I sought to discover the motions and uses of the heart from actual inspection and not from the writings of others; at length, and by using greater and daily diligence and investigaion, making frequent inspection of many and various animals, and collating numerous observations, I thought I had attained to the truth, etc.
He says he has gone to work, "in order that what is false may be set right by dissection, multiplied experience and accurate observation." No short cuts, no shirking of trouble: no royal road to physiology. He goes on:
Doctrine once sown strikes deep its root, and respect for antiquity influences all men. Still "the die is cast," and my trust is in my love of truth and in the candor of cultivated minds. Harvey was a gentleman.
Harvey demonstrated to any one who wished to see; to Hoffman at Nuremberg, to Vesling at Padua, to King Charles I., to whom he showed much: the king went with his physician to see a patient, a son of a Lord Montgomery, whose heart was congenitally exposed (ectopia cordis). Harvey dedicated his "De Motu" to the king.
Harvey did.not apparently think of injecting the vascular system with some kind of colored liquid, as was done shortly after his death by several observers, notably by Euyseh of Amsterdam. But even had he so filled the vessels and therefore the capillaries, he could not, in the absence of all histological technique, have seen them in the opaque tissues. Harvey made the capillaries a logical necessity, Malpighi made them a histological certainty. But Harvey did much more than discover the mechanism of the circulation. He attempted with all the assiduity of his nature to discover the mechanism of reproduction and the course of development of the embryo.
Inexorably hampered by having no microscope wherewith to explore the ultravisible, Harvey nevertheless reached conclusions which have stood the test of time. He insisted that that small white speck on the surface of the yolk (the cicatricula) was the precursor of the chick, that the whole future animal came from a fertilized germ, and that every living being came from an egg (ovum). Such were by no means the views held by the majority of naturalists in his day; he was once more ahead of his time. Not until 1827, by von Baer, was the full truth of these things substantiated.
Harvey when Warden of Merton College, Oxford, where he was for two years when Oxford held out for Charles, associated himself with a Dr. Bathurst in experiments on development. Dr. Bathurst had hens laying eggs in bis rooms in college, so that the embryo chick might be studied at any stage of its evolution.
Harvey furthermore wrote a treatise on respiration and one on insects; these, along with notes of post-mortem examinations (pathological anatomy), were all destroyed when his rooms in Whitehall were ransacked by the soldiers of the Parliament in 1642, an indelible stain
