Charles West

“ Let these suffice as samples of the men with whom Harvey was in daily intercourse. It would be easy enough, especially if one travelled beyond the somewhat narrow circle of those whose pursuits were exclusively connected with the profession of medicine, to swell the list of those remarkable alike for their genius and their culture, who were the inheritors of all that was most worth the possessing of that wonderful renaissance, that new birth of the world, out of which came alike the evil and the good of modern society. ”

“ But our profession gives us, in its daily exercise, the solution of the problem. We have to do with the spoilt, not with the perfect; the meaning presses on us; we find it in a brief sentence, half of which most are ready to utter with reverence, ‘Deus qui humanæ substantiæ dignitatem mirabiliter condidisti;’ ‘God who in creating human nature didst wonderfully dignify it;’ but two words are still wanting to complete it, ‘et mirabilius reformasti,’ ‘and hast still more wonderfully renewed it.’ These solve the otherwise insoluble equation, these give the answer to the enigma. ”

“ So long as we do not deify human intellect, every triumph that it achieves enriches all; and it is as proud a thing for us to be able to claim citizenship with Newton or with Bacon as with Wellington or with Nelson. Nor is this all, but in Harvey’s time the manner in which he conducted his enquiries was in its teachings of value little less than was the result at which he arrived. ”

“ Our great benefactors are they who have left us the inheritance of their example. They are such as Sydenham, who, with clear, open intellect, looked around him in search of truth: who used theories and systems as counters to mark with, or as the cords with which to tie his facts into bundles for greater convenience, and more handy reference. ”

“ I sought in the Orations, and especially in the earlier ones, for something that might have enabled me to set the man Harvey before you, ‘in his habit as he lived;’ for while but few are gifted with any measure of his deep insight, or can follow even at a distance the track of his genius, it would profit all of us to learn the lesson of his patriotism, his loyalty, his open-handed bounty, his forgiveness of injury and detraction, his deep religious feeling. ”

“ But even for those who are not able to subscribe to Pascal’s creed, there is yet enough in all the changes of scientific theory and opinion to lead them when doing battle for some hypothesis that may seem opposed to old beliefs, to bear in mind that after all they may be mistaken, that the ancient creed may have more truth in it than seems. I know of no more wholesome state of mind for the investigation of truth than the ever-present consciousness of the possibility of error. ”

“ President, and Fellows of the College of Physicians:—Few things are more difficult than to preserve alive for many years the spirit of an anniversary celebration. The memory of even a national deliverance grows faint; the horrors of war, the contest with the oppressor, are alike forgotten; a long peace effaces the recollection of the struggle to attain it, and of the hero by whom it was won. ”

“ Between Fabricius, honoured by and adding honour to the dignity of a Knight of St. Mark, and Harvey, a fast friendship seems to have sprung up, or rather that loving relationship which is so beautiful between the youth scarce twenty and the old man of well-nigh seventy years. ”

“ The hasty traveller, indeed, who stops for an hour or two on his way to Venice to take a hurried glance at the chapel of Giotto scarcely dreams as he treads the grass-grown streets of the deserted city,
‘Where wasteful time debateth with decay,’
how large a space Padua has filled in the intellectual life of Europe. [13] And yet it was once a university with 18,000 students; a true republic of letters, and a republic of most democratic kind. The Professors, originally elected by the students, were in Harvey’s time still nominated by the University. ”

“ Such was the man, such were his pursuits; loving knowledge for its own sake, loving it too not in pride of intellect, but in humility of heart, believing that it, like every good and perfect gift, cometh down from above from the Father of lights; and his longing for it seems to have become stronger as he grew older. ”

“ None of us who can remember the first broaching of Schwann’s famous theory of cell-formation, but must have been struck by the modifications which thirty years have introduced into the doctrines then propounded. We may take a fact for true as far as our means of observation reach, but it must be with the consciousness that with the increase of those means the truth may seem far other than it did before, as when more powerful telescopes resolved the nebulæ into myriads of stars. ”

