Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Harwood, Busick
HARWOOD, Sir BUSICK (1745?–1814), professor of anatomy at Cambridge, second son of John Harwood of Newmarket, was born there about 1745. After apprenticeship to an apothecary, he qualified as a surgeon, and obtained an Indian appointment. In India he received considerable sums for medical attendance on native princes, but his health suffering he returned to England and entered at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he graduated M.B. in 1785 and M.D. in 1790, having been elected F.S.A. in 1783 and F.R.S. in 1784. For his M.B. degree he read a thesis on the transfusion of blood, in which he gave an account of numerous experiments he had made on transfusion from sheep to dogs which had lost a considerable quantity of blood. In one case a pointer was bled nearly to death, and blood being then transfused from a sheep, the dog leaped from the table, walked home, and experienced no subsequent inconvenience. This experiment was performed before a crowded meeting at the anatomical schools in the old Botanic Garden at Cambridge, and was said to have been often repeated with success at Harwood's lectures. An account of these experiments is given in a note in Hutton, Shaw, and Pearson's ‘Abridgment of the Philosophical Transactions,’ 1809, i. 185, 186. Harwood was dissatisfied with the reasons for the discontinuance of transfusion in cases of loss of blood in his time. He intended to experiment as to the communication of diseases and of medicines by transfusion, but appears to have published nothing on the subject. In 1785, on the death of Charles Collignon [q. v.], he was elected professor of anatomy at Cambridge. In 1800 he was appointed Downing professor of medicine, retaining his anatomical chair. In 1806 he was knighted. He died at Downing College on 10 Nov. 1814. He married in 1798 the only daughter of the Rev. Sir John Peshall, bart., of Horsley, but left no children.
Henry Gunning gives an unfavourable account of Harwood, who was a popular bon-vivant, witty, but very licentious in conversation. During his morning walk he would in term time always pick up several guests for his two-o'clock dinner, at which it was no unusual thing for him to carve the turbot his demonstrator had dissected for lecture the day before; his guests almost always went to his lecture with him at four. He had covered his walls with small water-colour portraits, six or eight in a frame, done by one Harding, to whom he asked all his university acquaintances to sit. A quarrel arose between Harwood and W. L. Mansel [q. v.] about these portraits, which led Harwood to send a challenge to Sir Isaac Pennington, the regius professor of physic, which the latter refused to notice; but the messenger, an undergraduate, published the affair in the London papers. Harwood published the first volume of a ‘System of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology,’ Cambridge, 1796, pp. 72, 4to, with fifteen plates, and some synopses of his courses of lectures.
[Gent. Mag. 1814, lxxxiv. pt. ii. p. 805; Gunning's Reminiscences, i. 50–6, ii. 95–9; Notes and Queries, 5th ser. iii. 116.]