when the statue, with the following complimentary inscription on the pedestal, was displayed:
GULIELMO HARVEIO
Viro monumentis suis immortali
Hoc insuper Collegium Medicorum Londinense
posuit.
Qui enim Sanguini motum
ut et
Animalibus ortum dedit,
Meruit esse
Stator Perpetuus.[1]
Harvey, in acknowledgment, it may have been, of the distinguished honour done him by his friends and colleagues, appears about this time to have commenced the erection at his own cost of a handsome addition to the College of Physicians. It was, as Aubrey informs us, "a noble building of Roman architecture (of rustic work, with Corinthian pilasters), comprising a great parlour, a kind of convocation house for the fellows to meet in below, and a library above. On the outside, on the frieze, in letters three inches long, was this inscription: Suasu et cura Fran. Prujeani, Præsidis, et Edmundi Smith, elect, inchoata et perfecta est hæc fabrica, An. mdcliii."[2] Nor was Harvey content merely to erect this building; he, further, furnished the library with books, and the museum with numerous objects of curiosity and a variety of surgical instruments. On the ceremony of this handsome addition to the College of Physicians being opened, which took place on the 2d of February, 1653, a sumptuous entertainment was provided at Harvey's expense, at which he received the pre-
- ↑ This statue perished with the building, in the great fire of London in 1666, and seems never to have been replaced. The hall of the present College of Physicians is not graced as was the old one in Harvey's time. The only sculptures of Harvey that I know of are busts, in the theatre of the College of Physicians and on his monument in Hempstead church, but of dates posterior to their subject, that at the College of Physicians being apparently after the portrait by Jansen in the library, and, as I am informed, by a sculptor of the name of Seemacher.
- ↑ Aubrey, l. c. p. 378.
