Sir D'Arcy Power

“ Let us assume either arbitrarily or by experiment, that the quantity of the blood which the left ventricle of the heart will contain when distended to be, say two ounces, three ounces, or one ounce and a half—in the dead body I have found it to hold upwards of two ounces. Let us assume further how much less the heart will hold in the contracted than in the dilated state, and how much blood it will project into the aorta upon each contraction, and all the world allows that with the systole something is always projected ... ”

“ There is, in fact, no occasion for searching after spirits foreign to or distinct from the blood; to evoke heat from another source; to bring gods upon the scene, and to encumber philosophy with any fanciful conceits. ”

“ There are no means of knowing how Harvey spent the first few years of his married life in London, though it is certain that he was not idle. He was probably occupied in making those observations on the heart and blood vessels which have since rendered his name famous. Indeed his lectures show an intimate acquaintance with the anatomy of more than sixty kinds of animals, as well as a very thorough knowledge of the structure of the human body, and such knowledge must have cost him years of patient study. ”

“ It is so rugged and precipitous that it might rather be called a huge stone or rock than an island, for it is not more than a mile in circumference. The whole surface of the island in the months of May and June is almost completely carpeted with nests, birds, and fledglings. There are so many that you can scarcely avoid stepping upon them, and when they fly the crowd is so great that it hides the sun and the sky like a cloud. ”

“ Whether or not the heart besides propelling the blood, giving it movement locally and distributing it to the body, adds anything else to it—heat, spirit, perfection—must be inquired into by and by, and decided upon other grounds. So much may suffice at this time, when it is shown that by the action of the heart the blood [201] is transfused through the ventricles from the veins to the arteries and is distributed by them to all parts of the body.
“The above indeed is admitted by all, both from the structure of the heart and the arrangement and action of its valves. ”

“ There had always been a close bond between Merton and the medical profession from the days when John of Gaddesden, one of the earliest Englishmen to write a complete treatise on medicine, was a Fellow, and it was peculiarly fitting that Harvey should have been elected head of the College. He was a rich man, childless, without expensive habits, and so devoted to the pursuit of science that there is but little doubt that if he had retained his position he would have become one of the greatest benefactors of the College. ”

“ Harvey laid the foundation of modern medicine by his discovery of the circulation of the blood. Hunter laid the foundation of modern pathology, not by any [185] single and striking discovery, but by a long course of careful observation. Harvey, like Hunter, was a careful and competent observer; both were skilled anatomists, both were ardent pathologists, both were comparative anatomists of a high order. By singular ill fortune we have lost the records of many years of careful work done by each of these great men. ”

“ It is difficult to realise how any reasonable man could teach such a farrago of nonsense when he must have heard Harvey’s perfectly simple and clear demonstration of the structure and uses of the heart. ”

“ On the 16th of August, 1642, the King left London, and six days later his standard was raised at Nottingham. Harvey accompanied him. The newly raised troops belonging to the Parliament, as yet ignorant of the trammels of discipline, broke into the houses of suspected persons, rifled them of their contents and often sold their booty for the merest trifle. Harvey had been living in his official lodgings at Whitehall, and though he attended the King, not only with the consent, but at the desire of the Parliament, he was very rightly suspected of being a vehement Royalist. ”

“ I was acquainted with another strong man, who, having received an injury and affront from one more powerful than himself, and upon whom he could not have his revenge, was so overcome with hatred and spite and passion, which he yet communicated to no one, that at last he fell into a strange distemper, suffering from extreme oppression and pain of the heart and breast, and the prescriptions of none of the very best physicians proving of any avail, he fell in the course of a few years into a scorbutic and cachectic state, became tabid, and died. ”

“ Playful and impudent, it would often seat itself in my wife’s lap to have its head scratched and its back stroked, whilst a gentle movement of its wings and a soft murmur witnessed to the pleasure of its soul. I believed all this to proceed from its usual familiarity and love of being noticed, for I always looked upon the creature as a male on account of its skill in talking and singing (for amongst birds the females rarely sing or challenge one another by their notes, and the males alone solace their mates by their tuneful warblings) ... ”

“ The apothecaries at this time were accustomed to buy up the bills or prescriptions of the leading physicians in much the same manner and for the same purpose that a clinical clerk or a dresser in a hospital now treasures up the prescriptions of his physician or surgeon. We can afford to smile at these pieces of contemporary criticism by empirics, for we [75] remember that as the apothecaries objected to the practice of Harvey, the attorneys led by Coke sneered at the legal knowledge of Bacon, but in neither case has the verdict of posterity ratified that of contemporary opinion. ”

