In the oft-quoted statement that Harvey, 'conquering envy, hath established a new doctrine in his lifetime,' Hobbes was right so far as England and Holland are concerned. But it was far otherwise in France, where it met with a bitter and protracted hostility. The Medical School of the University of Paris, at the time one of the best-organized and most important in Europe, declined to accept the circulation of the blood during his lifetime and for some years after his death. The history of the period is pictured for us in vivid colours in that journal intime which Gui Patin kept up with his friends, Spohn and Falconet of Lyons and the Belins (pere et fils). With all his faults, particularly his scandalous lack of charity, one cannot but feel the keenest sympathy with this dear old man. Devoted to his saints, Hippocrates and Galen, Fernel and Duret, and to his teachers, Pietre and Riolan, to him the circulation of the blood was never more than an ingenious paradox. To such a lover of books and of good literature every- thing can be forgiven, and in his letters we follow with deepest interest his vigorous campaign against his dear enemies, the Cuisiniers arabesques, who had enslaved people and physicians alike, the haemophobes, the chemists, the astrologers and the stibiate , or as he calls it, the Stygiate group. To him the Koran was less dangerous than the works of Paracelsus, the appearance of the new Geneva edition of which he deeply deplores. Reverence for Galen and friendship with Riolan, rather than any deep interest in the question, inspired his opposition. To him the new doctrine was ridiculous, and it was he who called the partisans of it circulateurs in allusion to the Latin word, circulator, meaning charlatan. In 1652 he writes to Spohn that the question is still open whether the blood passes through the septum
