On the 30th September, 1654, Harvey was elected in his absence to the presidency of the college, which, however, he declined on the next day, owing to his age and growing infirmities, and recommending the continuance in office of Dr. Prujean, who nominated him as one of the council, which office he did not refuse. He continued to lecture, although his strength was diminished by severe attacks of gout, but in July 1656 he resigned his lectureship. In taking leave of the college, at a grand banquet which he gave, he presented it with his patrimonial estate at Burmarsh in Kent. One special provision settled a salary for a librarian, and another established what has since been known as the Harveian Oration, delivered yearly in commemoration of benefactors to the college, and now extended to those who have added to medical science during the year.
The long and truly fortunate career of Harvey—for fortunate he must be deemed, who, like Darwin, having enunciated an epoch-making discovery, lived to see it inculcated as a canon—was now drawing to a close. In several of his later letters he expresses his feelings of infirmity. Writing in 1655 to Dr. Horst, at Hesse-Darmstadt, he speaks of “advanced age, which unfits us for the investigation of novel subtleties, and the mind which inclines to repose after the fatigues of lengthened labours.” Later, on the 24th April, 1657, writing to Dr. Vlackveld, at Harlem, he says: “It is in vain that you apply the spur to urge me, at my present age—not mature merely, but declining—to gird myself for any new investigation. For I now consider myself entitled to my discharge from duty.”
Harvey died on the 3d of June, 1657, in the eightieth year of his age, and the Fellows of his college followed his remains far out of the city towards Hempstead, in Essex, where his brother Eliab had a vault. His will is a characteristic document. He thus expresses his Christian faith: “I do most humbly render my soul to Him that gave it, and to my blessed Lord and Saviour Christ Jesus.” Making his brother Eliab executor and residuary legatee, he bequeaths legacies to all his relations with most affectionate expressions: we do not know the date of his wife’s death (she was still living in 1645), but she is here mentioned as “my dear deceased loving wife.” “I give to the College of Physicians all my books and papers, and my best Persia long carpet, and my blue satin embroidered cushion, one pair of brass andirons, with fireshovel and tongs of brass, for the ornament of the meeting-room I have erected.” It seems very probable that these books and papers included some much-regretted observations of Harvey’s, which were destroyed, with the building which he erected and the statue to his memory, in the great fire of 1666. He left £10 to his friend Hobbes of Malmesbury, who describes Harvey as the only one that he knew who conquered envy and established a new doctrine in his lifetime.
“The private character of this great man,” says Aikin, in his Biographical Memoirs of Medicine in Great Britain, “appears to have been in every respect worthy of his public reputation. Cheerful, candid, and upright, he was not the prey of any mean or ungentle passion. He was as little disposed by nature to detract from the merits of others, or make an ostentatious display of his own, as necessitated to use such methods for advancing his fame. The many antagonists whom his renown and the novelty of his opinions excited were, in general, treated by him with modest and temperate language, frequently very different from their own; and while he refuted their arguments, he decorated them with all due praises. He lived on terms of perfect harmony and friendship with his brethren of the college; and seems to have been very little ambitious of engrossing a disproportionate share of medical practice. In extreme old age, pain and sickness were said to have rendered him somewhat irritable in his temper.... It is certain that the profoundest veneration for the great Cause of all those wonders he was so well acquainted with appears eminently conspicuous in every part of his works. He was used to say, that he never dissected the body of any animal without discovering something which he had not expected or conceived of, and in which he recognised the hand of an all-wise Creator. To His particular agency, and not to the operation of general laws, he ascribed all the phenomena of nature. In familiar conversation Harvey was easy and unassuming, and singularly clear in expressing his ideas. His mind was furnished with an ample store of knowledge, not only in matters connected with his profession, but in most of the objects of liberal inquiry, especially in ancient and modern history, and the science of politics. He took great delight in reading the ancient poets, Virgil in particular, with whose divine productions he is said to have been sometimes so transported as to throw the book from him with exclamations of rapture. To complete his character, he did not want that polish and courtly address which are necessary to the scholar who would also appear as a gentleman.”
According to Aubrey, who knew him well, Harvey was not tall, but of the lowest stature; round-faced, olivaster in complexion, with little round eyes, very black and full of spirit, his hair black as a raven, but quite white twenty years before he died. His portrait in the College of Physicians corresponds with this account, indicating a nervous, bilious temperament, and showing a compact, square, wide forehead. The general expression is highly intellectual, contemplative, and manly.
Harvey has the rare distinction of standing at the head of three departments of science in England—comparative anatomy, physiology, and medicine. When these scarcely existed, he evolved them into living form from chaos. The extent of his achievements must be gauged by the extent of the superstructure built upon his foundations. He laid the foundations broad and firm, and practised the true method of science. Notwithstanding Harvey’s infirmities, his mind in old age was characterised by an abiding youthfulness and desire to learn, so that Aubrey found him studying Oughtred’s “Clavis Mathematica,” and working problems not long before he died. He was equally pleased to communicate his knowledge to others, and, as Aubrey relates, “to instruct any that were modest and respectful to him. In order to my journey (I was at that time bound for Italy), he dictated to me what to see, what company to keep, what books to read, how to manage my studies—in short, he bid me go to the fountain-head and read Aristotle, Cicero, Avicenna.” He was always very contemplative, and was wont to frequent the leads of Cockaine House, which his brother Eliab had bought, having there his several stations in regard to the sun and the wind, for the indulgence of his fancy. At the house at Combe, in Surrey, he had caves made in the ground, in which he delighted in the summer-time to meditate. He also loved darkness, as he could then best contemplate. The activity of his mind would often deprive him of sleep, when he would rise and walk about in his shirt, until he was cooled and could gain sleep. Similarly he treated his attacks of gout; he would sit with his legs bare, even in frost, on the leads of Cockaine House, and put them into a pail of water until he was almost dead with cold, and thus he found his attacks could be moderated.
His great works were, according to the custom of the age, written in Latin; and Dr. Willis, who has translated all of them into English, describes his Latin as generally easy, often elegant, and not unfrequently copious and imaginative—he never seems to feel in the least fettered by the language he is using.
The College of Physicians, says Dr. Munk, possesses some interesting memorials of Harvey, two of which may be mentioned. One the whalebone probe or rod, tipped with silver, with which he demonstrated the parts in his Lumleian Lectures at the college. The other, consisting of six tables of wood, upon which are spread the different blood-vessels and nerves of the human body, carefully dissected out, probably prepared by Harvey himself, and presumed to have been used by him in his lectures. They were presented to the college by the Earl of Winchelsea, one of whose ancestors, the Lord-Chancellor Nottingham, had married the niece of Harvey.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Restitutio Christianismi.