Page:The advancement of science by experimental research - the Harveian oration, delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, June 27th, 1883 (IA b24869958).pdf/24

 moved by the political events that were passing before him. In the same year that his great work was published, 1.628, was the petition of Rights, in 1629 Sir John Eliot was condemned to the Tower, and the King began that system of defiance to the Parliament which led to the civil war, and to his death. Harvey had been appointed one of the Physicians extraordinary to James I., but it was not until Charles had been on the throne for five or six years that Harvey was appointed physician in ordinary to the King.

Harvey was then in the height of his professional career; his discoveries were becoming generally known, and he had established the great truths connected with the action of the heart, and the course of the circulation. For hundreds of years it had been supposed that the diastole of the heart, its expansion, was the most important movement, but Harvey saw the heart contract, and proved that the contraction, the systole of the heart, was that which was preeminently the propelling power, forcing the blood into the lungs and into the