Читать книгу The Works of William Harvey M.D - William Harvey - Страница 4

The circulation, it would seem, continued to form one of the subjects in the lectures on anatomy, which Harvey went on delivering for many years afterwards at the College of Physicians; but it was not till 1628 that he gave his views to the world at large in his celebrated treatise on the ‘Motion of the Heart and Blood,’[9] having already, as he tells us in his preface, for nine years and more, gone on demonstrating the subject before his learned auditory, illustrating it by new and additional arguments, and freeing it from the objections raised by the skilful among anatomists.

Some few years after his appointment as their lecturer by the College of Physicians, Harvey must have been chosen one of the physicians extraordinary to the reigning sovereign, James I. The fame of Harvey’s new views of the motions of the heart and blood could not but speedily have reached the wide-open ears of King James, and this of itself, to lay no stress on the powerful city interest of the illustrious anatomist, might suffice to ensure him such a mark of distinction as that just named. Of the precise date of his appointment as physician extraordinary to the king we are not informed; but in the letter of James bearing date the 3d of February, 1623, it is spoken of as a thing foregone—that had taken place some time ago; for in this letter Doctor Harvey is charged in common with the physicians in ordinary, with the care of the king’s health; and he is further guaranteed the reversion of the office of ordinary physician whenever, by death or otherwise, a vacancy should occur. To the promised dignity, however, Harvey did not attain for several years, not till after the demise of James, and when Charles had already occupied the throne of his father for some five or six years.

Harvey may now be said to have become rather closely connected with the court; but whether this connexion proved truly advantageous to him as a philosopher and physiologist may fairly be questioned. The time and service which the court physician must necessarily give to royalty and greatness interfere materially with the leisure and privacy that are indispensable to study and meditation. But Harvey, who appears to have been a man of singular self-possession, not to be diverted from his purpose by trifling or merely ceremonial considerations, always speaks of his master Charles in terms of unfeigned love and respect; and everything induces us to believe that Charles in turn loved and honoured his physician. The sovereign seems even to have taken a remarkable interest in the inquiries of the physiologist; to have had several exhibitions prepared of the punctum saliens in the embryo chick and deer, and to have witnessed the dissections of many of the does which he so liberally placed at Harvey’s disposal whilst the anatomist was prosecuting his inquiries into the subject of generation. Whatever the defects in Charles’s public and political character, he must always be admitted to have been a man of elegant tastes, and of amiable temper and refined manners in private. It was certainly worthy of the Prince who appreciated, whilst he commanded, the talents of a Vandyke and a Rubens, that he also prized and encouraged the less brilliant, but not less useful genius of a Harvey.

Harvey, as a physician, must now have been at the zenith of his reputation; he was physician in ordinary to the king, and we have seen him in the same position towards some of the foremost men of the age. His general practice, too, must have been extensive, and, if we look at the sum he is stated to have left behind him in money, his emoluments large. But he had not any lengthened harvest for all his early pains; his connexion with the court by and by came in the way of his continuing to improve his position; and then, grievous to relate, the appearance of the admirable Exercises on the Heart and Blood gave a decided and severe check to his professional prosperity. John Aubrey tells us he had “heard him (Harvey) say, that after his book on the ‘Circulation of the Blood’ came out, he fell mightily in his practice; ’twas believed by the vulgar that he was crack-brained, and all the physitians were against him.”[10] Writing many years afterwards, when the causes particularly indicated above had conspired to make Harvey’s practice less, Aubrey informs us further, that “though all his profession would allow him to be an excellent anatomist, I never heard any that admired his therapeutique way. I knew several practitioners in this town that would not have given threepence for one of his bills (prescriptions), and [who said] that a man could hardly tell by his bills what he did aim at.”[11] So has it mostly been with those who have added to the sum of human knowledge! The empiric under the title of the practical man, in his unsuspecting ignorance, sets himself up and is admitted as arbiter wherever there is difficulty: blind himself, he leads the blinded multitude the way he lists. He who laid the foundation of modern medical science lost his practice for his pains, and the routineer, with an appropriate salve for every sore, a pill and potion for each particular ache and ail, would not give threepence for one of his prescriptions! did not admire his therapeutique way!! and could not tell what he did aim at!!! Ignorance and presumption have never hesitated to rend the veil that science and modesty, all in supplying the means, have still owned their inability to raise. If Harvey faltered, who of his contemporaries could rightfully presume to walk secure? And yet did each and all of them, unconscious of the darkness, tread their twilight paths assuredly; whilst he, the divinity among them, with his eyes unsealed, felt little certain of his way. So has it still been with medicine; and the world must make many a lusty onward stride in knowledge before it can be otherwise.

