Page:The Harveian oration 1906.djvu/22

16 Montpellier, Paris, and Leyden. In 1593 a well-to-do young Englishman who wished to study medicine thoroughly went to North Italy, and most naturally to Padua—'fair Padua, nursery of the arts’—whose close affiliations with us may be gathered from the fact that, of universities next to Oxford and Cambridge, she has given us more Presidents than any other. In the years that had passed since Vesalius had retired in disgust, the fame of its anatomical school had been well maintained by Fallopius, Columbus, and Fabricius, worthy successors of the great master. Of each may be said what Douglas says of the first named : 'In docendo maxime methodicus, in medendo felicissimus, in secando expertissimus.’ While the story of Harvey’s student life can never be told as we could wish, we know enough to enable us to understand the influences which moulded his career. In Fabricius he found a man to make his life-model. To the enthusiastic teacher and investigator were added those other qualities so attractive to the youthful mind, generous sympathies and a keen sense of the wider responsibilities of his position, as shown in building, at his own expense, a new anatomical theatre for the University. Wide as was the range of his master’s studies, embracing not alone anatomy but medicine and surgery, the contributions by which he is most distinguished are upon subjects in which Harvey himself subsequently made an undying reputation. The activity of his literary life did not begin until he had been teaching nearly forty years, and it is a fact of the highest significance that, corresponding to the very period of Harvey’s stay in Padua, Fabricius must have been deep in the study of embryology and of the anatomy of the vascular system. His great work on generation was the model on which Harvey based his