The literature which has arisen on the great discovery of Harvey, on his methods and his merits, would fill a library. The most important contemporary writings have been mentioned above. The following list gives some of the most remarkable in modern times: the article in Bayle’s dictionary quoted above; Anatomical Lectures, by Wm. Hunter, M.D. (1784); Sprengell, Geschichte der Arzneikunde (Halle, 1800), vol. iv.; Flourens, Histoire de la circulation (1854); Lewes, Physiology of Common Life (1859), vol. i. pp. 291-345; Ceradini, La Scoperta della circolazione del sangue (Milan, 1876); Tollin, Die Entdeckung des Blutkreislaufs durch Michael Servet (Jena, 1876); Kirchner, Die Entdeckung des Blutkreislaufs (Berlin, 1878); Willis, in his Life of Harvey; Wharton Jones, “Lecture on the Circulation of the Blood,” Lancet for Oct. 25 and Nov. 1, 1879; and the various Harveian Orations, especially those by Sir E. Sieveking, Dr Guy and Professor George Rolleston.
(P. H. P.-S.)
[1] “Ignoscant mihi niveae animae, si, summarum injuriarum memor, levem gemitum effudero. Doloris mihi haec causa est: cum, inter nuperos nostros tumultus et bella plusquam civilia, serenissimum regem (idque non solum senatus permissione sed et jussu) sequor, rapaces quaedam manus non modo aedium mearum supellectilem omnem expilarunt, sed etiam, quae mihi causa gravior querimoniae, adversaria mea, multorum annorum laboribus parta, e museo meo summoverunt. Quo factum est ut observationes plurimae, praesertim de generatione insectorum, cum republicae literariae (ausim dicere) detrimento, perierint.”—De gen., Ex. lxviii. To this loss Cowley refers—
| “O cursed war! who can forgive thee this? Houses and towns may rise again, And ten times easier ’tis To rebuild Paul’s than any work of his.” |
[2] Indeed the same word, περίοδος αἵματος, occurs in the Hippocratic writings, and was held by Van der Linden to prove that to the father of medicine himself, and not to Columbus or Caesalpinus, belonged the laurels of Harvey.
[3] Realdo Columbus (De re anatomica, 1559) formally denies the muscularity of the heart, yet correctly teaches that blood and spirits pass from the right to the left ventricle, not through the septum but through the lungs, “quod nemo hactenus aut animadvertit aut scriptum reliquit.” The fact that Harvey quotes Columbus and not Servetus is explained by the almost entire destruction of the writings of the latter, which are now among the rarest curiosities. The great anatomist Fabricius, Harvey’s teacher at Padua, described the valves of the veins more perfectly than had Sylvius. Carlo Ruini, in his treatise on the Anatomy and Diseases of the Horse (1590), taught that the left ventricle sends blood and vital spirits to all parts of the body except the lungs—the ordinary Galenical doctrine. Yet on the strength of this phrase Professor J. B. Ercolani actually put up a tablet in the veterinary school at Bologna to Ruini as the discoverer of the circulation of the blood! The claims of Caesalpinus, a more plausible claimant to Harvey’s laurels, are scarcely better founded. In his Quaestiones peripateticae (1571) he followed Servetus and Columbus in describing what we now know as the pulmonary “circulation” under that name, and this is the only foundation for the assertion (first made in Bayle’s dictionary) that Caesalpinus knew “the circulation of the blood.” He is even behind Servetus, for he only allows part of the blood of the right ventricle to go round by this “circuit”; some, he conceives, passes through the hypothetical pores in the septum, and the rest by the superior cava to the head and arms, by the inferior to the rest of the body: “Hanc esse venarum utilitatem ut omnes partes corporis sanguinem pro nutrimento deferant. Ex dextro ventr° cordis vena cava sanguinem crassiorem, in quo calor intensus est magis, ex altero autern ventr°, sanguinem temperatissimum ac sincerissimum habente, egreditur aorta.” Caesalpinus seems to have had no original views on the subject; all that he writes is copied from Galen or from Servetus except some erroneous observations of his own. His greatest merit was as a botanist; and no claim to the “discovery of the circulation” was made by him or by his contemporaries. When it was made, Haller decided conclusively against it. The fact that an inscription has been placed on the bust of Caesalpinus at Rome, which states that he preceded others in recognizing and demonstrating “the general circulation of the blood,” is only a proof of the blindness of misplaced national vanity.
[4] So in Exerc. liv.: “Superior itaque et divinior opifex, quam est homo, videtur hominem fabricare et conservare, et nobilior artifex, quam gallus, pullum ex ovo producere. Nempe agnoscimus Deum, creatorem summum atque omnipotentem, in cunctorum animalium fabrica ubique praesentem esse, et in operibus suis quasi digito monstrari: cujus in procreatione pulli instrumenta sint gallus et gallina.... Nec cuiquam sane haec attributa conveniunt nisi omnipotenti rerum Principio, quocunque demum nomine idipsum appellare libuerit: sive Mentem divinam cum Aristotele, sive cum Platone Animam Mundi, aut cum aliis Naturam naturantem, vel cum ethnicis Saturnum aut Iovem; vel potius (ut nos decet) Creatorem ac Patrem omnium quae in coelis et terris, a quo animalia eorumque origines dependent, cujusque nutu sive effatu fiunt et generantur omnia.”
HARVEY, a city of Cook county, Illinois, U.S.A., about 18 m. S. of the Chicago Court House. Pop. (1900) 5395 (982 foreign-born); (1910) 7227. It is served by the Chicago Terminal Transfer, the Grand Trunk and the Illinois Central railways. Harvey is a manufacturing and residence suburb of Chicago. Among its manufactures are railway, foundry and machine-shop supplies, mining and ditching machinery, stone crushers, street-making and street-cleaning machinery, stoves and motor-vehicles. It was named in honour of Turlington W. Harvey, a Chicago capitalist, founded in 1890, incorporated as a village in 1891 and chartered as a city in 1895.