The first interruption to his ordinary professional pursuits and avocations which Harvey seems to have suffered through his connexion with the court, occurred in the beginning of 1630, when he was engaged “to accompany the young Duke of Lenox in his travels beyond seas.” In anticipation of a removal from London, apparently, Harvey had already, in December 1629, resigned his office of treasurer to the College of Physicians, which he seems to have filled for several years.

Of the course of Harvey’s travels with the Duke of Lenox we have not been able to gain any information. Their way probably led them to the Continent, and it may have been on this occasion and in this company that he visited Venice, as we know from himself that he did in the course of one of his journeys. Harvey must have been in England again in 1632 and 1633; for in the former year he was formally chosen physician to Charles, and in the latter we find his absence, “by reason of his attendance on the king’s majesty,” from St. Bartholomew’s Hospital complained of by the surgeons of that institution, and Dr. Andrews appointed by the governors as his substitute, but “without prejudice to him in his yearly fee or in any other respect.”[12] Such considerate treatment satisfies us of the esteem in which Harvey was held.

In the early part of 1633 Charles determined to visit his ancient kingdom of Scotland, for the ostensible purpose of being crowned King of Scots. Upon this occasion Harvey accompanied him, as matter of course, we may presume. But the absence of the court from London was not of long duration; and in the early autumn of the same year we are pleased to find Harvey again at his post in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, engaged in his own province and propounding divers rules and regulations for the better government of the house and its officers,[13] which of themselves give us an excellent insight into the state of the hospital, as well as of the relative positions of the several departments of the healing art two centuries ago. The doctor’s treatment of the poor chirurgeons in these rules is sufficiently despotic it must be admitted; but the chirurgeons in their acquiescence showed that they merited no better handling. The only point on which they proved restive, indeed, was the revealment of their SECRETS to the physician; a great outrage in days when every man had his secrets, and felt fully justified in keeping them to himself. But surgery in the year 1633 had not shown any good title to an independent existence. The surgeon of those days was but the hand or instrument of the physician; the dignitary mostly applied to his famulus when he required a wen removed, or a limb lopped, or a broken head plastered; though Harvey it seems did not feel himself degraded by taking up the knife or practising midwifery.[14] Nevertheless, in these latter days Royal Colleges of Physicians have been seen arrogating superiority over Royal Colleges of Surgeons, and Royal Colleges both of Physicians and Surgeons combining to keep the practitioner of obstetrics under.

From the year 1633 Harvey appears to have devoted much of his time to attendance upon the king and retainers of the court, so that we have little or no particular information of his movements for several years. We know, however, from Aubrey, that he accompanied Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, whose physician he was, in his extraordinary embassy to the emperor, in the year 1636.[15] In the course of this journey, Harvey had an opportunity of visiting several of the principal cities of Germany, and of making the acquaintance of many of the leading medical men of the time. The place of date of one of Harvey’s letters, that namely to Caspar Hofmann, from Nuremberg, in the month of May, 1636, has not been noticed; but his presence with the Earl of Arundel at once accounts for it; and we therefore see that Harvey’s offer to demonstrate to the distinguished professor of Nuremberg, the anatomical particulars which made the circulation of the blood a necessary conclusion was no vain boast, made at a distance, but a substantial proposition in presence of his opponent, and which there is tradition at least to assure us he was called upon to fulfil.—Harvey is reported to have made a public demonstration of his anatomical views at Nuremberg, satisfactory to all present save Caspar Hofmann himself; to whom, as he still continued to urge objections, the futile nature of which we in these days can readily understand, Harvey is further related to have deigned no other answer than by laying down the scalpel and retiring, conduct which we find in entire conformity with our estimate of the character of the man.[16]

On his return to England, in the winter of 1636, Harvey must have resumed his place near the person of the sovereign, and by and by, as in duty bound, accompanied him on his first hostile expedition into Scotland in 1639, when matters were happily accommodated between the King and his Scottish subjects, whom he had driven to take up arms so righteously in defence of their religious liberties. Harvey, as physician to the person, may be further presumed to have been with Charles when he marched towards the Border the following year, so memorable in the annals of English history, when the war with the Scots was renewed, when the king’s authority received the first check at the battle of Newbury, and when Charles, returning to his capital after his defeat, encountered the still more formidable opposition of the English Parliament.

