36 BRITISH PHYSICIANS. England, and having again graduated at Cam- bridge, settled in the practice of his profession in London. In 1604 he was admitted a candidate of the College of Physicians, and was elected fel- low about three years after. About this time the governors of St. Bartholomew's Hospital made an order, that on the decease of Dr. Wilkinson, one of the physicians to that charity. Dr. Harvey should succeed him in that office, which event took place in the following year. But the most important appointment which he obtained, was that of reader of the anatomical and surgical lectures at the College of Physicians in 161.5, when he was thirty- seven years old. He now seriously prosecuted his researches on the circulation of the blood, and it was in the course of these lectures that he first publicly announced his new doctrines ; but though he taught his opi- nions on this subject viva voce to his auditors, he continued assiduously to repeat his experiments, and verify his observations, for many years, before he ventured to commit them to the press. It is not intended to enter into the minute argu- ments and physiological reasonings by which he maintained the truth of his doctrine, but it may be mentioned, that while Fabricius ab Aquapendente had taught him, at Padua, that the use of the valves of the veins was to moderate the flow of blood from their trunks into their branches, Harvey more rationally and more obviously insisted that the valves were intended to facihtate the return of the blood to the heart. Tie up a vein, or com- press it, as is done in the simple operation of vene- section, and you see the part of the vein at a greater
