Page:Science and modern civilisation - the Harveian oration - delivered before the Royal College of Physicians, October 18, 1897 (IA b24976039).pdf/10

 Harvey’s life. He was the eldest son of an opulent Kentish yeoman, and was born at Folkestone in 1578.

Harvey passed his schoolboy days at the King’s Grammar School in the pleasant city of Canterbury. From thence he migrated, at the age of sixteen, to Caius College, Cambridge. Harvey spent some three years at the University, and graduated as Bachelor of Arts in 1597, just three hundred years ago. At the age of twenty he proceeded to Padua to pursue his medical studies. At that period Padua was one of the foremost universities in Europe, and was especially famous as a school of anatomy. Harvey passed four years at Padua, and had for teachers the most celebrated anatomists of the day, namely, Fabricius of Aqua Pendente and Casserius, names which are still embalmed in our anatomical nomenclature. Tt was obviously of the greatest advantage to Harvey, in view of his future work, that his attention was thus early fixed on the solid data of descriptive anatomy, which could be directly verified by eye and hand in the dissecting room, rather than on the pedantic aphorisms and cloudy speculations which constituted so large a part of the medical learning of that time. At the end of his course of study at Padua he obtained the degree of Doctor of Medicine, and returned to England in 1603. In the same year he received his doctor’s degree from the University of The young Harvey now settled in

Cambridge.

of

1

In those days the yeomen of Kent were persons There is an old rhyme which runs 1



A A And

knight of Cales, squire of Wales,

a laird of the North countree

A yeoman With

of

Kent

his yearly rent

of consideration.