Page:The Harveian oration 1896.djvu/11

 LIN ACRE AND CAIUS

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to solve it. Harvey’s debt to Aristotle was warmly ac- knowledged by himself, and has been frequently insisted upon, so that it is less necessary to enlarge upon that theme. But his relations to Galen and the Greek anatomists Harvey himself, for reasons which I shall presently state, was unavoidably led to put forward less prominently, and in modern times they have been greatly undervalued, or even misunderstood. It is therefore to Galen and Greek anatomy in general that I propose chiefly to confine myself. We need not fear that the result will be to lessen our admiration for Harvey or for his momentous discovery. The very contrary will be the case.

One sometimes wishes history could be written back- wards ; — that we could show how the state of affairs to-day is the consequence of that which existed yesterday or the year before, and so on. The practical difficulties of such a method would probably be too great, but in the present case I should like to trace the circumstances which in- fluenced Harvey through the two generations preceding his own, more especially as that will give me the oppor- tunity of obeying the Harveian precept by commemorating two great benefactors of our College — Thomas Linacre, our honoured founder, and John Caius. We shall see that there was a real link of connexion between these three gene- rations of English physicians. The relation of Harvey’s work to that of his predecessors may not be immediately obvious ; but nevertheless he owed much to them, and to the schools which they represent In fact their labours were an essential preliminary to his own great discovery.

Harvey, as we all know, was a student first at Cambridge, in the great college which owed its second foundation to Caius. He never knew Caius, who died five years before Harvey was bom, but he worked under the posthumous influence of that eminent physician, and the example of a man so distinguished, and standing in such a relation to the young scholar, must have had weight in determining the aspirations and the course of study of the greatest alumnus of his college. Beyond the fact that Harvey followed