Eminent doctors: Their lives and their work; Vol. 1 of 2

by G. T. Bettany

Attracts the same for aidance ’gainst the enemy;

Which with the heart there cools, and ne’er returneth

To blush and beautify the cheek again.”

If the man who discovered a new material world deserves immortality, equally meritorious is he who revealed a new world of activity, and promulgated the first true conception of the ceaseless round of vital processes. As Dr. Parkes says in his Harveian Oration, 1876, “When any one examines into this discovery of Harvey’s, and gradually recognises its extraordinary importance, he cannot but be seized with an urgent wish to know how the mind which solved so great a problem was constituted; how it worked and how it reached, not merely the probability, but the certainty, of a grand natural law.... There was no accident about it—no help from what we call chance; it was worked out and thought out, point after point, until all was clear as sunshine in midsummer. Nor had it been anticipated.”

William Harvey, eldest son of Thomas Harvey and Joan Halke, was born at Folkestone in Kent, on the 1st of April, 1578, and that his parents were in easy circumstances may be judged by the fact that five of his brothers became substantial London merchants. Of his mother it is recorded on her monumental tablet that she was “a careful, tender-hearted mother, dear to her husband, reverenced of her children, beloved of her neighbours.” Her eldest son, after some years’ education at Canterbury, was entered at Gonville and Caius College in 1593, where he remained till 1597, when he left the university with the B.A. degree, and betook himself to Padua. This renowned university then boasted among its professors Fabricius, the anatomist, whose influence upon Harvey was evidently remarkable. After five years, Harvey obtained his doctorate in medicine, couched in terms of the utmost praise of his astonishing ability, memory, and knowledge, and returned to England. He was admitted to the same degree at Cambridge, and settled in practice in London, marrying the daughter of Dr. Launcelot Browne in his twenty-sixth year—a union which proved childless.

Having become a candidate for the Fellowship of the College of Physicians in 1604, he was admitted in 1607 after due probation; and we find him in 1609 seeking the reversion of the physiciancy to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, gaining the king’s letters recommendatory, and producing such testimonials from the President of the College of Physicians and others that he was chosen before the vacancy occurred, and on the death of Dr. Wilkinson was appointed to the office, October 14, 1609.

Harvey now rapidly advanced in general favour as a physician, and in 1615 was appointed Lumleian Lecturer at the College of Physicians, an office then held for life. His first lectures were given in April 1616, and in this and subsequent years he gradually unfolded the novel views on the heart and the circulation of the blood which he was acquiring, and which he published in 1628. The novelty of his views does not, however, consist in the idea that the blood actually moves in the vessels. This was known before, and Shakespeare gives expression to a current conception in the passage at the head of this chapter. Servetus, in 1553,[4] had asserted that the blood finds access from the right side of the heart to the left through the lungs, thus explaining the intermixture in the heart of the two kinds of blood appropriate to arteries and veins respectively. For a long time the partition between the ventricles was believed to be perforated like a sieve, so that a mixture of venous and arterial blood could take place. But this had been completely disproved by Berengarius and Vesalius. Consequently the two kinds of blood, according to this view, after meeting in the head, thorax, and abdomen, returned to the heart by the way they came, for a fresh supply of the exhausted or enfeebled spirits on which the principal functions of the body depended. Servetus, it is true, asserts a communication between the pulmonary artery and veins; but he particularly declares that “the vital spirit has its origin in the left ventricle, the lungs assisting especially in its generation,” and that “it is engendered from the mixture that takes place in the lungs of the inspired air with the elaborated subtile blood which the right ventricle of the heart communicates to the left.” The extent of his knowledge is further shown by his statement that “the blood is mixed in the pulmonary vein with the inspired air, and by the act of expiration is purified from fuliginous vapours, when having become the fit recipient of the vital spirit, it is at length attracted by the diastole.” Still very great credit is due to the man who first declared that “the crimson colour is imparted to the spirituous blood by the lungs, not the heart.”

Servetus was, however, ignorant of the force by which the blood is impelled into the arteries, and the contractile functions of the heart were unknown. The ventricle was believed to dilate from some undiscovered cause, and thus to suck in the purified “spiritus vitalis.” But Servetus’s explanation, whatever it was worth, occurred in a theological work, the issue of which led to the author’s death at Calvin’s persecuting hands, and the work remained unknown—for Calvin carefully burnt every copy possible—until 1694, when Sir Henry Wotton disinterred it.

Realdus Columbus, the associate of Dr. Caius at Padua, had in 1559 published a treatise containing some advanced views, showing that the blood once having entered the right ventricle from the vena cava, cannot return in consequence of the opposition of the tricuspid valves, and he further perceived the effect of the pulmonary valves; but he still held the idea that the blood had to be converted in the lungs into a kind of spirit, and looked upon the liver as the fountain-head of the blood. Finally, he denied the muscular structure of the heart.

Cæsalpinus added to this some more complete idea of the greater circulation, but he knew nothing of the valves in the veins, and held to the belief that there were two kinds of blood, one for the growth, another for the nourishment of the body. He imagined that it was only during sleep that the veins become distended while the pulsations of the arteries become moderated. He had no idea of the connection between the emptying of the arteries and the filling of the veins, nor of the heart being the cause of the blood’s movement.