Читать книгу The Works of William Harvey M.D - William Harvey - Страница 7

Table of Contents

In our account of Harvey’s public career we found him busy with the subject of Generation at Oxford in 1642; but he had certainly turned his attention that way at a much earlier period, for one of the chief causes of his regret, as expressed to Dr. Ent, for the destruction of his papers during the civil war, is the loss of his Observations on the Generation of Insects, which could only have been made and reduced to form many years previously, probably before his engagement to accompany the Duke of Lennox on his travels. And then we see that all his notes on the gestation of the hind or doe were made in the palmy days of the first Charles, before the differences between him and the people of these countries had come to the arbitrement of arms. Harvey probably occupied a good deal of his leisure in arranging and writing the work on Generation, after quitting the service of Charles in 1646; his practice at this period was not extensive, and he seems to have passed much of his time in the country. Harvey appears to have been little inclined to the publication of this work, and only to have ventured it out of his hands with reluctance. Without the solicitations of Ent, indeed, it would certainly have been left unpublished during his lifetime. Ent, however, succeeded in carrying off the prize which his illustrious friend had showed him, and lost no time in getting it into types, taking on himself the task of correcting the press, and sending it forth according to his own ideas in fitting form, with a frontispiece, and a highflown dedication to the President and Fellows of the College of Physicians. Ent’s account of his interview with Harvey on the occasion of obtaining his consent to the publication, though highly theatrical, is still extremely interesting. Saluting the great anatomist, and asking if all were well with him, Harvey answers, somewhat impatiently as it seems: “How can it, whilst the Commonwealth is full of distractions, and I myself am still in the open sea? And truly,” he continues, “did I not find solace in my studies, and a balm for my spirit in the memory of my observations of former years, I should feel little desire for longer life.” (p. 145.) Let the reader turn to the page from which the above quotation is taken, and to the one which follows it, for thoughts and views that clearly bespeak the greatness of intellect, the nobleness of sentiment that distinguished William Harvey. When Ent proceeds to say that the learned world, aware of his indefatigable industry, were eagerly looking for other works at his hands, the fervid genius of the poet or discoverer still appears in his reply: “And would you be the man,” said Harvey, smiling, “who should recommend me to quit the peaceful haven, where I now pass my life, and launch again upon the faithless sea? You know full well what a storm my former lucubrations raised. Much better is it oftentimes to grow wise at home and in private, than by publishing what you have amassed with infinite labour, to stir up tempests that may rob you of peace and quiet for the rest of your days.” (p. 147.) By and by, however, he produces his Exercises on the Generation of Animals, and though he makes many difficulties at first, urging, among other things, that the work must be held incomplete, as containing nothing on the generation of insects, Ent, nevertheless, prevails in the end, and receives the papers with full authority, either speedily to commit them to the press, or to delay their publication to a future time. Ent set about his office of midwife, as he has it, forthwith, and the following year (1651) saw the birth of the work on Generation.

Physiological science generally was not sufficiently advanced in Harvey’s time to admit of a truly great and enduring work being produced on a subject so abstruse, and involving so many particulars as that of Generation. On the doctrine of the circulation the dawn had long been visible; Harvey came and the sun arose. On the subject of animal reproduction, all was night and darkness two centuries ago; and though the light has still been waxing in strength since Harvey wrote, it is only in these times that we have seen it brightening into something like the day. In Harvey’s time the very means and instruments that were indispensable to the investigation were not yet known, or were used of powers inadequate to bring the prime facts within the cognizance of the senses. Harvey doubtless did as much as any man living could have accomplished when he wrote. He announced the general truth: Omne animal ex ovo; he showed the cicatricula of the egg as the point where the reproductive process begins; he corrected numerous errors into which his master Fabricius had fallen; he further pointed out the path of observation and experiment as the only one that could lead to satisfactory results in the investigation of a subject which gradually displayed itself as one of natural history; and, it may be added, by his wanderings in the labyrinth of the metaphysics of physiological science, he did enough to deter any one from attempting to tread such barren ground again. In his work on the Heart and Blood, Harvey had all the essential facts of the subject clearly before him, and he used them at once in such masterly-wise, that he left little or nothing for addition either by himself or others. Secure of his footing here, he could well dispense with “vital spirits,” “innate heat,” and other inscrutable agencies, he could leave “adequate and efficient causes,” and other metaphysical phantoms on one side—it was physics that he was dealing with, and the physician was at home. With the information we now possess, we see clearly how indifferently weaponed was the physiologist of the year 1647 for encountering such a subject as Animal Generation; a Leeuwenhoek and a De Graaf, a Spallanzani and a Haighton, a Wolff, a Purkinje, a Von Baer, a Valentin, a Rudolph Wagner, a Bischoff, and many more, had successively to appear, before the facts of the subject could be ascertained, and a Schleiden and a Schwann were further necessary as ultimate interpreters of the things observed before they could be either rightly or wholly understood. No wonder then that The Physiologist of the 17th century, meets us in the guise of one rather puzzled with the burthen he has made up his mind to bear, and, contrary to his former wont, eking out the lack of positive knowledge by reiterated disquisitions on topics where certainty is unattainable.

