HARVEY, William (1578–1657), the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, was the eldest son of Thomas Harvey, a prosperous Kentish yeoman, and was born at Folkestone on April 1, 1578. After passing through the grammar school of Canterbury, on the 31st of May 1593, having just entered his sixteenth year, he became a pensioner of Caius College, Cambridge; at nineteen he took his B.A. degree, and soon after, having chosen the profession of medicine, he went to study at Padua under Fabricius and Casserius (see Anatomy, vol. i. pp. 809, 810). At the age of twenty-four Harvey became doctor of medicine, April 1602. Returning to England in the first year of James I., he settled in London; and two years later he married the daughter of Dr Lancelot Brown, who had been physician to Queen Elizabeth. In the same year Harvey became a candidate of the Royal College of Physicians, and was duly admitted a fellow (June 1607). In 1609 he obtained the reversion of the post of physician to St Bartholomew's Hospital. His application was supported by the king himself and by Dr Atkins, the president of the college. On the death of Dr Wilkinson in the course of the same year he succeeded to the post. He was thrice censor of the college, and in 1615 was appointed Lumleian lecturer. In the following year—the year of Shakespeare's death—he began his course of lectures, and first brought forward his views upon the movements of the heart and blood.[1] Meantime his practice increased, and he had the lord chancellor, Francis Bacon, and the earl of Arundel among his patients. In 1618 he was appointed physician extraordinary to James I., and on the next vacancy physician in ordinary to his successor. In 1625, the year of the publication of the Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis, he was elected treasurer of the College of Physicians, but at the end of the following year he resigned the office, in order, by command of Charles I., to accompany the young duke of Lennox (James Stuart, afterwards duke of Richmond) on his travels. He appears to have visited Italy, and returned in 1632. Four years later he accompanied the earl of Arundel on his embassy to the emperor. He was eager in collecting objects of natural history, sometimes causing the earl anxiety for his safety by his excursions in a country infested by robbers after the Thirty Years War. In a letter written on this journey, he says—"By the way we could scarce see a dog, crow, kite, raven, or any bird, or anything to anatomize; only some few miserable people, the reliques of the war and the plague, whom famine had made anatomies before I came." Having returned to his practice in London at the close of the year 1636, he accompanied Charles I. in one of his journeys to Scotland (1639 or 1641). While at Edinburgh he visited the Bass Rock; he minutely describes its abundant population of sea-fowl in his treatise De Generatione, and incidentally speaks of the then credited account of the solan goose growing on trees as a fable. He was in attendance on the king at the battle of Edgehill (October 1642), where he withdrew under a hedge with the prince of Wales and the duke of York (then boys of twelve and ten years old), "and took out of his pocket 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," as he afterwards told Aubrey. After the indecisive battle, Harvey followed Charles I. to Oxford, "where," writes the same gossiping narrator, "I first saw him, but was then too young to be acquainted with so great a doctor. I remember he came several times to our college (Trinity) to George Bathurst, B.D., who had a hen to hatch eggs in his chamber, which they opened daily to see the progress and way of generation." In Oxford he remained three years, and there was some chance of his being superseded in his office at St Bartholomew's Hospital, "because he hath withdrawn himself from his charge, and is retired to the party in arms against the Parliament." It was no doubt at this time that his lodgings at Whitehall were searched, and not only the furniture seized but also invaluable manuscripts and anatomical preparations.[2]
While with the king at Oxford he was made warden of Merton College, but a year later, in 1646, that city surrendered to Fairfax, and Harvey returned to London. He was now sixty-eight years old, and, having resigned his appointments and relinquished the cares of practice, lived in learned retirement with one or other of his brothers. It was in his brother Daniel's house at Combe that Dr (after wards Sir George) Ent, a faithful friend and disciple (1604–1689), visited him in 1650. "I found him," he says, "with a cheerful and sprightly countenance investigating, like Democritus, the nature of things. Asking if all were well with him—'How can that be', he replied, 'when the state is so agitated with storms and I myself am yet in the open sea? And indeed, were not my mind solaced by my studies and the recollection of the observations I have formerly made, there is nothing which should make me desirous of a longer continuance. But thus employed, this obscure life and vacation from public cares which would disgust other minds is the medicine of mine.'" The work on which he had been chiefly engaged at Oxford, and indeed since the publication of his treatise on the circulation in 1628, was an investigation into the recondite but deeply interesting subject of generation. Charles I. had been an enlightened patron of Harvey's studies, had put the royal deer parks at Windsor and Hampton Court at his disposal, and had watched his demonstration of the growth of the chick with no less interest than the movements of the living heart. Harvey had now collected a large number of observations, though he would probably have delayed their publication. But Ent succeeded in obtaining the manuscripts, with authority to print them or not as he should find them. "I went from him," he says, "like another Jason in possession of the golden fleece, and when I came home and perused the pieces singly, I was amazed that so vast a treasure should have been so long hidden." The result was the publication of the Exercitationes de Generatione (1651).
This was the last of Harvey's labours. He had now reached his seventy-third year. His theory of the circulation had been opposed and defended, and was now generally accepted by the most eminent anatomists both at home and abroad. He was known and honoured throughout Europe, and his own college erected a statue in his honour (1652), "viro monumentis suis immortali." In 1654 he was elected to the highest post in his profession, that of president of the college; but the following day he met the assembled fellows, and, declining the honour for himself on account of the infirmities of age, recommended the re-election of the late president Dr Prujean. He accepted,
- ↑ A venerable MS. notebook in Harvey's own crabbed handwriting was discovered only lately in the British Museum, with the title "Prælectiones anatomicæ," &c., this, so far as it has been deciphered, contains the germs of his great discovery.
- ↑ "Ignoscant mihi niveæ animæ, si, summarum injuriarum memor, levem gemitum effudero. Doloris mihi hæc causa est: cum, inter nuperos nostros tumultus et bella plusquam civilia, serenissimum regem (idque non solum senatus permissione sed et jussu) sequor, rapaces quædam manus non modo ædium mearum supellectilem omnem expilarunt, sed etiam, quæ mihi causa gravior querimoniæ, adversaria mea, multorum annorum laboribus parta, e museo meo summoverunt. Quo factum est ut observations plurimæ, præsertim de generatione insectorum, cum republicæ literariæ (ausim dicere) detrimento, perierint."—De Gen., Ex. Ixviii. To this loss Cowley refers—
"0 cursed war! who can forgive thee this?
Houses and towns may rise again,
And ten times easier tis
To rebuild Paul's than any work of his. "
