racy, and technical knowledge. Among his most successful illustrations are those to Lane's translation of the Thousand and One Nights; to Mr. Charles Knight's Pictorial Shakspeare, Land we live in, &c.; Northcote's Fables; the Tower Menagerie; the Pilgrim's Progress; and Wood's Natural History. Harvey died on the 13th of January, 1866.—J. T—e.
HARVEY, William, M.D., the discoverer of the function of the heart and circulation of the blood, was the eldest son of Thomas Harvey, yeoman, and Joan Halke, his wife, and born at Folkestone, Kent, in 1578. Amid the wreck of reputations which time so commonly makes, the name and fame of Harvey, after the long lapse of more than two hundred and eighty years, still meet us with undimmed lustre. His figure, indeed, is one of the imperishable beacons on the path of human progress. In relation to the physics of animal bodies, Harvey stands precisely in the same position as does Copernicus to the physics of the solar system. Each of these great men in his own sphere gave the first rude shock to prescription and authority, and kindled the torch that has since lighted science on her way in developing the system of the universe, and in eliciting the laws of life and organization. It is impossible to overestimate the influence which Harvey's induction has had on the progress of physiological knowledge, and on the science, as contrasted with the empirical practice, of medicine. Harvey received the rudiments of his liberal education at the grammar-school of Canterbury, and at sixteen years of age was a student of Caius-Gonvil college, Cambridge, where he kept the usual terms and graduated B.A. in 1597. Selecting physic as his profession, and England in those days boasting of no school of medicine, Harvey, like the rest of his countrymen who chose the same path, had to betake himself to the continent for instruction. The medical schools of France and Italy were in their palmiest days towards the end of the sixteenth century; and it was at the university of Padua, under the celebrated Fabricius of Acquapendente that the seeds of that grand induction were sown which has made the name of our English Harvey immortal. Having spent five years at Padua in the study of his profession, Harvey achieved his degree of doctor in medicine; and returning to England in the course of the same year (1602), and complying with the requisite forms, he also obtained his doctor's diploma from his old alma mater, Cambridge. In 1604, being then twenty-six years of age, he married the daughter of Dr. Lancelot Browne; and entering his name on the list of candidates for the fellowship of the College of Physicians, he settled himself for practice in London. In 1609 he was appointed physician to St. Bartholomew's hospital, and dedicating himself steadily to his professional duties, he appears to have risen rapidly to distinction; for we find him, after no very protracted servitude, in the position of physician to many of the foremost men of the age—Thomas, earl of Arundel, the Lord-chancellor Bacon, &c. The year 1615 is memorable in the life of William Harvey; he was chosen lecturer on anatomy and surgery to the College of Physicians on the foundation of Dr. Richard Caldwall; and in this new capacity he began within a year to give oral expositions of his new views of the action of the heart and the motion of the blood through all parts of the body in a continuous circle. It was not, however, till long after that he gave wider notoriety to his discoveries through the agency of the press, by publishing his "Exercitationes de motu Cordis et Sanguinis" at Frankfort-on-the-Maine in 1628. Up to this time the views of Harvey were probably unknown beyond the sphere of his own immediate influence. Till after the publication of Frankfort we perceive no stir in the anatomical world about the circulation of the blood, and no notice of Harvey as an innovator, and therefore, in the vulgar apprehension, a dangerous person. Shortly after the publication of the work on the heart and blood, however, we have evidences that the subject was attracting the notice of anatomists; for various dissertations in contravention of his views began to make their appearance on the continent of Europe. At home he had no public opponent; but the vulgar here had their revenge in another way, by questioning his skill as a practitioner; so that he complained to his contemporary, Aubrey, that "after the coming out of his book his practice had greatly declined." It is important here to observe that the conclusions of Harvey certainly took the world by surprise. Among his original opponents there is no hint at similar views already entertained by others. Differing entirely from current and long accredited notions, Harvey's inferences were at first simply rejected, and rejected by all the continental authorities with singular unanimity; his merits as a discoverer in contrast with others are never made subject of discussion. It is only by-and-by, when a possibility of Harvey being in the right was dawning on men's minds, that envy began to see things in the writings of older anatomists which had never been seen there before, and which, with the new interpretation, went to rob Harvey of almost all merit as a discoverer. The works of Columbus, Cæsalpinus, and Servetus, were now declared to contain enunciations of the circulation of the blood—of the lesser circulation at all events, if not of the greater; and strange to say, it was left for a writer of the present day, the latest of the biographers of Harvey, to show, by immediate reference to the writings of these celebrated men, that they had in no instance conceived a circulation of the blood in the sense in which Harvey demonstrated and we now understand it. (See the Life of Harvey, prefixed to his works, edited for the Sydenham Society by R. Willis, M.D., 8vo; London, 1847.) Till Harvey wrote, the liver was regarded as the origin of the veins, which were alone believed to be the proper bloodvessels; the arteries, as their name implies, were rather channels for air or vital spirits, with which a little blood was accidentally mixed. The heart, the moving power in Harvey's system, was the generator of heat and vital spirits to his predecessors, and served but as a sort of cistern, from which the blood was ejected by the act of inspiration, and to which it reverted in the act of expiration. How could there be a circulation of the blood with its immediate and necessary agent overlooked? Harvey's title gives a key to the right understanding of the state of the question when he himself appeared. It is not an exercise on the circulation of the blood, but "Exercises on the movement of the Heart and Blood:" the action of the heart has precedence, as of right, over the motion of the blood. The action of the heart once understood, the double circulation of the blood through the lungs, and through the body at large, follows as a necessity from the arrangement of the wonderful valvular apparatus of the propelling organ. Though his scientific inquiries may have interfered with his popularity, and led to the decline of his general practice, Harvey seems to have made steady way with the court and the great world. Some years after he had been made lecturer to the College of Physicians, he was chosen one of the physicians extraordinary to James I., with promise of reversion of the office of physician-in-ordinary on the first vacancy; and to this dignity he at length attained, but it was after the death of James and when his son Charles had already filled the throne for several years. The treatise on the heart and blood is dedicated to Charles, who is reported to have taken such an immediate interest in the studies of his physician as to have commanded a demonstration of the matters in question. Charles also most liberally furnished Harvey from the royal parks with the does which he required in the observations he was now pursuing upon the subject of generation. Harvey's position as physician to the court led, in the course of the year 1630, to an engagement as medical attendant on the young duke of Lennox in his travels on the continent, in the course of which Venice and the north of Italy must have been visited. In 1636 we again find Harvey in the suite of the earl of Arundel in his extraordinary embassy to the emperor; and in the city of Nuremberg seeking an interview with the celebrated anatomist, Caspar Hoffmann, for the purpose of demonstrating to him from the subject his new views of the heart's actions and the motion of the blood. Charles having in the course of 1640 brought matters to a crisis between himself and his people, the standard of despotic power on one hand, and of parliamentary and constitutional government on the other, was unfurled, and the battle of Edgehill was fought in 1641. At this conflict our Harvey was present. "During the fight," says Aubrey, "the prince and duke of York were committed to his care. He told me," continues the gossip, "that he withdrew with them under a hedge and took out a book and read. But he had not read very long before a bullet of a great gun grazed on the ground near him, which made him remove his station." Charles continuing to have his head-quarters at Oxford for several years after Edgehill, Harvey continued therewith him—but not entirely occupied with his court duties, as it appears; for Aubrey informs us incidentally that, along with Dr. Bathurst, "he had a hen set upon eggs for the study of generation," a subject which seems for many years to have absorbed a large share of his attention. At Oxford Harvey had the usual complimentary honour of D.C.L. conferred on him,
