"It was proper that the dean of the College of Paris should keep the medicine of Galen in repair; and should admit no novelties into his school without the utmost winnowing."[154]
CHAPTER VI
THE CIRCULATION AND THE PRIMACY OF THE BLOOD
We have found the discoverer of the circulation an admirer and defender of Aristotle; but we shall leave him far less Aristotelian than we found him. Before he died, he had transferred to the blood itself that physiological primacy which Aristotle had given to the heart; Harvey having come to regard the blood even as the very seat of the soul, harking back to a Greek doctrine older than Aristotle and expressly discountenanced by him.[155] This final view of Harvey was not simply an outcome of his old age, though he develops and formally declares and insists upon the doctrine of the primacy of the blood in the writings which he published when beyond the age of seventy, more than twenty years after the publication of his treatise of 1628. We have seen that in this his most famous work he adheres impressively to the Aristotelian doctrine of the primacy of the heart; though even this work contains utterances of Harvey which do not well accord with that doctrine. More than eleven years earlier, when making notes for his lectures of 1616, he asked himself in striking terms, whether the circulation do not exist in order that the blood may be heated by the heart.[156] Yet there are passages in those very same notes which show that, beside vaguer conjectures,[157] the doctrine of the primacy of the blood was present clearly to Harvey's mind even so early as in his thirty-seventh year. In his lecture notes four passages are especially significant as to this doctrine. Of these the first is as follows:—
"Yf I could shew what I hav seene, y^t weare att an end between physicians et philosophers."
After these words in English Harvey falls into his usual Latin, which may be translated thus:—
"For the blood is rather the author of the viscera than they of it, because the blood is present before the viscera, nor yet coming from the mother,[158] for in the egg there is a drop. The soul[159] is in the blood."[160]
In a second passage of his note-book Harvey says, speaking of the heart:—