66 HERBERT ALBERT RATNER 



science," *° Leake misses Harvey's fidelity to Aristotle's 

 method and its reward. Kilgour, in a recent and careful analy- 

 sis of Harvey's use of the quantitative method, concludes that 

 certainly " Harvey was not concerned with accurate measure- 

 ment " and that his estimations were consciously indifferent to 

 precision, the essence of the mathematical procedure. He adds, 

 " Apparently, quantitative evidence was not important in lead- 

 ing Harvey to develop the idea of the circulation because there 

 is no quantitation in his Lumleian Lecture notes of 1616." '" 

 The computations Harvey supplies, therefore, may be better 

 viewed as communicating to the reader — in the manner in 

 which a sensible model makes a theory vivid to the reader — 

 the physical reality of the disproportion between the amount 

 of ingesta and the flow of blood through the heart.^^ 



Finally, it would be amiss not to recogTiize that the demon- 

 stration of the circulation of the blood is just an Aristotelian 

 step in the elucidation of the nature of the heart, the prime 

 component of the cardiovascular system. The ultimate purpose 

 of Harvey's treatise is to define the heart upon which the 

 motion of the blood is dependent. 



One of the most remarkable chapters in this work of Harvey's 

 is the 17th and final chapter. From all the fields opened up by 

 the establishment of circulation — physiology, pathology, symp- 

 tomatology and therapeutics — he selects his topic: to relate 

 the various particulars that present themselves in the ana- 

 tomical study of the fabric of the heart and arteries to their 

 several uses and causes, " for I shall meet with many things 



*" Chauncey D. Leake, op. cit., ch. 9, p. 74, fn. 1. 



^° Frederick C. Kilgour, " William Harvey's Use of the Quantitative Method," 

 Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, XXVI (1954) , 417-18. 



^^ Some of the thoughts appearing in this article were first presented and in 

 part developed at a summer institute for scientists and philosophers conducted by 

 The Albert Magnus Lyceum for Natural Science at River Forest, Illinois, July 

 1952. A report of this institute is to be found in the publication, entitled, Science 

 in Synthesis: A dialectical approach to the integration of the physical and natural 

 sciences, by W. Kane, O. P.; J. D. Corcoran, O. P.; B. M. AsUey, O. P.; and R. H. 

 Nogar, O. P. (The Aquinas Library, Dominican College of St. Thomas Aquinas: 

 River Forest, Illinois. 1953). See pp. 93-108. 



