WILLIAM HARVEY 9 



ever, that among the greatest thinkers and investigators Harvey is 

 not unique in this respect. Copernicus is said to have detained his 

 "Treatise of Revolutions" thirty years before permitting its publi- 

 cation; Bacon kept his Novum Organum by him for twelve years; 

 Isaac Newton "brooded in silence over the motion of the spheres" 

 for more than twenty years before publishing his Principia ; between 

 the first draft and the publication of the Origin of the Species seven- 

 teen years were permitted to intervene. Perhaps it was Harvey's 

 reluctance toward "quitting the peaceful haven," that constrained 

 him for so long a time, for elsewhere he tells us that his practice 

 fell off or, to use his own words, he "fell mighty in practice." Re- 

 garding him a contemporary wrote, "though all of his profession 

 would allow him to be an excellent anatomist, I never heard of any 

 who admired his therapeutic way. I knew several practitioners in 

 this town that would not have given three pence for his bills (pre- 

 scriptions) as a man can hardly tell by his bills what he did aim at." 

 Harvey is said to have been the first to be persecuted by the medical 

 profession for making discoveries at variance with the drift of public 

 thought and opinion. The story of all discoveries of the first rank 

 has borne out Locke's aphorism that "Truth scarce ever yet carried 

 by vote at its first appearance." The greatest obstacle to the accept- 

 ance of truth seems to be our present knowledge. Men are by nature 

 conservative; they resent innovations. Bagehot tells us that the 

 "pain of a new idea is one of the greatest pains to human nature." 

 Socrates somewhere likens himself to a midwife but his peculiar 

 function in life was to assist in that mental labor which gave birth 

 to ideas, a similitude which is suggestive of pain. The man who ex- 

 presses a new idea is apt to be abused, perhaps stoned. Whatever 

 may be said of the twentieth century the scientific world can be ac- 

 cused no longer of tardiness in the acceptance of new truth, but it 

 reserves the right to "prove all things and to hold fast to that which 

 is good." While Harvey's practice may have fallen off, his discovery (^ 

 did not by any means consign him to obscurity. He still found favor T 

 with King Charles I, whose personal physician he was. His constant V 

 attendance at court greatly interfered with his duties at St .Bar- 

 tholomew's Hospital and resulted in the appointment of an assistant, 7 

 but with no diminution in Harvey's stipend. A contemporary of Har-*j 

 vey states as follows: "I have heard him say that after his Booke 

 of Circulation of the Blood came out he fell mightily in practice, and 

 'twas believed by the vulgar that he was crack-brained, and all the 

 physicians were against him, with much adoe at last in about twenty 

 or thirty years' time it was received in all the universities of the 

 world, and as Dr. Hobbs says in his book 'De Corpore,' he is the only 

 man perhaps that ever lived to see his own doctrine established in his 

 lifetime ;" sreritas est magna et prevalebit I 



And yet, after the discovery has beejijrje^ognized as one of mo- 

 mentous import, the scientist has his defector|^ Harvey was no ex- 

 ception. There were those who sought ta'7i!siJfove^Ql£L.03PiginaU^^^ of 

 his work. Some attributed the merTf*"ornST§c6vering the circula- 

 tion to Servetus, some to Realdus Columbus, others to Caesalpinus. 

 True, Servetus, a Spaniard, bom in 1511 and burned at the stake in 

 Geneva, 1533, at the bidding of Calvin, in a copy of his Restitutio, 

 which was saved when an edition of 1,000 copies met the fate of the 

 author, rejected the contention that the blood passed through the 