It is rather curious, moreover, to find Harvey, in his work on Generation, not entirely escaping the pitfall of which he was so well aware, and which he shunned so successfully in his earlier production. In the work on the Heart, he sets out with the certainty that the whole of the notions of the ancients on the heart and blood are untenable; and then, taking Nature for his guide, his fine intellect never once suffers him to stray from the right path. In the book on Generation, on the other hand, he begins by putting himself in some sort into the harness of Aristotle, and taking the bit of Fabricius between his teeth; and then, either assuming the ideas of the former as premises, or those of the latter as topics of discussion or dissent, he labours on endeavouring to find Nature in harmony with the Stagyrite, or at variance with the professor of Padua—for, in spite of many expressions of respect and deference for his old master, Harvey evidently delights to find Fabricius in the wrong. Finally, so possessed is he by scholastic ideas, that he winds up some of his opinions upon animal reproduction by presenting them in the shape of logical syllogisms.

The age of Harvey, then, was not competent to produce a work on generation—it was still an impossible undertaking. Yet has Harvey written a remarkable book; one that teems with interesting observation, and that presents the author to us in the character of the elegant writer, the scholar, and the poet as well as the discoverer—if, indeed, poet and discoverer, though variously applied, be not identical terms. Besides the points already referred to, as immediately connected with his subject, we here find Harvey anticipating modern surgery, by applying a ligature to the main artery of a tumour which he wished to extirpate, and so making its subsequent removal much more easy. Here, too, we find him, a century and a half before his contemporaries, in the most rapidly progressive period in the history of human knowledge, throwing out the first hint of the true use of the lungs. Hitherto the lungs had been regarded as surrounding the heart for the purpose of ventilating the blood and tempering or moderating its heat, the heart being viewed as the focus or hearth of the innate heat; and Harvey himself generally uses language in harmony with these ideas; but in one instance, the lightning of genius giving him a glimpse of the truth, he says, “Air is given neither for the cooling nor the nutrition of animals * * * it is as if heat were rather enkindled within the fœtus [at birth] than repressed by the influence of the air.”[62]

Had William Harvey possessed this idea in his earlier years, and pursued it as he did that of the blood never moving in the veins but in one recurrent course, he would at least have prepared the way for another grand discovery in physiology: demonstrating the erroneousness of the current physiological notions on the use of the lungs, he would have led the van in the investigation of their proper office; and, had everything else permitted, he might even have anticipated Joseph Black in explaining the source of animal heat. But this was an impossibility at the time: chemistry, in Harvey’s day, mostly in the hands of adepts and charlatans, transmuters of the base metals, and searchers after the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life, could have no attractions for the clear intellect of the demonstrator of the circulation of the blood. No wonder, therefore, that Harvey “did not care for chymistrey,” or that “he was wont to speak against the chymists” (Aubrey, l. c. p. 385); this anecdote is but another proof of Harvey’s sagacity. Harvey then could only show himself in advance of his age by questioning its opinions on the office of the lungs as he does; the state of chemical science in the middle of the 17th century did not admit of his doing more. Harvey, however, well knew the vivifying force of heat: he saw it the immediate indispensable agent in the reproduction of a living sentient being, as it is probably employed by the Creator as mainspring in the elaborate mechanism of the automatic animal body.

The short piece on the Anatomy of Thomas Parr, is interesting in itself; and in giving us a glimpse of Harvey’s style of pathological reasoning, confirms us in our faith in the great physiologist as a practitioner of medicine. If knowledge will not help, how should the want of it avail?