“ I have quoted these lines, not for their merit certainly, but because they afford a good illustration of that mixing up of the figurative expressions of theology in scientific enquiries which interferes grievously with the investigation of truth in the world of matter, while it yields no real because no intelligent homage to the higher world of belief. To Cæsar that which is Cæsar’s, holds good in the realm of intellect as well as in an earthly state. Each has its rights, human intelligence as well as Divine authority, the lower as well as the higher. ”

“ I feel, however, that I have small justification for speaking of the frame of mind befitting those who investigate the great secrets of Nature. The magician’s power to compel her to disclose them has been denied to me. Miror magis. I wonder, I admire, and I rejoice in the safer, humbler walk which our profession opens to the less gifted, as it does to me. ”

“ All that we can be sure of is that they were not years wasted, for he was well furnished for his future career when, on quitting Cambridge, he went immediately to Padua, attracted thither doubtless by the fame of its University as a school for those anatomical studies for which he had acquired a taste at college. The University of Padua became to Harvey a second mother, and her kindly nurture developed in him that genius which has left the whole world his debtor. ”

“ In the ordinary affairs of human life many things are done rightly, but on wrong, or at least, on insufficient grounds, just as in the world of morals many a man is diligent, or temperate, or chaste, on grounds far lower than the noblest. The seaman still navigated his ship in the main correctly by the stars nearly three hundred years after the use of the Mariner’s Compass was known in Europe, and treatises on the use of the Astrolabe continued to appear down nearly to the end of the sixteenth century. ”

“ There is indeed a happiness enjoyed by those who with firm conviction yield to some truths an assent more undoubting than any to which reason alone would lead, and to which none but they can attain. Thus it was that Pascal followed his scientific pursuits, with no solicitude as to the conclusions to which they would conduct him, safe in the ‘more sure word of prophecy’ to which it behoved him to take heed. ”

“ What comes not in our own time seems delayed indefinitely, and we feel as little children do when they dig up the ground in their impatience to learn whether the seeds they planted have yet begun to sprout. ”

“ So, too, in the world of intellect the remote consequences of a discovery are long in disclosing themselves, impossible to be foreseen. No gift of second sight showed at the time to anyone the electric telegraph in Franklin’s experiment made a hundred and twenty years ago. Harvey admired the skill of the artificer revealed by his researches as it had never been before ”

“ Benefactors—those who have done us good, or have shown us kindness; in vulgar sort, those to whom we owe gifts of money, grants of land, something or other that can be bought or sold in open market. According to this reading, few indeed have been our benefactors. Harvey, it is true, adopted this College as his heir, and left to us his lands, his books, as well as his name and fame and the example of his virtues. ”

“ Instead of 18,000, there were at the end of the 16th century not above 1,500 students; and the quaint old traveller Coryat, [16] most unimaginative of men, but smitten with the plague of an insatiable curiosity which sent him wandering through Europe, to die at last in India, tells us of Padua, not eight years after Harvey left it: ‘There is one special thing wanting in this city, which made me not a little wonder, namely, that frequency of people which I observed in the other Italian cities. ”

“ Another and a different illustration this, which Henry Vaughan affords of the benefactors whom we on this day are bound to have in special remembrance.
One thing in common belongs to Sydenham, and Jenner, and Bright, as to so many whom time fails for me to mention here. They were most diligent in seeking out nature by way of experiment, as Harvey has it by an old use of the word which signifies to find out, or learn by experience, not to settle or pre-determine by plausible conjecture, or by reasoning, what is most likely or most fitting. ”

“ But my search has yielded little fruit, partly, I suppose, from Harvey’s own character. The man who needed the cannon-shot at Edge Hill [4] to arouse him from his studies and to make him remove for the sake of the Princes committed to his care to a safer place, lived too entirely in his own pursuits to take much heed of life beyond them. It was with him much as it has been with many of our greatest artists, to whom the external world was but suggestive of the inner world in which they lived ”

