way we could scarce see a dogg, crow, kite, raven, or any bird, or anything to anatomise; only sum few miserable people, the reliques of the war and the plague, whom famine had made anatomies before I came.” Having returned to his practice in London at the close of the year 1636, he accompanied Charles I. in one of his journeys to Scotland (1639 or 1641). While at Edinburgh he visited the Bass Rock; he minutely describes its abundant population of sea-fowl in his treatise De generatione, and incidentally speaks of the account then credited of the solan goose growing on trees as a fable. He was in attendance on the king at the battle of Edgehill (October 1642), where he withdrew under a hedge with the prince of Wales and the duke of York (then boys of twelve and ten years old), “and took out of his pocket a book and read. But he had not read very long before a bullet of a great gun grazed on the ground near him, which made him remove his station,” as he afterwards told John Aubrey. After the indecisive battle, Harvey followed Charles I. to Oxford, “where,” writes the same gossiping narrator, “I first saw him, but was then too young to be acquainted with so great a doctor. I remember he came several times to our college (Trinity) to George Bathurst, B.D. who had a hen to hatch eggs in his chamber, which they opened daily to see the progress and way of generation.” In Oxford he remained three years, and there was some chance of his being superseded in his office at St Bartholomew’s hospital, “because he hath withdrawn himself from his charge, and is retired to the party in arms against the Parliament.” It was no doubt at this time that his lodgings at Whitehall were searched, and not only the furniture seized but also invaluable manuscripts and anatomical preparations.[1]
While with the king at Oxford he was made warden of Merton College, but a year later, in 1646, that city surrendered to Fairfax, and Harvey returned to London. He was now sixty-eight years old, and, having resigned his appointments and relinquished the cares of practice, lived in learned retirement with one or other of his brothers. It was in his brother Daniel’s house at Combe that Dr (afterwards Sir George) Ent, a faithful friend and disciple (1604–1689), visited him in 1650. “I found him,” he says, “with a cheerful and sprightly countenance investigating, like Democritus, the nature of things. Asking if all were well with him—‘How can that be,’ he replied, ‘when the state is so agitated with storms and I myself am yet in the open sea? And indeed, were not my mind solaced by my studies and the recollection of the observations I have formerly made, there is nothing which should make me desirous of a longer continuance. But thus employed, this obscure life and vacation from public cares which would disgust other minds is the medicine of mine.’” The work on which he had been chiefly engaged at Oxford, and indeed since the publication of his treatise on the circulation in 1628, was an investigation into the recondite but deeply interesting subject of generation. Charles I. had been an enlightened patron of Harvey’s studies, had put the royal deer parks at Windsor and Hampton Court at his disposal, and had watched his demonstration of the growth of the chick with no less interest than the movements of the living heart. Harvey had now collected a large number of observations, though he would probably have delayed their publication. But Ent succeeded in obtaining the manuscripts, with authority to print them or not as he should find them. “I went from him,” he says, “like another Jason in possession of the golden fleece, and when I came home and perused the pieces singly, I was amazed that so vast a treasure should have been so long hidden.” The result was the publication of the Exercitationes de generatione (1651).
This was the last of Harvey’s labours. He had now reached his seventy-third year. His theory of the circulation had been opposed and defended, and was now generally accepted by the most eminent anatomists both in his own country and abroad. He was known and honoured throughout Europe, and his own college (Caius) voted a statue in his honour (1652) viro monumentis suis immortali. In 1654 he was elected to the highest post in his profession, that of president of the college; but the following day he met the assembled fellows, and, declining the honour for himself on account of the infirmities of age, recommended the re-election of the late president Dr Francis Prujean (1593–1666). He accepted, however, the office of consiliarius, which he again held in the two following years. He had already enriched the college with other gifts besides the honour of his name. He had raised for them “a noble building of Roman architecture (rustic work with Corinthian pilasters), comprising a great parlour or conversation room below and a library above”; he had furnished the library with books, and filled the museum with “simples and rarities,” as well as with specimens of instruments used in the surgical and obstetric branches of medicine. At last he determined to give to his beloved college his paternal estate at Burmarsh in Kent. His wife had died some years before, his brothers were wealthy men, and he was childless, so that he was defrauding no heir when, in July 1656, he made the transfer of this property, then valued at £56 per annum, with provision for a salary to the college librarian and for the endowment of an annual oration, which is still given on the anniversary of the day. The orator, so Harvey orders in his deed of gift, is to exhort the fellows of the college “to search out and study the secrets of nature by way of experiment, and also for the honour of the profession to continue mutual love and affection among themselves.”
Harvey, like his contemporary and great successor Thomas Sydenham, was long afflicted with gout, but he preserved his activity of mind to an advanced age. In his eightieth year, on the 3rd of June 1657, he was attacked by paralysis, and though deprived of speech was able to send for his nephews and distribute his watch, ring, and other personal trinkets among them. He died the same evening, “the palsy giving him an easy passport,” and was buried with great honour in his brother Eliab’s vault at Hempstead in Essex, annorum et famae satur. In 1883 the lead coffin containing his remains was enclosed in a marble sarcophagus and moved to the Harvey chapel within the church.
John Aubrey, to whom we owe most of the minor particulars about Harvey which have been preserved, says: “In person he was not tall, but of the lowest stature, round faced, olivaster complexion, little eyes, round, very black, full of spirits; his hair black as a raven, but quite white twenty years before he died.” The best portrait of him extant is by Cornelius Jansen in the library of the College of Physicians, one of those rescued from the great fire, which destroyed their original hall in 1666. It has been often engraved, and is prefixed to the fine edition of his works published in 1766.
Harvey’s Work on the Circulation.—In estimating the character and value of the discovery announced in the Exercitatio de motu cordis et sanguinis, it is necessary to bear in mind the previous state of knowledge on the subject. Aristotle taught that in man and the higher animals the blood was elaborated from the food in the liver, thence carried to the heart, and sent by it through the veins over the body. His successors of the Alexandrian school of medicine, Erasistratus and Herophilus, further elaborated his system, and taught that, while the veins carried blood from the heart to the members, the arteries carried a subtle kind of air or spirit. For the practical physician only two changes had been made in this theory of the circulation between the Christian era and the 16th century. Galen had discovered that the arteries were not, as their name implies, merely air-pipes, but that they contained blood as well as vital air or spirit. And it had been gradually ascertained that the nerves (νεῦρα) which
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“Ignoscant mihi niveae animae, si, summarum injuriarum memor,
levem gemitum effudero. Doloris mihi haec causa est: cum, inter
nuperos nostros tumultus et bella plusquam civilia, serenissimum
regem (idque non solum senatus permissione sed et jussu) sequor,
rapaces quaedam manus non modo aedium mearum supellectilem
omnem expilarunt, sed etiam, quae mihi causa gravior querimoniae,
adversaria mea, multorum annorum laboribus parta, e museo meo
summoverunt. Quo factum est ut observationes plurimae, praesertim
de generatione insectorum, cum republicae literariae (ausim
dicere) detrimento, perierint.”—De gen., Ex. lxviii. To this loss
Cowley refers—
“O cursed war! who can forgive thee this?
Houses and towns may rise again,
And ten times easier ’tis
To rebuild Paul’s than any work of his.”