The Letters of Great men generally serve to make us more intimately acquainted with them than without such aid we could have become. This is more especially the case as respects the letters that are written in the ease and confidence of private friendship. It is greatly to be regretted that so few of the letters of this description that flowed from the pen of Harvey should have come down to us. Those addressed to Giovanni Nardi, however, show us what an affectionate and elegant mind our Harvey possessed; how mindful he always appears of former kindnesses to himself and to those that were near to him; how anxious that he should be cherished in the memory of his friends, even as he cherishes them in his own!

The other letters we possess are mostly upon professional—physiological topics; though the one addressed from Nuremberg to Caspar Hofmann may, perhaps, be held an exception; for in this letter the manly and candid character of Harvey displays itself conspicuously. In his own city he challenges the Nuremberg professor to the proof. “If you would see with your own eyes the things I assert of the circulation, I promise to show them to you with the opportunity afforded me.” We have seen that Harvey accompanied the Earl of Arundel in his extraordinary embassy to the Emperor, in 1636, and may probably have been one of the party of which three members were barbarously murdered on their way, from Nuremberg to Ratisbon, as Crowne[63] informs us. Hence the solicitude which Hollar, the artist, who also accompanied the ambassador, informed Aubrey the Earl of Arundel expressed for his physician’s safety: “For he would still be making of excursions into the woods, making observations of strange trees, plants, earths, &c., and sometimes like to be lost; so that my lord ambassador would be really angry with him, for there was not only danger of wild beasts but of thieves.”[64]

The burthen of the long and able letter to Siegel, of Hamburg, is still the Circulation. The one addressed to Morison, and the two to Horst, treat of the discovery of the receptaculum chyli and thoracic duct by Pecquet. Harvey has been held wanting to his greatness in having refused his assent to the facts of the distinct existence and special office of the lymphatic system. But, non omnia possumus omnes; Harvey had his own work laid out for him, and the lymphatic system was not a part of it. Aselli’s book on the ‘Lacteal Viens,’[65] was even published before Harvey’s own Exercises on the Heart and Blood had appeared, and must have been familiar to our physiologist; but that he failed to perceive the import of that discovery, and never inquired particularly into it, cannot surely be rightly laid to him as a charge; and then, when the newly-discovered system of vessels acquired extension from the researches of Pecquet, Rudbeck, and Bartholin, Harvey felt that he was both too old and too infirm to enter on the examination of so extensive and delicate an anatomical question. In entire consistency with his noble nature, however, and in striking contrast with his own opponents, he nowhere formally denies the existence of the new lymphatic vessels; nor does he once oppose the authority of his name to the investigation of the truth. On the contrary, he states his objections, “not as being obstinately wedded to his own opinion, but that he may show what can readily be urged in opposition to the advocates of the new ideas. Nor do I doubt,” he proceeds, “but that many things now hidden in the well of Democritus, will by and by be drawn up into day by the ceaseless industry of a coming age.”[66]

The letter to Vlackveld was written the very year, within a few weeks indeed, of his death. It is even touching—it is in vain, he says, to his correspondent, that he would apply the spur; he has already felt his right to demand his release from duty; yet would he still be honorably considered by his contemporaries, and he begs his friend Vlackveld to love him to the last.

We have taken occasion from time to time in the course of our narrative, to glance at the mental and moral constitution, and also at the personal character, of Harvey, principally by way of inference from his conduct on particular occasions, and from what appears in his writings. Happily we have in addition a few particulars from the pen of a contemporary, John Aubrey,[67] which, though perchance they do not harmonize in every respect with the facts in his public life and the portrait he gives us of himself in his works, are nevertheless extremely interesting, and cannot be left unnoticed in a Life of Harvey.

“In person,” Aubrey informs us, “Harvey was not tall, but of the lowest stature; round faced; olivaster (like wainscot) complexion; little eye, round, very black, full of spirit; his hair black as a raven, but quite white 20 years before he died.” The portrait we have of Harvey by Cornelius Jansen, in the library of the Royal College of Physicians, as well as of one, we presume by Bemmel, now in the possession of Dr. Richard Bright, corresponds with this account: the temperament is nervous-bilious; the forehead is compact and square, and of greater width than usual between the temples; the expression is highly intellectual, contemplative, and manly.

