natural philosophy, or what we now call "natural science," of which Harvey was speaking when, as we are told, he made this derisive comment. What strikes us is the seeming implication that the ordered and rational presentation ofan argument or line ofthought that we associate with a goodjudicial pronouncement—and the Lord Chancellor ofEngland is the head ofthejudiciary—should in some way be deemed by Harvey to be out ofplace when the subject matter was science. Harvey's claim to have cured Bacon ofthis habit ofmind can be neither substantiated nor easily accepted, nor may we infer that Harvey was criticizing Bacon as a pure theorist who did not put his theories to the test ofexperiment; for in fact, as we also learn from Aubrey, the unfortunate man met his death from a chill, acquired when he stepped out ofhis coach * The author is consulting physician to University College Hospital and to the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, Queen Square, London, and one-time editor of Brain. Present address: n/12 Wimpole Street, London, W. 1. I. Antiquarian and biographer (1625-93). John Aubrey was a close friend ofWilliam Harvey in the last six years ofthe latter's Ufe. Says Aubrey: "I was at his funerali, and helpt to carry him into the vault," this being in Hempstead church in Essex. I97 upon a winter's day to see whether, by filling a fowl's carcass with snow, he could preserve it from putrefaction. Bacon was indeed the protomartyr ofthe experimental method in science in his own country. Indeed, perhaps Bacon (2) had the last word here, for in his essay "On Truth" he writes: "What is Truth? saidjesting Pilate and did not stay for an answer." Harvey seems not to have stayed for the answer Bacon might have given him, and hence hisjest has survived to our own day to have— dare I say it?—no helpful influence upon some modern medical and scientific writers, for that distinguished cardiologist and clinical scientist, the late Sir Thomas Lewis (3) was moved to write that "a disquieting proportion ofwhat is offered [to the student] in conversationand in the generality ofjournals and books is inaccurate, slovenly and redundant." In other words, it lacks those qualities which distinguish the orderly thought and lucid prose ofLord Chancellor Bacon and is so much the worse for the lack. But perhaps we should not take too seriously this aphorism by Harvey, thrown offin the course offamiliar talk with a close friend, for has he not told us that he reached his conclusions concerning the circulation of the blood by way of "reason and experiment"? while Aubrey tells us that Harvey "dictated to me what to see, how to manage my studies: in short, he bid me goe to the Fountaine head, and read Aristotle, Cicero, Avicenna, and did call the neoteriques shitt-breeches." Thus Harvey, upon the ancients and upon the moderns ofhis day. If the logic he favored was Aristode's rather than Bacon's, it was yet logic and implies the need for ordered thinking about, and exposition of, the fruits of observation and experiment. We could, nevertheless, do with more ofthe intellectual method and clarity ofa Lord Bacon in the literature of medicine and its ancillary sciences than many modern writers vouchsafe to us. So much for Harvey and Bacon, and perhaps I should admit that it is certainly not the fashion now to point a moral of this unexpected kind from the sayings ofthe great William Harvey. YetJohn Aubrey, whose "brieflife" ofhim physicians and physiologists should most certainly read, gives us Harvey in the round...

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