Page:The Harveian oration 1896.djvu/12

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HARVEY AND GALEN

Caius’s example in studying in the schools of Italy, I will only now draw attention to two of Caius’s intellectual characteristics. He was an enthusiastic student of Greek medicine, and more especially of Galen, spending much time in revising and publishing some of his writings. Besides, or rather in consequence of, this bent he was keenly interested in anatomy, and founded a lectureship in his own college to promote its study. I need hardly point out how directly these facts bear upon Harvey’s career as a student.

Caius stood as to time much in the same relation to Linacre as Harvey did to himself, being about four years old when Linacre died, but in spirit the earlier pair were much more intimately connected. Caius cannot have known the older physician, but he made him in most respects the model of his life, and was in the truest sense his intellectual heir. Indeed, it was in a filial spirit that he repaired the neglect of others by erecting a monument to Linacre in St. Paul’s Cathedral with its well-known affec- tionate inscription.

We are led back, then, to Linacre, our founder, as in a sense the intellectual grandfather of Harvey, and we ask, What share had he in moulding the mind and influencing the life of the most famous of his progeny? How far did he contribute to lay the foundation on which Harvey’s great work was built ? The answer is that, though neither Linacre nor Caius, even through their writings, may have had any direct influence on Harvey, they represent not only the two preceding generations of English physicians, but also represent two successive stages in a great intel- lectual movement which was the indispensable preliminary to Harvey’s work, and of which his great discovery may be called the culmination. This was the movement generally called the Renaissance, or the revival of learning, but which, for our present purpose, might be more closely defined as the ‘ revival of Greek thought.’ Every one knows that the most important factor in the revival of learning (so far as it took place in the fifteenth century, though doubtless it began much earlier) was, beside the invention of printing,