Page:The Harveian oration 1906.djvu/32

26 states in a manuscript introductory lecture in the College library—‘I deliver nothing I have not seen and observed myself'—he could not add with him, ‘I am not a reader of books.' Nearly one hundred references to some twenty authors occur in the manuscript of the thorax, or, as he calls it, the 'parlour' lecture.

It is a great pity that we have no contemporary account of the impression on such men as Mayerne or Reid of the new doctrines, for which we have the author’s statement that they were taught annually and elaborated. So far as I know there is no reference to show that the lectures had any immediate influence in the profession, or indeed that the subject-matter ever got beyond the circle of the college. We are not with-out a first-hand account by the author of his reception : 'These views as usual pleased some more, others less; some chid and calumniated me, and laid it to me as a crime that I had dared to depart from the precepts and opinions of all anatomists; others desired further explanation of the novelties.'

It is difficult for us to realize the mental attitude of the men who listened year by year as the turn of the 'Parlour Lecture' came. Their opinions, no less firmly held than is our positive knowledge, did not get much beyond : ‘The great dictator Hippocrates puts us in mind of it, Galen has a thousand times inculcated the same, the prince of the Arabian tribe, Avicen, has set his seal unto it.' This expresses their mental state, and such a heresy as a general circulation could scarcely be appreciated; and in a man of such good parts as Harvey would in pity be condoned, just as we overlook the mild intellectual vagaries of our friends.

Bootless to ask, impossible to answer, is the question why Harvey delayed for twelve years the publication