“ But still more quickly fades the remembrance of private benefactors. How quickly we all have realised who in one of our cathedrals, or of our college chapels have listened on some Sunday or Festival Day to the Bidding Prayer, and have heard mentioned with thanks to Almighty God the names of men and women gone ages since to their last home, of whom all we know, and almost all that we can learn is, that ‘they rest from their labours and their works do follow them.’
There is, however, something peculiar and different from most in this celebration. ”

“ But many a child knows the alphabet who cannot spell, or spells but cannot read, or reading fluently enough, yet fails to catch the full meaning of the sentence. And so I take it we must feel that at the best we are but children who have scarce learnt to spell out the words, and who dare not therefore be too positive as to their true significance. ”

“ Or, to change the metaphor, our theories and systems are but as the scaffolding which serves to raise the building. As the building rises the scaffolding is struck, and we may be content if it has answered well its temporary purpose. ”

“ Riolanus in his book had indulged himself in the idle fancy of attempting to deduce from examination of the bodies of healthy subjects inferences as to the nature and seat of the diseases to which the human frame is subject; and Harvey says that, stimulated by his example, he too proposes to publish his ‘Medical Anatomy, or Anatomy in its Application to Medicine,’' a work, which it will be observed, he speaks of as being completed and only waiting for the printer. ”

“ We must not hold too confidently to opinions which a few years may show to be partial, if not wrong, and may wait patiently in hopes of a clearer vision, as he of old who first saw ‘men as trees, walking,’ afterwards, under the Divine touch, beheld all clearly. ”

“ The last half of the fifteenth century was a time of preparation, in which men were learning the use of the new weapons to be wielded in the storm and strife of the ensuing fifty years. The peace of Augsburg, in 1555, fixed the limits beyond which Protestantism has never passed, and the Council of Trent moulded the Roman Catholic Church into the form which it has ever since retained. ”

“ Northern travellers tell us how with the approach of spring the long silence of winter is disturbed by strange sounds, loud cracking, or reports like those of thunder or of discharges of artillery, which tell how the masses of solid ice are giving way beneath the influence of the returning warmth. ”

“ To Harvey no doubt the great attraction of Padua was its anatomical school, which then presented opportunities for study greater than any other in Europe. The statutes of the University prescribed that twice during the academical session, which extended from St. Luke’s Day to the Feast of the Assumption, on August 15, [18] the whole human body should be publicly dissected by the Professor of Anatomy. ”

“ But there never was a time when this exhortation was less necessary than at present; so busy is every one, with the aid of all imaginable scientific helps, in investigating the structure and functions of the body, and in unravelling the problems presented by its diseases. ”

“ Its existence, however, proves how responsible a post that was felt to be which I now have the honour to occupy, and I could wish, for my own sake, that instead of having simply to throw myself on the indulgence of my hearers, I could plead that my poor attempt to do justice to my theme had already been submitted to the President and Censors, and had been stamped by their authority as fit to pass current. ”

“ It was thus once supposed that in the realm of nature effect followed cause in quick succession, and it was little thought how slow is the action of those powers which have by their continuance upheaved mountains, or have hollowed out deep seas. ”

“ Second.—That while the arteries thus distribute everywhere the fresh pure blood, the veins with which they communicate bring back that same blood, no longer pure, to the right side of the heart, whence it is once more transmitted to the lungs, thence carried again revivified to the left ventricle, and then once more distributed throughout the body, its changes not being those of an ebbing and a flowing tide, but the ceaseless current of an onward rushing river. ”

“ He did not care for wealth, he did not care for fame; married, but childless, his first affections seem to have been set on the places where he had studied or had taught. Aubrey tells us (I am not quite sure whether correctly) that in spite of his brother’s entreaties he persisted in giving the stone house where he and all his brothers were born to Caius College, Cambridge. His diploma of Doctor of Medicine of Padua, his earliest trophy, found its way, I know not how, to the King’s School at Canterbury, which he entered as a child of ten, and left as a lad of fifteen ”