"It has often been observed that, when the heart of some animal has been torn out, it palpitates with a mobility which imitates the swiftness of fire."[247]
Moreover, thirty-five years before Harvey was born, even the beating of the excised human heart had been seen by Vesalius, and referred to in his celebrated treatise on anatomy, as an incident of one of the barbarous executions of the sixteenth century.[248]
By no means in accord with the cause of the heart-beat first advocated by Harvey in 1649, is an experiment which he himself had brought forward in support of the circulation in 1628. In the famous treatise of that year he tells us that if the vena cava of a living snake be compressed at a point some distance away from the heart, the vein between that point and the heart is nearly emptied by the heart-beat, and the heart itself becomes paler and shrinks from lack of blood "and at length beats more languidly."[249] These words show that in this experiment the orderly heart-beats must have continued after the blood remaining in the vena cava had become too scanty to excite them by its expansion in accordance with his doctrine. It is, therefore, an interesting question how Harvey could reconcile the beating of the empty heart with his belief as to the "prime efficient cause" of its beat.
CHAPTER VIII
HARVEY'S DELINEATION OF THE VENOUS RETURN
It may seem surprising that the discoverer of the venous return felt the need of a deus ex machina to distend the right auricle. On reflection, however, ought it to surprise us that, although we find the muscular power of the heart sufficient to complete the Harveian circulation, Harvey himself did not, but eked it out with Aristotelian forces? Vigorous as Harvey was, he could not make smooth the road which he himself had broken. For instance, he could not study, like ourselves, the return of the blood to the heart in the opened chest of an animal anæsthetized and curarized. The knowledge gained by his own tireless investigations did not suffice to teach him what we now know, viz.: that the unaided force of the systole of the left ventricle is sufficient to distend the right auricle with blood and to charge with blood the right ventricle as well.
The essence of Harvey's great discovery is his reversal of the immemorial direction of the venous flow, which he also proved to be abundant and rapid. But the laws which rule this flow were not, and could not be, patent to him as to us, owing to the imperfect physiological knowledge of his day. Hence at times his statements as to the movement of the blood are conceived in what, to borrow an architectural phrase, may be called a "transition style." As a sequel to his doctrine of the cause of the heart-beat let us pass in review some of these statements; but, first, let us briefly note a few facts which may help us to realize the imperfect state of the science of physics in Harvey's day.
Harvey was fourteen years younger than Galileo, who struck crippling blows at the Aristotelian physics, yet could not explain the common pump;[250] and Harvey's discovery of the circulation was made public thirteen years before the momentous work on the movement of liquids done by Torricelli, who was thirty years younger than Harvey.[250] Moreover, it was only a year before the publication of the Exercises to Riolanus in Harvey's old age that Blaise Pascal supplied the final proof that the mercurial column below the vacuum of Torricelli's barometer is really sustained by the pressure of the atmosphere.[250] It was not till one hundred years after the publication of Harvey's discovery that the Reverend Stephen Hales published the first comparative manometric measurements of the blood-pressure in the arteries and the veins of the same living animal, and stated in his preface that "the animal fluids move by Hydraulick and Hydrostatical Laws."[251]