Page:The Harveian oration 1906.djvu/28

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
22
THE GROWTH OF TRUTH

of the picture of ‘The Anatomy Lecture by Bannister’, which is in the Hunterian collection, Glasgow, and a photograph of which Dr. Payne has recently put in our library, we can bring to mind this memorable occasion. We see the ‘Anatomy’, one of the six annually handed over to the College, on the table, the prosector standing by the skeleton near at hand, and very probably on the wall the very Tabulae of dissection of the arteries, veins, and nerves that hang above us to-day. But the centre of attention is the lecturer—a small dark man, wand in hand, with black piercing eyes, a quick vivacious manner, and with an ease and grace in demonstrating, which bespeaks the mastery of a subject studied for twenty years with a devotion that we can describe as Hunterian. A Fellow of nine years’ standing, there was still the salt of youth in William Harvey when, not as we may suppose, without some trepidation, he faced his auditors on this second day— a not uncritical audience, including many men well versed in the knowledge of the time and many who had heard all the best lecturers of Europe.

The President, Henry Atkins, after whose name in our Register stands the mysterious word ‘Corb’, had already had his full share of official lectures, less burdensome three hundred years ago than now. Let us hope the lecture of the previous day had whetted his somewhat jaded appetite. The Censors of the year formed an interesting group : John Argent, a Cambridge man, a 'great prop of the college’, and often President, of whom but little seems known; Richard Palmer, also of Cambridge, and remembered now only for his connexion with Prince Henry’s typhoid fever, as Dr. Norman Moore has told us; Mathew Gwinne of Oxford, first Professor of Physic at Gresham College and a play-