Thomas Harvey

“ HARVEY, GABRIEL (c. 1545–1630) , English writer, eldest son of a ropemaker of Saffron-Walden, Essex, was born about 1545. He matriculated at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1566, and in 1570 was elected fellow of Pembroke Hall. Here he formed a lasting friendship with Edmund Spenser, and it has been suggested (Athen. Cantab., ii. 258) that he may have been the poet’s tutor. Harvey was a scholar of considerable weight, who has perhaps been judged too exclusively from the brilliant invectives directed against him by Thomas Nashe. ”

“ Needes to thy bowes will I bow this knee, and vayle my bonetto”—
afford a fair sample of the success of Harvey’s metrical experiments, which presented a fair mark for the wit of Thomas Nashe. “He (Harvey) goes twitching and hopping in our language like a man running upon quagmires, up the hill in one syllable, and down the dale in another,” says Nashe in Strange Newes, and he mimics him in the mocking couplet:
“But eh! ”

“ A biographical notice of Christopher Harvie, or Harvey, is given by Anthony à Wood in his Athenæ Oxonienses, vol. iii. p. 538. (Bliss) , from which it appears he was "a minister's son of Cheshire, was born in that county, became a batler of Brasen-nose College in 1613, aged sixteen years, took the degrees in Arts, that of Master being completed 1620, holy orders, and at length was made vicar of Clifton in Warwickshire." Wood, however (Ath. Oxon., vol. i. {273}p. 628.) , attributes The Synagogue to Thomas Harvey, first Master of Kington School in Herefordshire. "There can be no doubt," adds Mr. ”

“ In 1599 Archbishop Whitgift made a raid on contemporary satire in general, and among other books the tracts of Harvey and Nashe were destroyed, and it was forbidden to reprint them. Harvey spent the last years of his life in retirement at his native place, dying in 1630.
His extant Latin works are: Ciceronianus (1577) ; G. Harveii rhetor, sive 2 dierum oratio de natura, arte et exercitatione rhetorica (1577) ; Smithus, vel Musarum lachrymae (1578) , in honour of Sir Thomas Smith ”

“ The only specimen we have of his observations in morbid anatomy is his account of the post-mortem examination made by order of the king on the body of the famous Thomas Parr, who died in 1635, at the reputed age of 152. Harvey insists on the value of physiological truths for their own sake, independently of their immediate utility; but he himself gives us an interesting example of the practical application of his theory of the circulation in the cure of a large tumour by tying the arteries which supplied it with blood (De generat. Exerc. xix.) ”

“ He spoke at the memorial meeting at the College of Physicians (July 18) , he gave a lecture on Harvey at the Royal Institution on January 25, afterwards published in "Nature" and the "Fortnightly Review," and intended to write a book on him in a projected "English Men of Science" series. (See below.) ]
I am very glad you like "Harvey" [he writes to Professor Baynes on February 11] . He is one of the biggest scientific minds we have had. I expect to get well vilipended not only by the anti-vivisection folk, for the most of whom I have a hearty contempt, but apropos of Bacon. ”

“ Harvey, by the diversity, the variety, and the thoroughness of his investigations, was enabled to give an entirely new direction to at least two branches—and two of the most important branches—of what now-a-days we call Biological Science. On the one hand, he founded all our modern physiology by the discovery of the exact nature of the motions of the heart, and of the course in which the blood is propelled through the body ”

“ If we ask to whom mankind are indebted for this great service, the general voice will name William Harvey. For, by his discovery of the circulation of the blood in the higher animals, by his explanation of the nature of the mechanism by which that circulation is effected, and by his no less remarkable, though less known, investigations of the process of development, Harvey solidly laid the foundations of all those physical explanations of the functions of sustentation and reproduction which modern physiologists have achieved. ”

“ The first distinct enunciation of the hypothesis that all living matter has sprung from pre-existing living matter came from a contemporary, though a junior, of Harvey, a native of that country, fertile in [Pg 82] men great in all departments of human activity, which was to intellectual Europe, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, what Germany is in the nineteenth. It was in Italy, and from Italian teachers, that Harvey received the most important part of his scientific education. ”

“ On the following day Harvey, as commander-in-chief, signed a series of orders summoning men to his camp and prohibiting, on pain of death, plunder and excesses. He exerted all his energies to restrain his followers, and publicly reprobated the destruction of life and property. The insurgents, after their repulse at Ross, deposed Harvey from the command. He subsequently sought safety in flight, and took refuge in a cave on a rocky island outside Wexford Harbour. ”

“ And the qualification of "potential" has the advantage of reminding us that the great characteristic of the germ is not so much what it is, but what it may, under suitable conditions, become. Harvey shared the belief of Aristotle--whose writings he so often quotes and of whom he speaks as his precursor and model, with the generous respect with which one genuine worker should regard another--that such germs may arise by a process of "equivocal generation" out of not-living matter ”

“ It is formed at once at the single 'individual' moment at which the conjunction of the male and female elements takes place."
It will be observed that M. Flourens uses language which cannot be mistaken. For him, the labours of von Baer, of Rathke, of Coste, and their contemporaries and successors in Germany, France, and England, are non-existent: and, as Darwin "imagina" natural selection, so Harvey "imagina" that doctrine which gives him an even greater claim to the veneration of posterity than his better known discovery of the circulation of the blood. ”

