William Harvey and the Discovery of the Circulation of the Blood | Page 4

credit of the unfortunate monarch--who, whatever his faults may have
been, was one of the few English monarchs who have shown a taste for
art and science--that Harvey became his attached and devoted friend as
well as servant; and that the king, on the other hand, did all he could to
advance Harvey's investigations. But, as you know, evil times came on;
and Harvey, after the fortunes of his royal master were broken, being
then a man of somewhat advanced years--over 60 years of age, in
fact--retired to the society of his brothers in and near London, and
among them pursued his studies until the day of his death. Harvey's
career is a life which offers no salient points of interest to the
biographer. It was a life devoted to study and investigation; and it was a
life the devotion of which was amply rewarded, as I shall have occasion
to point out to you, by its results.
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; and, on the other, he laid the foundation of that study
of development which has been so much advanced of late years, and
which constitutes one of the great pillars of the doctrine of evolution.
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.
It would, I regret, be quite impossible for me to attempt, in the course
of the time I can presume to hold you here, to unfold the history of
more than one of these great investigations of Harvey. I call them
"great investigations," as distinguished from "large publications." I
have in my hand a little book, which those of you who are at a great
distance may have some difficulty in seeing, and which I value very
much. It is, I am afraid, sadly thumbed and scratched with annotations

by a very humble successor and follower of Harvey. This little book is
the edition of 1651 of the 'Exercitationes de Generatione'; and if you
were to add another little book, printed in the same small type, and
about one-seventh of the thickness, you would have the sum total of the
printed matter which Harvey contributed to our literature. And yet in
that sum total was contained, I may say, the materials of two
revolutions in as many of the main branches of biological science. If
Harvey's published labours can be condensed into so small a compass,
you must recollect that it is not because he did not do a great deal more.
We know very well that he did accumulate a very considerable number
of observations on the most varied topics of medicine, surgery, and
natural history. But, as I mentioned to you just now, Harvey, for a time,
took the royal side in the domestic quarrel of the Great Rebellion, as it
is called; and the Parliament, not unnaturally resenting that action of his,
sent soldiers to seize his papers. And while I imagine they found
nothing treasonable among those papers, yet, in the process of
rummaging through them, they destroyed all the materials which
Harvey had spent a laborious life in accumulating; and hence it is that
the man's work and labours are represented by so little in apparent bulk.
What I chiefly propose to do to-night is to lay before you an account of
the nature of the discovery which Harvey made, and which is termed
the Discovery of the Circulation of the Blood. And I desire also, with
some particularity, to draw your attention to the methods by which that
discovery was achieved; for, in both these respects, I think, there will
be much matter for profitable reflection.
Let me point out to you, in the first place, with respect to this important
matter of the movements of the heart and the course of the blood in the
body, that there is a certain amount of knowledge which must have
been obtained without men taking the trouble to seek it--knowledge
which must have been taken in, in the course of time, by everybody
who followed the trade of a butcher, and still more so by those people
who, in ancient times, professed to divine the course of future events
from the entrails of