Page:The Harveian oration 1906.djvu/24

18 mental attitude is expressed in a well-known poem of Browning’s :


 * those divine men of old time
 * Have reached, thou sayest well, each at one point
 * The outside verge that rounds our faculty,
 * And where they reached who can do more than reach?

Willing to correct observations or to extend anatomy by careful dissection, it was too much to expect from them either a new interpretation of the old facts or a knowledge of the new method by which those facts could be correctly interpreted.

The ingenious explanation which Fabricius gave of the use of the valves of the veins—to serve as dams or checks to the flow of the blood, so that it would not irrigate too rapidly and overflow the peripheral vessels to the deprivation of the upper parts of the limbs—shows how the old physiology dominated the most distinguished teacher of the time in the most distinguished school of Europe. This may have been the very suggestion to his pupil of the more excellent way. Was it while listening to this ingenious explanation of his master that, in a moment of abstraction—dimly dreaming, perhaps, of an English home far away and long forsaken—that there came to Harvey a heaven-sent moment, a sudden inspiration, a passing doubt nursed for long in silence, which ultimately grew into the great truth of 1616?

The works of Vesalius, of Fallopius, and of Fabricius effected a revolution in anatomy, but there was not at the close of the sixteenth century a new physiology. Though he had lost an anatomical throne, Galen ruled