Page:Imperialdictiona02eadi Brandeis.pdf/880

HAR And by-and-by he was made warden of Morton college, an office which he, however, did not long retain, for the court had soon after his appointment to quit Oxford. Harvey's long residence at Oxford in the train of Charles, with the inevitable neglect of his London duties—of those connected with his position at St. Bartholomew's hospital especially—could not fail to attract attention; so that we are not surprised to find a notice on the journals of the house of commons, under date February 12th, 1643-44, of "a motion made to recommend Dr. Mucklethwaite to the warden and masters of St. Bartholomew's hospital to be physician in the place of Dr. Harvey, who hath withdrawn himself from his charge, and is retired to the party in arms against the parliament." After the surrender of Oxford in 1646, Harvey appears to have followed the fortunes of Charles no longer—a measure to which he was probably led by advancing years; for all we know of Harvey leads us to conclude, that he was ever true and steadfast in loyalty as in friendship. From this time forward Harvey probably did little as a physician; indeed, he seems not to have resided constantly in London, but to have spent much of his time at the houses of more than one of his brothers in the country. Harvey, however, must have been engaged in very lucrative practice before the civil war broke out, for the fund he then accumulated grew so fast under the prudent management of his brother Eliab, the city merchant, that at his death Harvey was worth some £20,000, a very ample fortune in those days. In retiring from public life Harvey did not by any means abandon himself to idleness. He had long been engaged in the study of the difficult subject of generation, and in the course of 1651, at the especial instance of Dr. Ent, by far the most bulky of his works was given to the world. Ent's account of his interview with Harvey on the occasion of his obtaining this work for publication is extremely interesting, and brings us face to face with the great anatomist, whose language to Ent is highly imaginative as he refers to the troubles he had brought upon himself by the publication of the "Exercises on the Heart." "Would you be the man," he exclaims to Ent, who is pressing him to share with the world some farther fruits of his ingenuity—"Would you be the man to have me quit the peaceful haven where I now pass my life, and launch again upon the faithless sea? You, who know full well what a storm my former lucubrations raised! Much better is it oftentimes to grow wise at home than, by publishing what you have gathered with infinite pains, to stir up tempests that may rob you of peace and quiet for the rest of your days." Ent nevertheless succeeded in overpersuading the old philosopher, and carried off the MS., comparing himself to a second Jason laden with another golden fleece, and engaging to perform the midwife's part and usher the work into the world. The scope and character of the work on generation were of themselves guarantees that Harvey would not be disturbed by the cavils and objections of ill-informed and speculative opponents. Here he offended no accredited ideas, came in rude contact with no foregone conclusions by his observations. Almost the only assumption in the work indeed is contained in the epigraph—"Omne animal ex ovo;" the text is an account of that which is presented to sense and sight, and is simple description. In more recent times the subject of generation has been found one of the most interesting that could engage the attention of the physiologist; but to make it so he wanted the light of general and transcendental anatomy, which had not been created in Harvey's day, and above all he wanted the assistance of the microscope, which did not yet exist. Our modern interest in the wonderful processes of generation ends at a point almost before the inquiries of Harvey begin. The work on generation, then, does not appear to have made any stir in the world of science; but that it enhanced its author's reputation among his contemporaries is unquestionable. Harvey was, in fact, now looked up to by common consent as the most distinguished anatomist and physician of his age, and soon after the publication of the work in question, the College of Physicians decreed him a statue to be erected in their hall, where with a suitable inscription on its base, it stood till the great fire of 1666 desolated London. The inscription has come down to us, but the statue perished. This appears to have been the only statue of Harvey which was executed in his lifetime, and its loss is greatly to be regretted; though we are not without contemporary presentments of Harvey in the shape of portraits, which happily make us familiar with the man as he looked when in life. Aubrey, moreover, has left a few graphic word-touches that seem to bring us very near him. "In person," says Aubrey, "he was of the lowest stature, round-faced, olivaster complexion; little eye, round, very black, full of spirit; his hair black as a raven. In temper," continues our authority, "he was very choleric, and in his younger days he wore a dagger, as the fashion then was, which he would be apt to draw out upon every occasion." Harvey, however, was unquestionably of a most placable and amiable disposition; with his own family he lived on terms of entire intimacy, and he was universally beloved and honoured among his professional friends. He seems to have been entirely free from all love of ostentation and titular distinction. He built, furnished, and endowed a handsome library for the College of Physicians at his own entire cost, but his name did not even appear in connection with the gift; the inscription round the cornice merely announced that the building was erected under the auspices of Dr. Prujean, the president of the year. Harvey's mind was largely imbued with the imaginative faculty; he was one of nature's poets, though he did not write in verse; he was also strongly possessed with the sentiments that lead to true piety. With the ancient philosophers he appears to have regarded the universe and its parts as existing by the will, and actuated by the power, of a supreme and all-pervading Intelligence. He was a great admirer of Virgil, whose works were frequently in his hands, and whose religious philosophy he appears also in a great measure to have adopted, though upon the purely deistic notions of cultivated antiquity he undoubtedly engrafted a special faith in the christian dispensation. Harvey was universally inquisitive into natural things and natural phenomena, and his industry in collecting facts and recording them was unwearied. He was the first English comparative anatomist; that is, he was the first physiologist our country had produced whose superiority of mental endowment led him to perceive the relations between the meanest and the highest of organized beings, and who made the simplicity of structure and function in the one the means of explaining the complexity of structure and function in the other. The great British physiologist of the nineteenth century. Hunter, had certainly a herald in the great comparative anatomist and physiologist of the seventeenth century. "Had anatomists," says Harvey, "only been as conversant with the dissection of the lower animals as they are with that of the human body, many matters that have hitherto kept them in a perplexity of doubt would in my opinion have met them freed from every kind of difficulty."—(On the Heart, cap. vi.) Aubrey mentions particularly Harvey's having often said, "that of all the losses he sustained, no grief was so crucifying to him as the loss of his papers (containing notes of his dissections of many of the lower animals), which, together with his goods in his lodgings at Whitehall, were plundered at the beginning of the rebellion." But these notes on comparative anatomy were not the only loss; the "Medical Observations," or "Medical Anatomy," perished at the same time, a great work still more to be regretted, in which Harvey himself informs us that he intended "from the many dissections he had made of the bodies of persons worn out by serious and strange affections, to relate how and in what way the internal organs were changed in their situation, size, figure, structure, consistency, and other sensible qualities, from their natural forms and appearances. For even as the dissection of healthy bodies contributes essentially to the advancement of philosophy and sound physiology, so does the inspection of diseased and cachectic subjects powerfully assist philosophical pathology." (Second Dissert, to Riolan.) This is precisely the system which the celebrated Morgagni pursued, and it is still the grand business which the most illustrious among modern pathologists are striving to accomplish. Harvey preserved his mental activity and vigour to the very end of his life. His letter to Slegel of Hamburg, written in his seventy-fifth year, has all the perspicuity and force of a much younger man's production. He continued his lectures till within a few years of his death, and very shortly before that event Aubrey found him reading Oughtred's Clavis Mathematica, and working the problems. Accumulating years, however, and reiterated attacks of gout, from which he had long suffered severely, at length asserted their mastery over the declining body, and Harvey, the great in intellect, the noble in nature, the fortunate in the love and affection of his friends, the favoured in his death, quitted life on the 3rd of June, 1657, in the eightieth year of his age; "the palsy," as Aubrey has it, "giving him an easy passport in the evening of the same day on which he was stricken." The funeral took place a few days afterwards.