“In temper,” Aubrey says, “he was like the rest of his brothers, very choleric, and, in his younger days, he wore a dagger, as the fashion then was, which he would be apt to draw out upon every occasion.” We cannot suppose that this was offensively, but merely in the way of gesticulation, and to lend force to his words; for in his public and literary life, Harvey showed everything but a choleric nature: he seems, indeed, at all times to have had his temper under entire control. The way in which Harvey himself speaks of the robbery of his apartments and the destruction of his papers, has nothing of bitterness or acrimony in it. With the opportunity presenting itself to him—as when he sends Nardi the books on the Troubles in England—he is not tempted to utter even a splenetic word against the party which had been all along opposed to his friends, and by which he had suffered so severely. Harvey was, probably, a marked man by Cromwell and his adherents; but had he been so disposed he could have indulged in a little vituperation without risk of molestation. The government of England in the Protector’s time was still no tyranny.

Harvey appears not to have esteemed the fair sex very highly. He would say, that “we Europeans knew not how to order or govern our women, and that the Turks were the only people who used them wisely.” But, indeed, if Aubrey may be trusted, he did not think very much of mankind in general: he was wont to say, that “man was but a great mischievous baboon.” Harvey, however, wived young, and in his age he seems still to have thought that the old man was best tended by the gentle hand of a woman not too far stricken in years.[68]

Harvey, in his own family circle, must have been affectionate and kind—characteristics of all his brothers—who appear as we have said to have lived together through their lives in perfect amity and peace. But our Harvey’s sympathies were not limited to his immediate relatives: attachment, friendship was an essential ingredient in his nature. His will from first to last is a piece of beautiful humanity, and more than one widow and helpless woman is there provided for. He seems to have been very anxious to live in the memory of his sisters-in-law and of his nephews and nieces, whose legacies are mostly given to the end that they may buy something to keep in remembrance of him. To Dr. Ent he was much attached, and, besides his bookcases, there are ‘five pounds to buy a ring.’ Dr. Scarborough, who also stood high in Harvey’s favour, has his ‘silver instruments of surgery and his best velvet gown.’

We cannot fancy that Harvey was at any time very eager in the pursuit of wealth. Aubrey tells us that, “For twenty years before he died, he took no care of his worldly concerns; but his brother Eliab, who was a very wise and prudent manager, ordered all, not only faithfully, but better than he could have done for himself.” The effect of this good management was that Harvey lived, towards the end of his life, in very easy circumstances. Having no costly establishment to maintain, for he always lived with one or other of his brothers in his latter days, and no family to provide for, he could afford to be munificent, as we have seen him, to the College of Physicians, and at his death he is reported to have left as much as 20,000l. to his faithful steward and kind brother Eliab, who always meets us as the guardian angel of our anatomist, in a worldly and material point of view. Honoured be the name and the memory of Eliab Harvey for his good offices to one so worthy!

Though of competent estate, in the enjoyment of the highest reputation, and trusted by two sovereign Princes in succession, Harvey never suffered his name to be coupled with any of those lower-grade titles that were so freely conferred in the time of both the First and Second Charles. When we associate Harvey’s name with a title at all, it is with the one he fairly won from his masters of Padua: by his contemporaries he is always spoken of as Dr. Harvey; we in the present day rightly class him with our Shakespeares, and our Miltons, and speak of him as Harvey. Harvey, indeed, had no love of ostentation or display. The very buildings he erected, were built “at the suggestion and under the auspices” of others.

Harvey’s mind was largely imbued with the imaginative faculty: how finely he brings in the classical allusion to “the Sicilian sea, dashing among the rocks around Charybdis, hissing and foaming and tossed hither and thither,” in illustration of those who reason against the evidence of their senses, (p. 130.) And then what unbounded confidence he has in Nature (p. 153), and how keenly alive he is to her beauties in every sphere: Nature has not been sedulous to deck out animals only with ornaments; she has further thrown an infinite variety of beautiful dyes over the lowly and insensate herbs and flowers. (p. 426.)

In Harvey the religious sentiments appear to have been active; the exordium to his will is unusually solemn and grand. He also evinces true and elevated piety throughout the whole course of his work on Generation, and seizes every opportunity of giving utterance to his sense of the immediate agency and omnipotence of Deity. He appears, with the ancient philosophers, to have regarded the universe and its parts as actuated by a Supreme and all-pervading Intelligence. He was a great admirer of Virgil, whose works were frequently in his hands, and whose religious philosophy he seems also, in a great measure, to have adopted. The following beautiful and often-quoted passage of his favorite author may be said to embody his ideas on this subject, as they appear repeatedly in the course of the work on Generation:—