42 Harvey and the [lect. 



between the writing and the publication of Fabricius's treatise 

 on Respiration, of which I have just spoken as being, in great 

 measure, an exposition of the Galenic doctrine of the circulation. 

 At the end of the period, in 1602, he received at Padua the 

 degree of Doctor of Medicine, and on his return to England 

 in the same year was incorporated into the Doctorate at 

 Cambridge. 



Setting up his abode in London, joining the Royal College of 

 Physicians in 1604, and becoming Physician to St Bartholomew's 

 Hospital in 1609, he ventured in 1615 to develope, in his 

 Lectures on Anatomy at the College of Physicians, the view 

 which he was forming concerning the movements of the heart 

 and of the blood. But his book, his Exercitatio, on that 

 subject did not see the light until 1628. 



1 The little choleric man ' as Aubrey calls him, attained fame 

 among his fellows, and favour at Court. As Physician to King 

 Charles I. he accompanied that Monarch on his unhappy 

 wanderings, and every one knows the tale or legend of how at 

 the battle of Edgehill, taking care of the Princes he sat, on the 

 outskirts of the fight under a hedge, reading a book. In 1646, 

 after the events at Oxford, he retired into private life, pub- 

 lishing in 1651 his treatise, Be generatione animalium, in 

 which he followed up some of the researches of his Paduan 

 master, and on June 3, 1667, he ended a life remarkable for 

 its effects rather than for its events. 



It is a fashion to speak of Harvey as ' the immortal Dis- 

 coverer of the Circulation ; ' but the real character of his work 

 is put in a truer light when we say that he was the first to 

 demonstrate the circulation of the blood. His wonderful book, 

 or rather tract, for it is little more, is one sustained and 

 condensed argument, but an argument founded not on general 

 principles and analogies but on the results of repeated ' frequent 

 appeals to vivisection ' and ocular inspection. He makes good 

 one position, and having done that advances on to another, and 

 so marches victoriously from position to position until the whole 

 truth is put clearly before the reader, and all that remains is to 

 drive the truth home by further striking illustrations. 



His first position is the true nature and purpose of the 