Harvey may now be said to have become fairly involved with the Court. From the total absence of his name in the transactions of the times, it is nevertheless interesting to observe how completely he kept himself aloof from all the intrigues and dealings of the party with which he was connected. He must have held himself exclusively to the discharge of his professional duties. In the course of these he doubtless attended Charles in his third visit to Scotland in the summer of 1641, when he essayed the arts of diplomacy with little better effect than he had already attempted the weight of prerogative in the first, and the force of arms in the second visit.

On returning to London in the autumn of the same year, Charles soon brought matters to a crisis between himself and his English subjects, in the persons of their representatives, and nothing soon remained for him but to unfurl his standard and proclaim himself at war with his people. This was accordingly done in the course of the ensuing summer. But the Parliament did not yet abandon a seeming care of the royal person, and Harvey informs us himself, that he now attended the king, not only with the consent, but by the desire, of the parliament. The battle of Edge-hill, which followed, and in which the sun of fortune shone with a partial and fitful gleam upon the royal arms, is especially interesting to us from our Harvey having been present, though he still took no part in the affair, and seems indeed to have felt very little solicitude either about its progress or its issue, if the account of Aubrey may be credited. “When King Charles,” says Aubrey, “by reason of the tumults, left London, he (Harvey) attended him, and was at the fight of Edge-hill with him; and during the fight the Prince and Duke of York were committed to his care. He told me that he withdrew with them under a hedge, and tooke out of his pockett a booke and read. But he had not read very long before a bullet of a great gun grazed on the ground neare him, which made him remove his station.”[17] The act of reading a book pending an important battle, the result of which was greatly to influence his master’s fortunes, certainly shows a wonderful degree of coolness and a remarkable indifference to everything like military matters. Harvey’s own candid character, and the confidence so obviously reposed in him when he was intrusted with the care of the Prince and the Duke of York, forbid us to interpret the behaviour into any lukewarmness or indifference as to the issue; but Harvey, throughout his whole career, was a most peaceful man: he never had the least taste for literary controversy, and can scarcely be said to have replied to any of those who opposed his views; and in his indifference about the fight of Edge-hill he only further shows us that he was not

“Of those who build their faith upon

The holy text of pike and gun,

And prove their doctrine orthodox

By apostolic blows and knocks.”

With his fine understanding and freedom from party and sectarian views of every kind, he probably saw that an appeal to arms was not the way for political right to be elicited, or for a sovereign to settle matters with his subjects. Harvey had certainly no turn for politics,[18] and when we refer to Aubrey we find that the fight of Edge-hill was hardly ended before our anatomist had crept back into his shell, and become absorbed in the subjects that formed the proper business of his life. “I first saw him (Harvey) at Oxford, 1642, after Edge-hill fight,” says our authority, “but was then too young to be acquainted with so great a doctor. I remember he came several times to our college (Trin.) to George Bathurst, B.D., who had a hen to hatch eggs in his chamber, which they opened dayly to see the progress and way of generation.” The zealous political partisan would have found no leisure for researches like these in such stirring times as marked the outbreak of the civil war in England; the politician had then other than pullets’ eggs to hatch.

