Page:The Harveian oration - delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, October 18th, 1899 (IA b24975941).pdf/15

 himself in the natural laws of the world as well as in the letter of the Scriptures. Agriculture flourished, and accordingly we find that the promising son of the prosperous Kentish yeoman is sent from the King's School at Canterbury to Caius College, Cambridge. From Cambridge he goes to Padua, where alone in Europe he could receive anything like adequate instruction in anatomy, and where Fabricius ab Aquapendente held the torch which Vesalius had kindled, and from which our Caius had brought a vitalising spark to England. At Padua Harvey must have lived in a scientific atmosphere, and may occasionally have formed one of an audience of 2000 persons who hung upon the words of Galileo Galilei, the immortal professor of mathematics. After graduation in 1602, Harvey settled in London, married Elizabeth Browne, the daughter of the King's physician, became a fellow of our College in 1607, succeeded to the post of physician at St. Bartholomew's in 1609, was ap pointed our Lumleian lecturer in 1615, and in 1618 was made physician extraordinary to James I. It was not until ten years after this that Harvey in 1628, at the age of fifty, published in its final form his ever-famous essay on the Circulation of the Blood.

The thirty years which intervened between the commencement of Harvey's studies at Padua and the publication of his essay (1598-1628) was a period of comparative political tranquillity in which