“ To enforce the right opinion by remarks drawn from far and near, and to illustrate man by the structure of animals according to the Socratic rule [given by Aristotle and affixed as an extract to the title-page of the lectures [3] ] . To bring in points beyond mere anatomy in relation to the causes of diseases, and the general study of nature with the object of correcting mistakes and of elucidating the use and actions of parts for the use of anatomy to the physician is to explain what should be done in disease. ”

“ I have several times opened the breast and pericardium of a man within two hours after his execution by hanging, and before the colour had totally left his face, and in presence of many witnesses, have demonstrated the right auricle of the heart and the lungs distended with blood: the auricle in particular of the size of a large man’s fist, and so full of blood that it looked as if it would burst. ”

“ What we are wont to derive from the stars is in truth produced at home. The blood is the only calidum innatum or first engendered animal heat.”
Harvey then proceeds to examine the evidence for a spirit different from the innate heat, of celestial origin and nature, a body of perfect simplicity, most subtle, attenuated, mobile, rapid, lucid, ethereal, participant in the qualities of the quintessence. Of this spirit Harvey confesses that “we, for our own parts, who use our simple senses in studying natural things, have been unable anywhere to find anything of the sort. ”

“ We have known huntsmen who having only once seen a particular stag or his horns or even his print in the mud (as a lion is known by his claws) have afterwards been able to distinguish him by the same marks from every other. Some, too, from the footprints of deer, seen for the first time, will draw inferences as to the size and grease and power of the stag which has left them: saying whether he were full of strength or weary from having been hunted, and farther whether the prints are those of a buck or doe. ”

“ Harvey then discusses at some length the Aristotelian and scholastic views of the word “spirit” and “vital principle,” and in the end arrives at the conclusion that “the blood, by reason of its admirable properties and powers, is ’spirit.’ It is also celestial; for nature, the soul, that which answers to the essence of the stars is the inmate of the spirit, in other words, it is something analogous to heaven, the instrument of heaven, vicarious of heaven.... The blood, too, is the animal heat in so far namely as it is governed in its actions by the soul ”

“ And though much has been made out by the learned men of former times, I have still thought that much more remained behind, hidden by the dusky night of nature, uninterrogated: so that I have oftentimes wondered and even laughed at those who have fancied that everything had been so consummately and absolutely investigated by an Aristotle [149] or a Galen or some other mighty name, that nothing could by any possibility be added to their knowledge. Nature, however, is the best and most faithful interpreter of her own secrets ”

“ In fishes, serpents, lizards, tortoises, frogs, and others of the same kind there is a heart present, furnished with both an auricle and a ventricle.... And then in regard to animals that are yet larger and warmer and more perfect,... these require a larger, stronger, and more fleshy heart.... Every animal that has lungs has two ventricles to its heart, one right, the other left, and whenever there is a right there is a left ventricle, but the contrary does not hold good; where there is a left there is not always a right ventricle.... ”

“ The fame of Fabricius and his school was no doubt the chief reason which led Harvey to Padua, but there was an additional reason which led his friends to concur cheerfully in his resolve. Padua was the University town of Venice, and the tolerance which it enjoyed under the protection of the great commercial republic rendered it a much safer place of residence for a Protestant than any of the German Universities, or even than its fellows in Italy. ”

“ It is scarce credible in so rich, populous, and plentiful countries as these were that so much misery and desolation, poverty and famine should in so short a time be, as we have seen. I interprete it well that it will be a great motive for all here to have and procure assurance of settled peace. It is time to leave fighting when there is nothing to eat, nothing to be kept, and nothing to be [86] gotten. ”

“ For the hen hearing the chirping of the chick within, and knowing thereby the necessity of now breaking the shell in order that the chick may enjoy the air which has become needful to it, or if you will, you may say, that desiring to see her dear offspring, she breaks the shell with her beak, which is not hard to do, for the part over the hollow long deprived of moisture and exposed to the heat of incubation, has become dry and brittle. The chirping of the chick is consequently the first and principal indication of the creature desiring to make its escape and of its requiring air. ”

“ He had illustrated them by arguments and he had freed them from objections of the most learned and skilful Anatomists. He then proceeds so modestly that it is difficult to realise how great an innovation he was really making when he [190] says, “I profess both to learn and to teach anatomy, not from books but from dissections, not from the positions of philosophers but from the fabric of nature.” ”