The king’s physician, not to speak of the author of a new doctrine of the motions of the heart and blood, was sure to find favour in the eyes of the high church dignitaries of Oxford; and we accordingly find that, besides being everywhere handsomely received and entertained, Harvey had the honorary degree of Doctor of Physic conferred on him. Oxford, indeed, when the king and court were driven from the metropolis, which was now wholly in the hands of the popular party, became the head-quarters of the royal army and principal residence of the king for several years. And here Harvey seems to have quietly settled himself down and again turned his attention to his favorite subjects. Nor was the honorary distinction of doctor of physic from the university, which has been mentioned, the only mark of favour he received. Sir Nathaniel Brent, Warden of Merton College, yielding to his natural bias, forsook Oxford when it was garrisoned by the king, and began to take a somewhat active part in the proceedings of the popular party; he came forward in especial as a witness against Archbishop Laud, on the trial of that dignitary. Merton College being thus left without a head, upon the suggestion, as it is said, of the learned antiquary and mathematician, John Greaves, and in virtue of a letter of the king, Harvey was elected warden some time in the course of 1645. This appointment was doubtless merited by Harvey for his constant and faithful service to Charles; but it may also have been bestowed in some measure as a retort upon the Parliament, which, the year before, had entertained a motion for the supercession of Harvey in his office of physician to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. [19] Harvey, however, did not long enjoy his new office or its emoluments; for Oxford having surrendered to the Parliamentary forces under Fairfax the following year, Harvey, of course, resigned his charge, and immediately afterwards betook himself to London. Sir Nathaniel Brent, on the contrary, returned to Oxford; and the star of the Parliamentarians being now in the ascendant, Merton College was not slow to reinstate its old Presbyterian warden in the room of its late royalist head.[20]

From the date of the surrender of Oxford (July, 1646), Harvey followed the fortunes of Charles no longer. Of his reasons for quitting the service of his old master we know nothing. He probably felt anxious for repose; at sixty-eight, which was Harvey’s age, a man begins to find that an easy chair is a fitter resting-place than the bare ground, a ceiled roof more suitable covering than the open sky—prospects which a continuance of the strife held out. Harvey, besides, as we have seen, had no stomach for contention in any shape or form, not even in the literary arena; and he now probably resolved himself to follow the advice he had once given to his young friend Charles Scarborough, “to leave off gunning,”[21] and dedicate himself wholly to more congenial pursuits. And then Charles had long made it apparent, even to the most ardent of his adherents, that no faith was to be put in his promise, no trust to be reposed in his royal word. The wise old man, verging on the age of threescore years and ten, doubtless saw that it was better for him to retire from a responsible office, now become most irksome and thankless, and seek privacy and leisure for the remainder of his days. These Harvey found awaiting him in the houses of his affectionate brothers—now in the house of Eliab, in the City, or at Roehampton, and then in the house of Daniel, in the ‘suburban’ village of Lambeth, or at Combe near Croydon in Surrey, in each of which Harvey had his own apartments. The Harveys appear to have been united from first to last in the closest bonds of brotherly love,[22] and to have had a common interest in many of their undertakings; and Eliab, as we shall see, employed the small capital, which his brother William must have accumulated before the civil wars broke out, to such purpose, that the doctor actually died a rich man. With his brothers, then, retreating now to the “leads” of the house in the heart of the metropolis, now to the “caves” of the one at Combe, did Harvey continue to pass his days—but not in idleness; for the work on Generation, with the subject of which we saw him busied at Oxford several years before, must have found him in ample occupation. Nor was the love of ease so great in William Harvey, even at the advanced age of seventy-one, if we may credit some of the accounts, as to hinder him from again visiting the Continent, and making his way as far as Italy, a journey in which it is said he was attended by his friend the accomplished scholar and gentleman, Dr. Ent.[23]

In the beginning of 1651 appeared the second of Harvey’s great works, that, namely, On Animal Generation.[24] In this publication we have abundant proof of our author’s unabated industry and devotion to physiological science; and in the long and admirable letter to P. M. Slegel, of Hamburg, written shortly after the appearance of the work, we have pleasing evidence of the integrity of Harvey’s faculties at the advanced age of seventy-three.

The year after the publication of the work on Generation, i.e. 1652, when Harvey was looked up to by common consent as the most distinguished anatomist and physician of his age, the College of Physicians came to the resolution of placing his statue in their hall then occupying a site at Amen-corner; and measures being immediately taken in conformity with this purpose, it was carried into effect by the end of the year, when the statue, with the following complimentary inscription on the pedestal, was displayed:

GULIELMO HARVEIO

Viro monumentis suis immortali

Hoc insuper Collegium Medicorum Londinense

posuit.

