THE GROWTH OF TRUTH
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‘Still the die is cast, and my trust is in the love of truth and the candour that inheres in cultivated minds.' With these words he consoles himself, knowing from
experience that the publication of even a portion of the work, as in one place he calls the little book, would raise a tempest. Zachariah Wood in the preface to the English edition, 1673, expresses what many of his contemporaries must have felt, 'Truly a bold man indeed,
O disturber of the quiet of physicians! O seditious
citizen of the Physical Commonwealth! who first of all
durst oppose an opinion conformed for so many ages by the consent of all.' De Bach of Amsterdam
describes the dilemma in which teachers found themselves : 'This new thing I did examine, which the first entrance did seem very easily to be refuted, but being weighed in a just balance, and having added to reason my own ey-sight it was found inexpugnable, nay (the very prick of truth enforcing) to be embraced with both arms. What should I doe? Must Hippocrates be left, Galen slighted? No, if we follow the truth senced with reason and our sense, we are still Hippocrates his, we are still Galens' (English edition, 1653).
The history of the next thirty years illustrates the truth of Locke's dictum in the struggle for acceptance. Not the least interesting part of the story, it should be told at greater length and with more detail than it has yet received—more than I am able to give it. That the repeated demonstrations, aided by the strong personal influence of the man, brought the College, as a body, to the new views is witnessed rather by the esteem and affection the Fellows bore to Harvey than by any direct evidence. The appearance of the book in 1628 made no great stir; it was not a literary sensation—a not uncommon fate of epoch-making works, the authors of
