WILLIAM HARVEY 



397 



The fact is, that neither in this nor in any 

 physiological problem can mere deductive rea- 

 soning from dead structure tell us what part that 

 structure plays, when it is a living component of 

 a living body. Physiology attempts to discover 

 the laws of vital activity, and these laws are ob- 

 viously ascertainable only by observation and 

 experiment upon living things. 



In the case of the circulation of the blood, as 

 in that of all other great physiological doctrines, 

 take away the truths which have been learned by 

 observation and experiment on living structures, 

 and the whole fabric crumbles away. Galen, 

 Columbus, Harvey, were all great vivisectors. 

 And the final ocular demonstration of the circu- 

 lation of the blood by Malpighi, seven years after 

 Harvey's death — the keystone of the fabric he 

 raised — involved an experiment on a living frog. 



This experiment can be performed on a de- 

 monstrably insensible animal. Nevertheless, any 

 English subject who repeats it, in these days, 

 may be subjected to fine or imprisonment, as a 

 common malefactor, whenever the chances of 

 political strife give the home office to some min- 

 ister of less knowledge, less justice, and, above 

 all, less firmness in resisting open and underhand 

 pressure, than the present Secretary of State for ' 

 the Home Department. 



I do not think the present is a fitting occasion i 

 for the discussion of the burning question of vivi- i 

 section. My opinions on the subject have been 

 formed and expressed under a due sense of re- 

 sponsibility, and they have not been, and are not 

 likely to be, affected by the preposterous misrep- 

 resentations and unseemly abuse which they have 

 evoked. The good Harvey, in one of his fits of 

 choler, I suppose, said that " man was but a 

 great mischievous baboon," 1 and yet for twenty 

 years he kept silence, and at the end answered 

 Riolan with quite angelic mildness. I can imi- 

 tate his silence, if not his mildness; and there- 

 fore I have nothing further to offer on this subject. 

 It may be? that those are right who say, " Perish 

 the human race, rather than let a dog suffer." It 

 may be that those are right who think that a 

 man is worth a wilderness of apes, and that he 

 who will not save human life when he could do 

 so, by sacrificing a hecatomb of animals, is an 

 accomplice in murder. 



But, without touching upon this debatable 

 ground, I may be of some use in cleansing the 

 ground of mere rubbish. I submit two points 

 for your consideration. The one of these is the 



1 Aubrey. 



unquestionable fact that physiology is based 

 upon experiment, and can only grow by experi- 

 ment ; and that the discovery of the true motion 

 of the blood, which is one of the cardinal doc- 

 trines of that science, and a doctrine the truth 

 of which is implied in the diagnosis and the 

 treatment of nine diseases out of ten, has been 

 made in no other way than by reasoning on the 

 data supplied by repeated and multiplied vivisec- 

 tions. 



The other is a mere suggestion, which, per- 

 haps, may be dictated by a want of power on the 

 part of a man who is growing old, to adjust him- 

 self to a changing world. The great mark of 

 senility, I believe, is to be a " laudator temporis 

 acti." But, as Harvey says, "the die is cast, 

 and I put my faith in the candor of the lovers 

 of truth and of learned minds." 



I have had occasion to remark that the sci- 

 ence of former days was not so despicable as 

 some think ; and that, however foolish undue 

 respect for the wisdom of the ancients may be, 

 undue disrespect for it may be still more repre- 

 hensible. Now I fancy that a candid mind will 

 admit it to be within the limits of possibility, 

 that the like may apply to the public opinion 

 and the moral sense of former ages. 



Harvey was the favored friend of his sov- 

 ereign, the honored Nestor of his profession, 

 the pride of his countrymen. If he lived now, 

 and were guilty of serving mankind to the same 

 extent and in the same way, so far from any 

 such marks of favor reaching him, he would 

 find himself to be a mark of a different kind — a 

 mark, I mean, for immeasurable calumny and 

 scandalous vituperation ; and, though his pro- 

 fessional brethren would surely pay him all 

 honor, so far from being the pride of his coun- 

 trymen, a goodly number of them, of all grades 

 in the social scale, would be spending a world of 

 energy in the endeavor to give him the legal 

 status of a burglar. 



I venture to ask you to consider seriously 

 whether, under these circumstances, it is quite 

 so certain, as some seem to believe, that the pub- 

 lic opinion of the England of Harvey's day — that 

 time when Englishmen could hurl back a world 

 arrayed in arms against them, because they feared 

 neither to suffer, nor to inflict, pain and death in 

 a good cause ; that age within which Shakespeare 

 and Milton, Hobbes and Locke, Harvey and New- 

 ton, Drake and Raleigh, Cromwell and Strafford, 

 embodied the powers of our race for good and 

 evil in a fashion which has had no parallel before 

 or since — was absolutely contemptible when set 