“ It had been maintained that the heart was the great centre for the production of heat. The blood was driven alternately to and from the heart, being sucked into it during the diastole and driven from it during the systole. The use of the arteries was to fan and cool [192] the blood, as the lungs fanned and cooled the heart, for the pulse was due to an active dilatation and contraction of the arteries. During their dilatation the arteries sucked in air, and during their contraction they discharged murky vapours through pores in the flesh and skin. ”

“ The second disquisition opens with Harvey’s view of the contemporary criticism upon his treatise. “But scarce a day, scarce an hour has passed since the birthday of the Circulation of the blood that I have not heard something, for good or for evil, said of this, my discovery. Some abuse it as a feeble infant, and yet unworthy to have seen the light; others again think the bantling deserves to be cherished and cared for. ”

“ Every act of Harvey’s public life that has come down to us is marked, as Dr. Willis very properly observes, not merely by propriety, but by grace. He attended the Comitia or assembly of the College next day, thanked his colleagues for the distinguished honour of which they had thought him worthy—the honour, as he said, of filling the foremost place amongst the physicians of England; but the concerns of the College, he proceeded, were too weighty to be entrusted to one who, like himself, was laden with years and infirm in health ”

“ The Universities of Europe have always been of two [16] types, the one Magistral, like that of Paris, with which we are best acquainted, for Oxford and Cambridge are modelled on Paris, and the Masters of Arts form the ruling body; the other, the Student Universities, under the control of the undergraduates, of which Bologna was the mother. Hitherto Harvey had been a member of a Magistral University, now he became attached to a University of Students, for Padua was an offshoot of Bologna. ”

“ All that the work contains of observation and experiment is valuable, for Harvey had made use of his uncommon opportunities to acquire a knowledge, such as is usually possessed only by huntsmen and gamekeepers, and has very rarely been attained by a man of science. ”

“ Saturn and Jove by the Gentiles; by ourselves, as is seemly in these days, the Creator and Father of all that is in heaven and earth, on whom all things depend for their being, and at whose will and pleasure all things are and were engendered.” He thus opened his lectures in a broad spirit of religious charity quite foreign to his environment but befitting the position he has been called upon to occupy in the history of science. ”

“ Such a statement is now a mere truism, because every one who starts upon a subject of original research follows the method adopted by Harvey. He learns thoroughly what is known already; he frames a working hypothesis and puts it to the test of experiment. He then combines his à priori reasoning with a logical deduction from the facts he observes. A feeble mind is sometimes overmastered by its working hypothesis, and may be led to consider it proved when a better trained observer would dismiss it for a more promising theory. ”

“ If you sail round the island and look up you see on every ledge, shelf, and recess innumerable flocks of birds of every sort and size, more numerous than the stars seen at night in the unclouded moonless sky, and if you watch the flights that come and go incessantly, you might imagine that it was a mighty swarm of bees. ”

“ Nature is nowhere accustomed more openly to display her secret mysteries than in cases where she shows traces of her workings apart from the beaten path; nor is there any better way to advance the proper practice of medicine than to give our minds to the discovery of the usual law of nature, by careful investigation of cases of rarer forms of disease. ”

“ In like manner that which is abundantly nourished increases; what is not sufficiently supplied shrinks; what is perfectly nourished preserves its health; what is not perfectly nourished falls into disease. The blood therefore, even as the soul, is to be regarded as the cause and author of youth and old age, of sleep and waking, and also of respiration. All the more and especially as the first instrument in natural things contains the internal moving cause within itself. ”

“ A single body was dissected to show the muscles (this was the muscular lecture) ; another to show the bones (the osteological lecture) ; another to show the parts within the head, chest, and abdomen (the visceral lecture) . The osteological lecturer was not always identical with the visceral lecturer, nor he with the lecturer upon the muscles, [42] though some great teachers, like Reid and Harvey, gave a course upon each subject. ”

“ The truth, indeed, presents itself obviously before us when we consider what happens in the dissection of living animals: the great artery need not be divided, but a very small branch only (as Galen even proves in regard to man) , to have the whole of the blood in the body, as well that of the veins as of the arteries, drained away in the course of no long time—some half hour or less. Butchers are well aware of the fact and can bear witness to it ”

“ If, on the contrary, the artery instead of the vein be compressed or tied, you will observe the part between the obstacle and the heart and the heart itself to become inordinately distended, to assume a deep purple or even livid colour, and at length to be so much oppressed with blood that you will believe it about to be choked ”

“ Instead of a verbal answer, therefore, I carried the young man himself to the King, that his Majesty might with his own eyes behold this wonderful case: that, in a man alive and well, he might without detriment to the individual, observe the movement of the heart, and with his own hand even touch the ventricles as they contracted. ”