In June, 1607, Harvey was elected a fellow of the College of Physicians, not yet Royal; and by 1609 he had been appointed one of the physicians to St. Bartholomew's Hospital, a charity justly proud to remember the fact. In 1615 he was made Lumleian lecturer at the College of Physicians, a post he held until 1656. In 1618 Harvey was appointed physician to King James I. and VI., and in 1631, physician-in-ordinary to King Charles I.
Lecture notes of Harvey's dated 1616, now in the British Museum, show that by that time he was teaching the doctrine of the circulation, but it was not till 1628 that he published with William Fitzer at Frankfort-on-the-Main a quarto entitled "Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus." An epoch-making essay this! and I am not forgetting either Schwann on the cell-theory or Darwin on the "Origin of Species." The "De Motu" is a good example of a great book which is not necessarily a large one; it has only 72 pages. Harvey published his book at Frankfort because of the important bookfair held there annually, so that the work might have a better chance of being rapidly taken up than if brought out in England, then vastly more isolated from the Continent than it is nowadays.
Possibly no epoch-making book had a worse reception. Previously to publishing the "De Motu," Harvey's practise was very large, for he was a skillful surgeon and obstetrician; but Aubrey tells us that after 1628
He fell mightily in his practise; 'twas believed by the vulgar that he was crack-brained and all the physicians were against him.
Harvey was quite alive to the possibility of opposition and even dislike, so truly did he know that anything new is objected to, so difficult is it to overcome mental inertia. Listen to him:
These views as usual pleased some more, some less; some chid and calumniated me, and laid it to me as a crime that I had dared to depart from the precepts and opinion of all anatomists. I tremble lest I have mankind at large for my enemies, so much doth wont and custom become a second nature.
He got what he expected, the usual treatment meted out to those who dare to upset what has been believed for a long time; people do not like to be disturbed physically or mentally.
From 1628 onwards, Harvey's spare time may be said to have been occupied in defending and expounding his so-called "doctrine" of the circulation, for both at home and abroad all the professors of anatomy were at first disbelievers. Harvey is most long-suffering towards that "tympanitic philistine," as Huxley called him, Riolanus of Paris. He is most courteous to him, he calls him "a learned and skillful physician, and the Corypheus of anatomists." Riolan was physician to Marie de Medici, mother of Louis XIII., and of Queen Henrietta Maria. Harvey met him once at Whitehall.
The great discovery had plenty of opposition everywhere, but I am
