Page:The Harveian oration on Harvey in ancient and modern medicine (electronic resource) (IA b20420080).pdf/15

MODERN MEDICINE 3 Harvey lived through one period which was favourable to intellectual progress, and through another which was not. Born (1578) under Elizabeth, ten years old at the time of the Armada, he was a spectator of English history until within fifteen months of the death of Oliver Cromwell. At the death of James I. Harvey was forty-seven years old; his great discovery had been made and expounded in this College, though not yet given to the world. Thus his most important work was done in a quiet time--a period not brilliant historically, but one not unpropitious to learning and research. The fetters of old superstition had been loosened, and the influ- ence of the Elizabethan age was still in the air. It is worth noting that Harvey's long life made him the contemporary of the four greatest men whom England has produced. No one will dispute that this pre-eminence belongs to Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, and Newton, each without rival in his own way. Shakespeare died in 1616, the year in which Harvey, then thirty-seven, began to lecture at