on the 3d of June, 1657, in the eightieth year of his age. About ten o'clock in the morning, as Aubrey tells us, on attempting to speak, he found that he had lost the power of utterance, that, in the language of the vulgar, he had the dead palsy in his tongue. He did not lose his other faculties, however; but knowing that his end was approaching, he sent for his nephews, to each of whom he gave some token of remembrance,—his watch to one, his signet ring to another, and so on. He farther made signs to Sambroke, his apothecary, to let him blood in the tongue; but this did little or no good, and by and by, in the evening of the day on which he was stricken, he died; "the palsy," as Aubrey has it, "giving him an easy passport."[1]
The funeral took place a few days afterwards, the body being attended far beyond the walls of the city by a long train of his friends of the College of Physicians, and the remains were finally deposited "in a vault at Hempstead, in Essex, which his brother Eliab had built; he was lapt in lead, and on his breast, in great letters, his name—Dr. William Harvey. * * * I was at his funeral," continues Aubrey, "and helpt to carry him into the vault." And there, at this hour, he lies, the lead that laps him little changed, and showing indis-
- ↑ Anbrey gives a positive denial to "the scandall that ran strongly against him (Harvey), viz. that he made himself away, to put himself out of his paine, by opium." Aubrey proceeds: "The scandall aforesaid is from Sir Charles Scarborough's saying that he (Harvey) had, towards his latter end, a preparation of opium and I know not what, which he kept in his study to take if occasion should serve, to put him out of his paine, and which Sir Charles promised to give him. This I believe to be true; but do not at all believe that he really did give it him. The palsey did give him an easie passeport." (1. c. p. 385.) Harvey, if he meditated anything of the kind above alluded to, would not be the only instance on record of even a strong-minded man shrinking from a struggle which he knows must prove hopeless, from which there is no issue but one. Nature, as the physician knows, does often kill the body by a very lingering and painful process. In his practice he is constantly required to smooth the way for the unhappy sufferer. In his own case he may sometimes wish to shorten it. Such requests as Harvey may be presumed to have made to Scarborough, are frequently enough preferred to medical men: it is needless to say that they are never granted.
