The Lumleian lecture was a surgery lecture established at a cost of forty pounds a year, laid as a rent charge upon the lands of Lord Lumley in Essex, and of Dr. Caldwell in Derbyshire.
Its founders were two notable men. Lord Lumley, says Camden, was a person of entire virtue, integrity, and innocence, and in his old age, was a complete pattern of true nobility. His father, the sixth baron, suffered death for high treason, but the son was made a Knight of the Bath two days before the coronation of Queen Mary. He was one of the lords appointed to attend Queen Elizabeth at her accession, in the journey from Hatfield to London, and at the accession of James I. he was made one of the Commissioners for settling the claims at his coronation. He died April 11, 1609, without surviving issue. Dr. Caldwell had enjoyed unique honour at the College of Physicians. He was examined, approved, and admitted a Fellow upon 22nd December, 1559, and upon the same day he was appointed a Censor. He became President in 1570, and was present at the institution of the lecture in 1582. He was then so aged, his white head adding double reverence to his years, that when he attempted to make a Latin oration to the auditors he was compelled to leave it unfinished by reason of his manifold debilities. And in a very short time afterwards the good old doctor fell sick, and as a candle goeth out of itself or a ripe apple falleth from a tree, so departed he out of this world at the Doctors’ Commons, where his usual lodgings were, and was buried on the 6th of June immediately following, in the year 1584, at S. Ben’et’s Church by Paul’s Wharf, at the upper end of the chancel.
The design of the benefaction was a noble one. It was the institution of a lecture on Surgery to be continued perpetually for the common benefit of London and consequently of all England, the like whereof had not been established in any University of Christendom (Bologna and Padua excepted). An attempt had been made to establish such a lectureship at Paris, but the project failed when Francis I. died, on the last day of March, 1547.
The reader of the Lumleian lecture was to be a Doctor of Physic of good practice and knowledge who was to be paid an honest stipend, no less in amount than that received by the Regius Professors of law, divinity, and physic, in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The lecturer was enjoined to lecture twice a week throughout the year, to wit on Wednesdays and Fridays, at ten of the clock till eleven. He was to read for three-quarters of an hour in Latin and the other quarter in English “wherein that shall be plainly declared for those that understand not Latin.”
The lecturer was appointed for life and his subjects were so arranged that they recurred in cycles. The first year he was to read the tables of Horatius Morus, an epitome or brief handling of all the whole art of surgery, that is, of swellings, wounds, ulcers, bone-setting, and the healing of broken bones commonly called fractures. He was also to lecture upon certain prescribed works of Galen and Oribasius, and at the end of the year in winter he was directed “to dissect openly in the reading place all the body of man, especially the inward parts for five days together, as well before as after dinner; if the bodies may last so long without annoy.”
The second year he was to read somewhat more advanced works upon surgery and in the winter “to dissect the trunk only of the body, namely, from the head to the lowest part where the members are and to handle the muscles especially. The third year to read of wounds, and in winter to make public dissections of the head only. The fourth year to read of ulcers and to anatomise [or dissect] a leg and an arm for the knowledge of muscles, sinews, arteries, veins, gristles, ligaments, and tendons. The fifth year to read the sixth book of Paulus Aegineta, and in winter to make an anatomy of a skeleton and therewithall to show the use of certain instruments for the setting of bones. The sixth year to read Holerius of the matter of surgery as well as of the medicines for surgeons to use. And the seventh year to begin again and continue still.”
The College of Physicians made every effort to fulfil its trust adequately. Linacre, its founder and first President in 1518, allowed the Fellows to use the front part of his house—the stone house in Knightrider Street, consisting of a parlour below and a chamber above, as a council room and library, and the college continued to use these rooms for some years after his death, the rest of the premises being the property of Merton College, Oxford. At the Institution of the Surgery lecture the Fellows determined to appropriate the sum of a hundred pounds out of their common stock—and this proved to be nearly all the money the College possessed—to enlarge the building and to make it more ornamental and better suited for their meetings and for the attendance at their lectures. The result appears to have been satisfactory, for two years later, it was ordered, on the 13th of March, 1583-1584, that a capacious theatre should be added to the College thus enlarged.
Dr. Richard Forster was appointed the first Lumleian lecturer, and when he died in 1602, William Dunne took his place. Dunne, however, did not live to complete a single cycle of lectures for Thomas Davies was elected in May, 1607. The College then again began to outgrow its accommodation, and as the site did not allow of any further additions to the buildings, a suitable house and premises were bought of the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s in Amen Corner, at the end of Paternoster Row. The last meeting of the College in Linacre’s old house in Knightrider Street, took place on the 25th of June, 1614, and its first meeting in Amen Corner was held on the 23rd of August, 1614. Dr. Davies died in the following year, and on the 4th of August, 1615, William Harvey was appointed to the office of Lumleian lecturer, though his predecessor was not buried until August 20th. He continued to occupy this post until his resignation in 1656, when his place was taken by (Sir) Charles Scarborough. The duties of the lecturer, no doubt, had been modified with each fresh appointment, but even in Harvey’s time, there is some evidence to show that the subjects were still considered in a definite order.
Harvey, in all probability, began to lecture at once upon surgery as the more theoretical portion of his subject, but it was not until April, 1616, that he gave his first anatomical lecture. It was a visceral lecture for the terms of the bequest required that it should be upon the inward parts. At this time Harvey was thirty-seven years of age. A man of the lowest stature, round faced, with a complexion like the wainscot; his eyes small, round, very black and full of spirit; his hair as black as a raven and curling; rapid in his utterance, choleric, given to gesture, and used when in discourse with any one, to play unconsciously with the handle of the small dagger he wore by his side.
The MS. notes of his first course of lectures are now in the British Museum. They formed a part of the library of Dr. (afterwards Sir Hans) Sloane, which was acquired under the terms of his will by the nation in 1754. For a time the book was well known and extracts were made from it, then it disappeared and for many years it was mourned as irretrievably lost. But in 1876 it was found again amongst some duplicate printed books which had been set aside, and in the following year it was restored to its place in the Manuscript Department. The notes were reproduced by an autotype process, at the instigation of Sir E. H. Sieveking, and under the supervision of a Committee of the Royal College of Physicians. This facsimile reproduction was published in 1886 with a transcript by Mr. Scott, and an interesting introduction from the pen of Dr. Norman Moore. The original notes are written upon both sides of about a hundred pages of foolscap, which had been reduced to a uniform size of six inches by eight, though the creases on the paper show that they have been further folded so as to occupy a space of about eight inches by two. These leaves have been carefully bound together in leather which presents some pretensions to elegance, but it is clear that the pages were left loose for some years after they were written. There seems to be no doubt that Harvey used the volume in its present form whilst he was lecturing, for three small threads of twine have been attached by sealing wax to the inner side of the cover so that additional notes could be slipped in as they were required. It must be assumed that Harvey did this himself, for he wrote so badly and the notes are so full of abbreviations, interlineations, and alterations, as to render them useless to any one but the author.