—two have left their names embedded in anatomical nomenclature: in the circle of Willis and the antrum of Highmore.
It was in conversation with Boyle that Harvey admitted that the idea of the circulation came to him after pondering on the way in which the valves of the veins were placed with reference to the heart. Boyle's words are:
When I asked our famous Harvey, in the only discourse I had with him, what were the things that induced him to think of a circulation of the blood, he answered me, that when he took notice that the valves, etc.
Now it is a very remarkable thing that Bacon in all his writings has not one word on the circulation, though its discovery was such an admirable example of the success of the inductive method he so laboriously recommended.
One other very great Englishman was a contemporary of Harvey, I mean the author of the plays and poems known as Shakespeare's. It has been conjectured that this very gifted person did know of the circulation and made allusion to it in his writings. Having looked into the question pretty carefully, I have come to the conclusion that this writer did not understand the circulation of the blood, although he had some acquaintance with anatomical terms and with the medicine of his day.
The champions of the Harveian "doctrine" were all foreigners, I suppose on the principle that a prophet hath no honor in his own country. The great philosopher Descartes convinced himself of the truth of Harvey's assertions by making a large number of dissections; but Descartes was not a medical man and not a teacher. Professors Sylvius of Leyden, Trullius of Borne and Bartholinus of Copenhagen were all ardent defenders of the Harveian faith. So enlightened a contemporary as Sydenham, the English Hippocrates, was not a convert. An admirable observer, he had, nevertheless, not a receptive mind; it was strong enough, but it was narrow. Alluding to Harvey and his school—the experimental one—he said:
We may know the larger organs of the body, but its minute structure will always be hidden from us. No microscope will ever show us the minute passages by which the chyle leaves the intestine or show by which the blood passes from the arteries to the veins.
This is in his "De podagra" and his "De Hydrope" published in 1683. Sydenham was a little behind the times, for twenty-three years before Malpighi had, by the despised microscope, found the capillaries by which the blood of the arteries of the lung reaches the veins of that organ, and only five years after this statement was made, namely, in 1688, Leeuwenhoek, the Dutchman, discovered the capillaries of the general vascular system. So much for prophecy in biology when it is not based on a direct study of nature!
