William Harvey, M. D.: Modern or Ancient Scientist?

WILLIAM HARVEY, l.Vl. D.: MODERN OR ANCIENT SCIENTIST? WILLIAM HARVEY was born in England in 1578 and died in 1657. He received his grammar school education at the famous King's School in Canterbury . In 1593 he entered Caius College, Cambridge, and received his B. A. degree in 1597. In this period, it was not unusual for English Protestants interested in a scientific education to seek it in a continental Catholic university. Harvey chose the Universitas Juristarum, the more influential of the two universities which constituted the University of Padua in Italy and which had been attended by Thomas Linacre and John Caius, and where, incidently, the Dominican priests were associated with University functions. Competency in the traditional studies of the day was characteristic of William Harvey's intellectual development. The degree of Doctor of Physic was awarded to Harvey in 1602 with the unusual testimonial that " he had conducted himself so wonderfully well in the examination, and had shown such skill, memory, and learning that he had far surpassed even the great hopes which his examiners had formed of him. They decided therefore that he was skilled, expert, and most efficiently qualified both in arts and medicine, and to this they put their hands, unanimously, willingly, with complete agreement, and unhesitatingly." 1 In 1616 he gave his first Lumleian lectures in surgery at the Royal College of Physicians in London. The manuscript notes of his first course of lectures, the Prelectiones, are preserved and have been reproduced in facsimile and transcript.2 In these lectures he first enunciates the circulation of the blood. 1 D'Arcy Powers, William Harvey (London, 1897), pp. ~6-~7. • William Harvey, Prelectiones Anatomiae Unive:rsalis (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1886) . 175 176 HERBERT ALBERT RATNER He waited for 12 years, however, until 1628, before he published his great work entitled, An Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals. In this classic he formally demonstrated the true nature of the heart and that the motion of the blood was circular. This work is relatively short and takes up 86 pages in the standard English edition of his collected works.8 In 1648 Harvey's demonstration was attacked in a treatise published by Dr. Jean Riolan of Paris. Harvey answered his critic in two lengthy letters published in Cambridge in 1649. Harvey's second famous work, Anatomical Exercises on the Generation of Animals, which is over five times the length of the first, appeared in publication in 1651 through the solicitation and under the direction of Dr. George Ent, a well-known physician of the period. In his personal life and professional career Harvey had a wide circle of acquaintances and friends. Though it is not certain whether he knew Galileo who was a fellow student at Padua, he knew most of the leading contemporaries of his day. This included Boyle, Hooke, Hobbes, Dryden, Cowley, Descartes, Gilbert, Wren, Bacon and others, in addition to prominent physicians and anatomists. Harvey was extremely well-read and made reference in his lectures and writings to the Greek philosophers and scientists of the fourth through the seventh centuries, B. C., to many Greek writers of the Christian era, to numerous Latin writers including many of the poets, to Albert the Great, and to numerous Renaissance men of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In all, he made reference to approximately 100 authors in his 3 The Works of William Harvey, M.D. (London: Printed for the Sydenham Society, 1847): Translated from the Latin by Robert Willis, M.D. It includes An Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; The First Anatomical Exercise on the Circulation of the Blood to John Riolan; A Second Exercise to John Riolan, in Which Many Objections to the Circulation of the Blood are Refuted; Anatomical Exercises on the Generation of Animals, to Which are Added, Essays on Parturition, On the Membranes and Fluids of the Uterus, and on Conception; and miscellaneous items (Harvey's will, autopsy of Thomas Parr and nine short letters). WILLIAM HARVEY, M. D. 177 writings. In particular, he had a comprehensive working knowledge of Aristotle, as well as Aristotle's commentators, Avicenna...