WILLIAM HARVEY 3 



had six; Germany eight; Italy sixteen. Medicine was a prominent 

 department in all of them. Compared with the reception accorded 

 literature and philosophy, science lagged in England. Green sums 

 up the situation (1645) : "Bacon had already called men with a 

 trumpet voice to such studies. But in England, at least. Bacon stood 

 before his age. The beginnings of physical science were more slow 

 and timid there than in any country of Europe. Only two discoveries .^ 

 of any real value came from English research before the Restoration 

 — the first, Gilbert's discovery of terrestial magnetism, in the close of 

 Elizabeth's reign; the next, the great discovery of the circulation of 

 the blood which was taught by Harvey in the reign of James. Apart 

 from these illustrious names England took little share in the scien- 

 tific movement of the continent ; and her whole energies seemed to I 

 be whirled into the vortex of theology and politics by the Civil War:^^-''''^ 



Birth and Education — William Harvey was born in Folkstone, 

 England, April 1st, 1578. Very little is known of his early life. His 

 preliminary education was obtained at his native town, where he 

 made his first acquaintance with Latin. He proceeded to 

 the King's School, Cambridge, where he remained five years, and 

 afterward, at 16 years of age, entered Caius College, Cambridge, in 

 1593. Harvey even early in his school life possessed habits of minute 

 observation. His fondness for dissections and his love for compara- 

 tive anatomy had shown his mental bias from his earliest years. To 

 Caius, the founder of the College at Cambridge, is accredited the in- 

 troduction into England of the study of practical anatomy. He ob- 

 tained for his college a charter which allowed the authorities of the 

 institution to take annually the bodies of two criminals condemned to 

 death and executed at Cambridge, free of all charges, for the purposes 

 of dissection, with the view to increase the knowledge of medicine 

 and to benefit the health of her majesty's heges, without interfer- 

 ence on the part of any of her officers. To what extent the college 

 availed itself of the privilege is not known. In all probability Har- 

 vey pursued the course of study which consisted of a sound knowledge 

 of Greek and Latin ordinarily followed until he obtained his B. A. 

 degree in 1597. A year after graduation, at the age of twenty, we 

 find him traveling on the continent where he studied the scientific 

 branches tributary to medicine, as well as medicine itself. As has 

 been said, the universities of northern Italy were the first to welcome 

 the new learning as it emanated from the east in the minds of Greek 

 scholars, as well as rescued manuscripts. The universities of north- 

 ern Italy, namely, Bologna, Padua, Pisa and Pavia, were at the time 

 at the height of their renown as centers of mathematics, law and 

 medicine. Harvey studied more particularly at Padua, renowned for 

 its anatomical school, and rendered famous by the work of such men 

 as Vesalius, the first of modern anatomists, and his successor, Fabri- 

 cius. The tolerance shown towards Protestants in Padua, the univer- 

 sity town of Venice, the great commercial republic, attracted many ^ 

 law and medical students from England and other Protestant coun- vC^ 

 tries of Europe. 



It is interesting to recall that each entry in the university (Pa- 

 dua) register was accompanied by a note describing some physical' . 

 pecularity of the student, as a means of his identification. Thus j 

 Johannes Cookaeus, Anglus cum cicatrice in articulo medii di^iti die 



if 



