The year 1628 may fairly be looked upon as the crowning year of Harvey’s scientific life. It was that in which he published at Frankfort-on-the-Main his matured account of the circulation of the blood. After its publication he was sometimes heard to say that “he fell mightily in his practice,” for it was believed by the vulgar that he was crack-brained, and all the physicians were against him. Such ideas probably occurred to him in his later years when he was depressed by repeated attacks of gout. But party feeling ran high, and was even greater than professional jealousy at a time when Harvey was very closely connected with the losing side. Some of his contemporaries took advantage of the double meaning attaching to the word Circulator which Celsus applies to a merry andrew. It was also said about him that “though all of his profession would allow him to be an excellent anatomist, I never heard of many that admired his therapeutic way. I knew several practitioners in this town that would not have given threepence for one of his bills, as a man can hardly tell by his bills what he did aim at.” The apothecaries at this time were accustomed to buy up the bills or prescriptions of the leading physicians in much the same manner and for the same purpose that a clinical clerk or a dresser in a hospital now treasures up the prescriptions of his physician or surgeon. We can afford to smile at these pieces of contemporary criticism by empirics, for we remember that as the apothecaries objected to the practice of Harvey, the attorneys led by Coke sneered at the legal knowledge of Bacon, but in neither case has the verdict of posterity ratified that of contemporary opinion.
Harvey early attained to high office in the College of Physicians, then but a small body, though it contained as it has always done, the picked men of the medical profession. Here he was elected a Censor in 1613, an office to which he was reappointed in 1625 and again in 1629. The Censors were four fellows of the College appointed annually, with power “to supervise, watch, correct, and govern” those who practised physic in London or within the statutory limit of seven miles, whether members of the College or not. They had power to punish by fine and summary imprisonment in the Wood Street Counter, and the name of Harvey occurs more than once about this time in connection with proceedings taken by the College against quacks or “Empirics” as they were then called.
The Censors attended by the representatives of the Society of Apothecaries were empowered to visit the shops of the apothecaries in London to “search, survey, and prove whether the medicines, wares, drugs, or any thing or things, whatsoever in such shop or shops contained and belonging to the art and mystery of an apothecary be wholesome, meet and fit for the cure, health, and ease of his Majesty’s subjects.” These inquisitorial visits were made at irregular times every summer and autumn. The procession, consisting of the Censors with the Wardens and the Beadle of the Society of Apothecaries, started at one o’clock, and before six in the afternoon from twenty to thirty shops had been visited. At each shop the visitors entered and asked for a few drugs selected at random. They then examined the stock from which the supply was taken, as well as the individual sample offered, a few rough tests were applied, and if the drugs were found to be bad or adulterated they were at once destroyed by the simple but effectual method of throwing them out into the street. The records of each visitation were kept in a book belonging to the College of Physicians.
Dr. Robert Pitt, Censor in 1687 and again in 1702 has left us an interesting account of the results of such a visitation, which in all probability did not differ materially from those which it was Harvey’s duty to conduct. The Transcript of the Deposition in the time of Dr. Pitt’s censorship runs thus—
Mr. G——’s Shop.
London Laudanum without either colour or smell.
Oxycroceum without saffron.
Pil. Ruff. no colour of saffron. [This was a pill largely used as a preservative against the plague. It contained myrrh, aloes, and saffron.]
Mr. R——’s Shop.