RENAISSANCE II5 



London College of Physicians, and there gained such a reputation that he 

 was commissioned to give lectures to his colleagues. Eventually he was ap- 

 pointed court physician to King James I and later to King Charles I. After- 

 wards he spent many years in peaceful and uninterrupted research work and 

 in the duties of his medical practice in London, but then the great Civil 

 War broke out and Harvey accompanied his king in his flight from London, 

 while his house was plundered and his collections destroyed. He was then 

 made a professor at Oxford, which was the headquarters of the King; when 

 this city was also captured by the Parliamentary army after Charles's final de- 

 feat, Harvey, then sixty-eight years old, had to retire into private life. Fortu- 

 nately he possessed private means and was also supported by his brother, 

 a wealthy London merchant, so that his old age was free from care, and at 

 the same time he retained the deep respect of his countrymen and colleagues. 

 A stroke brought his life to a sudden and peaceful close in the year 1657. 

 He left his fortune by will to the College, whose leading personality he had 

 been during his lifetime, and ever since his death the College has continued 

 to celebrate his memory, an annual festival being held in London in his 

 honour. A fine monument has been erected over his grave. 



Harvey's ivork on the circulation 

 The work in which Harvey expounded his new idea of the circulation of 

 the blood was published in i6i8 at Frankfurt am Main in the form of a 

 quarto volume containing seventy-two pages. Harvey, however, had spent 

 his whole time, ever since, as a youth, he received his first lesson in anatomy 

 in Fabrizio's school, in working out the ideas which were recorded in this 

 modest volume. There are still extant the lecture notes dating from 1616, 

 in which are expressed some of the thoughts which twelve years later as- 

 sumed their final form, and it has thus been possible to check the careful 

 research, the mature consideration, on which the work is based and which 

 shows itself in the masterly style, at the same time concise and explicit, in 

 which not a word seems superfluous. After giving an account of the old tradi- 

 tional theories on the subject, in which he sharply brings out their defects, 

 Harvey presents his own observations on the movement of the heart. Ac- 

 cording to the old theory the walls of the heart were not muscular and the 

 dilatation of the heart was its most important function; by this means the 

 blood was conveyed from the veins into the heart. By careful experiments, 

 of which he gives an account, Harvey found that the heart is muscular and 

 that, on the contrary, its regular contraction is its most important move- 

 ment, which drives the blood forward — that is, out into the blood-vessels 

 — just as it is likewise during this movement that the heart beats against 

 the thorax. In this movement not only the ventricles of the heart take part, 

 but also its vestibule, the significance of which Harvey rightly emphasizes 

 for the first time. He then gives an account of the course of the blood from 