“ One is grieved to think that the grand old man should have gone down to his tomb without the vast satisfaction it would have given to him to see what the Italian naturalist Malpighi showed only seven years later, in 1664, when he demonstrated, in a living frog, the actual passage of the blood from the ultimate ramifications of the arteries into the veins. But that absolute ocular demonstration of the truth of the views he had maintained throughout his life it was not granted to Harvey to see. ”

“ This doctrine, I need hardly tell you, is now tending to revolutionise our conceptions of the origin of living things, exactly in the same way as Harvey's discovery of the circulation in the seventeeth century revolutionised the conceptions which men had previously entertained with regard to physiological processes. ”

“ The short piece on the Anatomy of Thomas Parr, is interesting in itself; and in giving us a glimpse of Harvey's style of pathological reasoning, confirms us in our faith in the great physiologist as a practitioner of medicine. If knowledge will not help, how should the want of it avail? ”

“ Now it did not lead Harvey to imagine anything of the kind. He had heard all about it from his master, Fabricius, who made a great point of these valves in the veins, and he had heard the theories which Fabricius entertained upon the subject, whose impression as to the use of the valves was simply this—that they tended to take off any excess of pressure of the blood in passing from the heart to the extremities; for Fabricius believed, with the rest of the world, that the blood in the veins flowed from the heart towards the extremities. ”

“ To those who later outgrew the fondness for logic and the supreme respect for Aristotle, scholasticism, with its neglect of Greek and Roman literature, came to seem an arid and profitless plan of education. Yet if we turn over the pages of the wonderful works of Thomas Aquinas, we see that the scholastic philosopher might be a person of extraordinary insight and erudition, ready to recognize all the objections to his position, and able to express himself with great clearness and cogency. ”

“ He was still at work upon, or meditating his Crayfish, his Introduction to Psychology, the Spirula Memoir, and a new edition of the Elementary Physiology. Professor H.N. Martin writes about the changes necessary for adapting the "Practical Biology" to American needs; the article on Harvey was waiting to be put into permanent form. Besides giving an address at the Working Men's College, he lectured on Sensation and the Uniformity of the Sensiferous Organs ("Collected Essays" 6.) , at the Royal Institution, Friday evening, March 7 ”

“ I ’ll break in on him. I ’m expecting a call. There ’s probably a mistake in the name. Thomas Sullivan for Thomas Oliphant. Do you understand? That ’ll give us an introduction to him. Where is he? Don’t point.”
They were at the dining-room door. “There he is. Over at that last window.”
“I see. I ’m your rich uncle from Kansas City. You ’re Barney Cook, my New York nephew. Go ahead and telephone. Get me a Tribune.“ And Babbing, refusing the offices of the girl at the coat rack, went to meet the head-waiter with all his encumbrances of hat, rain-coat and umbrella. ”

“ Harvey proceeds to contrast this view with that of the "Medici," or followers of Hippocrates and Galen, who, "badly philosophising," imagined that the brain, the heart, and the liver were simultaneously first generated in the form of vesicles; and, at the same time, while expressing his agreement with Aristotle in the principle of epigenesis, he maintains that it is the blood which is the primal generative part, and not, as Aristotle thought, the heart. ”

“ Science Schools, South Kensington, February 7, 1878.
My dear Morley,
Many thanks for the cheque, and still more for your good word for the article. [On Harvey.] I knew it would "draw" Hutton, and his ingenuity has as usual made the best of the possibilities of attack. I am glad to find, however, that he does not think it expedient to reiterate his old story about the valuelessness of vivisection in the establishment of the doctrine of the circulation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nothing is there now so much in my vowes as to be at peace with all men, and make submissive amends where I have most displeased.’ Declaring himself tired of the controversy with Harvey, he acknowledged in generous terms that he had rashly assailed Harvey's ‘fame and reputation.’ But Harvey was deaf to the appeal; ‘the tears of the crocodile,’ he declared, did not move him. He at once renewed the battle in his ‘New Letter of Notable Contents.’ In a second edition of his ‘Christes Teares’ Nash accordingly withdrew his offers of peace, and lashed Harvey anew with unbounded fury. ”

“ 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 ”

“ After violent emotion most people and all boys demand food. They feasted the returned prodigal behind drawn curtains, cut off in their great happiness, while the trains roared in and out around them. Harvey ate, drank, and enlarged on his adventures all in one breath, and when he had a hand free his mother fondled it. His voice was thickened with living in the open, salt air; his palms were rough and hard, his wrists dotted with the marks of gurry-sores; and a fine full flavour of cod-fish hung round rubber boots and blue jersey. ”

“ The best evidence of the state of knowledge respecting the motions of the heart and blood in Harvey's time is afforded by those works of his contemporaries which immediately preceded the publication of the Exercitatio Anatomica, in 1628. And none can be more fitly cited for this purpose than the de Humani Corporis Fabrica, Book X, of Adrian van den Spieghel, who, like Harvey, was a pupil of Fabricius of Aquapendente, and was [Pg 54] of such distinguished ability and learning that he succeeded his master in the chair of anatomy of Padua. ”

“ Yet Harvey had changed the most of all. The stalwart form had taken to itself the proportions of opening manhood—height, firmness, breadth of shoulders, length of limb, all made a strong and comely frame. The poise of the head indicated resolute activity, and the evening light that now played upon his face revealed a countenance in which sincerity, seriousness, hopefulness, might be traced by a practiced eye. Humour, too, was there—that twin sister unto seriousness—maintaining its own place in the large eyes that had room for other things beside ”