Page:The Harveian oration, 1873.djvu/19

 casion, by an 'experimentum a me ' (in his seventy-fourth year) 'nuper et collegis aliquot praesentibus exploratum.' Simple as this experiment may seem to us now, I do not think that any apology is required for the drawing of attention to it; for it is only twenty-eight years ago (see Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, vol. lxiii. p. 20), that Dr. Sharpey, to whom our Baly Medal has been so recently and so fitly assigned, had to perform the very closely similar experiment of injecting defibrinated blood into the thoracic aorta, with the very closely similar object of showing that the force of the heart was sufficient to account for the passage of blood through the intestinal and hepatic vascular systems—nay, to perform an all but identical experiment, adding on to it but the means for estimating and reproducing the force put out by the ventricle concerned. If such experiments as these were necessary in 1845, how much more necessary must have been the still simpler experiments of Harvey in 1651! At that time, the prestige of Eiolanus the younger 'pressed heavily upon mankind.'