William Harvey

by Sir D'Arcy Power

“I was acquainted with another strong man, who, having received an injury and affront from one more powerful than himself, and upon whom he could not have his revenge, was so overcome with hatred and spite and passion, which he yet communicated to no one, that at last he fell into a strange distemper, suffering from extreme oppression and pain of the heart and breast, and the prescriptions of none of the very best physicians proving of any avail, he fell in the course of a few years into a scorbutic and cachectic state, became tabid, and died. This patient only received some little relief when the whole of his chest was pummelled or kneaded by a strong man, as a baker kneads dough. His friends thought him poisoned by some maleficent influence or possessed with an evil spirit. His jugular arteries enlarged to the size of a thumb, looked like the aorta itself, or they were as large as the descending aorta: they had pulsated violently and appeared like two long aneurysms. These symptoms had led to trying the affects of arteriotomy in the temples, but with no relief. In the dead body I found the heart and aorta so much gorged and distended with blood that the cavities of the ventricles equalled those of a bullock’s heart in size. Such is the force of the blood pent up, and such are the effects of its impulse.”

His letters show that Harvey was employed almost to the end of his life in devising fresh experiments in proof of the circulation of the blood. Thus, in a letter addressed to Paul Marquard Slegel, and dated London, this 26th of March, 1651, Harvey writes: “It may be well here to relate an experiment which I lately tried in the presence of several of my colleagues.... Having tied the pulmonary artery, the pulmonary veins, and the aorta, in the body of a man who had been hanged, and then opened the left ventricle of the heart, we passed a tube through the vena cava into the right ventricle of the heart, and having at the same time attached an ox’s bladder to the tube, in the same way as a clyster-bag is usually made, we filled it nearly full of warm water and forcibly injected the fluid into the heart, so that the greater part of a pound of water was thrown into the right auricle and ventricle. The result was that the right ventricle and auricle were enormously distended, but not a drop of water or of blood made its escape through the orifice in the left ventricle. The ligatures having been undone, the same tube was passed into the pulmonary artery and a tight ligature having been put round it to prevent any reflux into the right ventricle, the water in the bladder was now pushed towards the lungs, upon which a torrent of the fluid, mixed with a quantity of blood, immediately gushed forth from the perforation in the left ventricle: so that a quantity of water, equal to that which was pressed from the bladder into the lungs at each effort, instantly escaped by the perforation mentioned. You may try this experiment as often as you please: the result you will still find to be as I have stated it.”

The exact teaching of Harvey’s contemporaries in London is easily accessible. One of his distinguished colleagues at the College of Physicians was Alexander Reid, son of the first minister of Banchory, near Aberdeen, brother of Thomas Reid, Secretary for Latin and Greek to King James I. Reid was born about 1586, learnt Surgery in France, was admitted a Fellow of the College of Physicians in 1624, and was appointed Lecturer on Anatomy at the Barber Surgeons’ Hall December 28, 1628, in succession to Dr. Andrewes, Harvey’s assistant. Reid, eight years younger than Harvey, lectured at an annual stipend of £20 on every Tuesday throughout the year from 1628 to 1634, when he published a tiny Manual of Anatomy containing the substance of his lectures. For some reason Harvey’s doctrines did not recommend themselves to Reid, and the Manual therefore contains the following traditional account of the heart.

“As for the heart, the substance of it is compact and firm, and full of fibres of all sorts. The upper part is called Basis or Caput: the lower part Conus, Mucro or Apex Cordis. When the heart contracteth itself it is longer, and so the point is drawn from the head of it. But when it dilateth itself it becometh rounder, the conus being drawn to the basis. About the basis the fat is. It is covered with a skin which hardly can be separat[ed]. In moist and cowardly creatures, it is biggest.... Of all parts of the body it is hottest, for it is the wellspring of life, and by arteries communicateth it to the rest of the body. The heart hath two motions, Diastole and Systole. In Diastole, or dilatation of the heart, the conus is drawn from the basis to draw blood by the cava to the right ventricle, and air by the arteria venosa [pulmonary vein] to the left ventricle. In Systole or contraction the conus is drawn to the basis.

“First, that the vital spirit may be thrust from the left ventricle of the heart into the aorta.

“Secondly, that the arterial blood may be thrust into the lungs by arteria venalis [the left auricle].

“Thirdly, that the blood may be pressed to the lungs, in the right ventricle by vena arterialis [right auricle].

“The septum so called because it separateth the right ventricle from the left, is that thick and fleshy substance set between the two cavities.

“Riolan will have it the matter of the vital blood to pass through the holes or porosities of it from the right to the left ventricle, but that hardly any instrument can show them. First, because they go not straight, but wreathed. Secondly, because they are exceeding narrow in the end. He affirmeth that they are more easily discerned in an ox-heart boiled.”