Qui enim Sanguini motum

ut et

Animalibus ortum dedit,

Meruit esse

Stator Perpetuus.[25]

Harvey, in acknowledgment, it may have been, of the distinguished honour done him by his friends and colleagues, appears about this time to have commenced the erection at his own cost of a handsome addition to the College of Physicians. It was, as Aubrey informs us, “a noble building of Roman architecture (of rustic work, with Corinthian pilasters), comprising a great parlour, a kind of convocation house for the fellows to meet in below, and a library above. On the outside, on the frieze, in letters three inches long, was this inscription: Suasu et cura Fran. Prujeani, Præsidis, et Edmundi Smith, elect. inchoata et perfecta est hæc fabrica, An. MDCLIII.”[26] Nor was Harvey content merely to erect this building; he, further, furnished the library with books, and the museum with numerous objects of curiosity and a variety of surgical instruments. On the ceremony of this handsome addition to the College of Physicians being opened, which took place on the 2d of February, 1653, a sumptuous entertainment was provided at Harvey’s expense, at which he received the president and fellows, and made over to them, on the spot, his whole interest in the structure.

Dr. Prujean, the president of the college, going out of office, as usual, at Michaelmas the next year (1654), Harvey was unanimously chosen to fill the vacant chair. Having been absent when the election took place, a deputation proceeded to his apartments to apprize him of the honour his colleagues had done themselves and him, and to say that they awaited his answer on the following day. Every act of Harvey’s public life that has come down to us is marked not merely by propriety but by grace. He attended the comitia or assembly of the college next day; thanked his colleagues for the distinguished honour of which they had thought him worthy—the honour, as he said, of filling the foremost place among the physicians of England; but the concerns of the college, he proceeded, were too weighty to be intrusted to one like him, laden with years and infirm in health; and if he might be acquitted of arrogance in presuming to give advice in such circumstances, he would say that the college could not do better than reinstate in the authority which he had but just laid down, their late president, Dr. Prujean, under whose prudent management and fostering care the affairs of the college had greatly prospered. This noble counsel had fitting response: Harvey’s advice being adopted by general consent, Dr. Prujean was forthwith re-elected president.

The College of Physicians were justly proud of their great associate, and Harvey, in his turn, was undoubtedly attached to the college. Here, indeed, as their lecturer on anatomy and surgery, he had first propounded the views which had won him such distinguished credit in his life, and which have left his name as a deathless word on the lips of men; here he consorted with his nearest and dearest friends, receiving from all those remarks of respectful consideration that were so justly his due; and here, in fine, the first place among the first men of his profession had been tendered to him, and gracefully declined. To a mind like Harvey’s, and with the opportunity afforded him of making so graceful a concession, the foremost place was certainly a higher distinction unaccepted, than it had been enjoyed.—The excuse for declining the office of president was not merely personal: it was not alone that he was an old man, infirm in health, and incompetent for so great a trust; but, the affairs of the college had greatly thriven under the prudent management and constant care of the late president, and it was no more than right that he who had but just laid down should be re-established in authority.

Harvey, we have said, was childless; his wife, though we have not the date of her death, he had certainly lost by this time. His only surviving brother Eliab was rich; his nephews were prosperous merchants and on the road to the independence and titles which several of them afterwards achieved: he, therefore, determined to make the College of Physicians not only heirs to his paternal estate, worth, at that time, 56l. per annum, but to bestow it on them in free gift during his life. This purpose he carried into effect by means of a formal instrument, which he delivered to the college in the month of July, 1656; the special provisions in the deed settling one sum, by way of salary for the librarian, and another sum, for the delivery of a solemn oration annually, in commemoration of those who had approved themselves benefactors to the college, and, by extension, who had added aught to the sum of medical science in the course of the bygone year.[27]

Having thus accompanied Harvey over so much of the way in his mortal career, let us, before proceeding further, briefly advert to his Writings, to the influence they had in the republic of letters during his life-time, to the fruits they have since produced, and to the impression still made on the mind that holds communion through their means with the mind that dictated them so many years ago.—The intellectual endowment of a man necessarily appears in his writings; it is not always from them that so true a conception of his moral character can be formed. Harvey, however, though in his long life he accomplished but a small fraction of all his literary designs, has still left us sufficient from which to form an estimate of him as a philosopher, as a physiologist, and it may also be said as a man. Let us take a brief survey of his writings, then, and wind up our account of his life with such personal notices as we can gather from contemporaries, or as we can infer from his own conduct and written word.