Charles I., King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith." He was with this king at the battle of Edgehill. Much of his time was occupied in attendance at the royal court, and yet he found opportunity to follow the bent of his genius in anatomical and physiological researches.
Being wealthy, he remembered the necessities of his profession, and munificently bestowed money in the erection of a fine edifice for the College of Physicians, enriched it with a fine pathological museum and library, and endowed it with funds, wherewith, as a part of the bestowment, an annual oration is delivered for the advancement of medical science.
But to return to the subject under consideration: methinks I hear you ask, after the foregoing recital of what so many observers have discovered, "What remained for this great man Harvey to discover or explain?"
Dr. Rolleston[1] answers: "Nothing less than the circulation itself. His predecessors had but impinged, and that by guess-work, upon different segments of the circle, and then gone off at a tangent into outer darkness, while he worked, and proved, and demonstrated, round its entire periphery."
True, as Flourens says, when Harvey appeared, everything relative to the circulation of the blood had been indicated or suspected; nothing had been established. Servetus knew nothing of the general circulation; Columbus adhered to the Galenic error of the origin of the veins in the liver; Cæsalpinus, who perceived the two circulations, and came so near to comprehending them, still held belief in the error of perforations in the ventricular septum; and, lastly, Fabricius—who, by-the-way, was not the very first to discover valves in the blood-vessels, but who discovered more of them than any other observer, and wrote more and better than any of his predecessors—Fabricius, I say, did not understand the use of the valves, supposing them to be for the purpose of strengthening the veins and checking the too rapid flux of blood through them.
The medical historian Sprengel has cunningly remarked that nothing explains Harvey better than "his education at Padua," under the teachings of Fabricius.
If it was a piece of good fortune for Harvey to enjoy the teachings of Fabricius, it was a happy thing, and a thrice fortunate thing, for the world, that the study of the circulation should have fallen into the hands of a man so well fitted to investigate it and to elaborate the true theory of the motion of the heart and blood.
Before Harvey, it was not known that the heart is the motive power—it was presumed to be the lungs; he it was who demonstrated every step in the progress of the blood in its double circuit, stilled all clamor of disputants, and convinced the world that he was right.
- ↑ "Harveian Oration" for 1873.
