NA TURE 



217 



THURSDAY, MAY 11, 1916. 



HARVEY AND ARISTOTLE. 



Harvey's Views on the Use of the Circulation cf | 

 the Blood. By Prof. J. G. Curtis. Pp. xi+ i 

 194. (New York: Columbia University Press; I 

 London : Oxford University Press, 1915-) : 

 Price 65. 6d. net. 



UNPRETENDING as it is, this is an admir- ; 

 able little book. It is concise but fuU of | 

 matter, is scholarly and accurate, and, for i 

 those who concern themselves with the history 

 of ideas, very interesting. It is a curious thing i 

 that of the scores of orators on Harvey none has '. 

 given any considerable place to a closer dis- ! 

 cussion of the relations of Harvey to Aristotle i 

 and to Galen. Some of us have touched upon I 

 the attitude of Harvey towards the overbearing j 

 tradition of these two great ancients, and of the | 

 degree, or terms, in which he doggedly asserted 

 his independence of it, or in which he admitted 

 their doctrines or approved their speculations ; 

 but no one seems to have completed the task of 

 setting forth exactly how far the ideas, let us 

 say, especially of Aristotle and of Harvey, coin- 

 cided or diverged. This Prof. Curtis has done, 

 and done finally. Unhappily, upon the apprecia- 

 tion of the reviewer there lies a shadow : this able 

 and interesting scholar died, in September 1913, 

 before the publication of his work. At the 

 author's request, this volume has been edited by 

 his colleague, Frederic Lee, of Columbia 

 University. 



Prof. Curtis considers first the attitude of 

 Harvey towards the question of the uses of the 

 alleged circulation of the blood. Why, said not 

 only his opponents but also the master himself, 

 why, if the blood is but a nutrient fluid, need it 

 be scampering in every second of time all round 

 the mammalian frame ! Here Harvey was him- 

 self a little puzzled ; about the respiratory func- 

 tions and the nature of combustion he was, if I 

 may venture to say so, somewhat less far-seeing 

 than had been some of his remote forerunners, or 

 even Columbus. Unfortunately, he abhorred 

 chemists, seeing, no doubt, very unfavourable 

 examples of the craft. With the supposed cooling 

 effect of the pulmonary ventilation Harv-ey re- 

 mained fairly content. The redness of the 

 arterial blood he attributed to a filtering effect 

 of the lungs. 



Another principal chapter of Prof. Curtis's his- 

 tory is, of course, concerned with the well-known 

 Aristotelian primacy of the heart. This hegemony 

 Harvey ardently contested ; only to put in its 

 place the primacy of the blood. Aristotle's cardiac 

 primacy connoted far more than Harvey dealt 

 with, but, narrowly speaking, when Harvey 

 makes the blood the seat of the Innate Heat — not 

 to mention the soul — and speaks of innate heat as 

 an entity', and, furthermore, as an uncaused 

 entity, it is not apparent that Harvey's view was 

 more far-seeing than Aristotle's. Whether the 



NO. 2428, VOL. 97*] 



heart heats the blood, or the blood possesses heat 

 as an innate quality, scarcely seems to us, nowa- 

 days, to demand much discussion. Were Prof. 

 Curtis still with us one might have asked of him 

 if the truth were not that ^e ascendant genius of 

 both these great men was not as philosophers, 

 but as observers. Imagination was not the 

 strength of either of them. Like Aristotle, 

 Harvey, in speculative genius, was surpassed by 

 many of his predecessors and contemporaries. 

 The great Ionian thinkers were full of wonder, 

 as well they might be, whence and how came 

 motion. But this problem did not trouble 

 Harvey overmuch; as an observer he recognised 

 the activity of the circulation, as he saw it, from 

 the punctum. saliens to the human heart; and 

 when the problem of its origin became pressing 

 he was fain to follow Aristotle, and to find it 

 akin to the quintessence — the motive principle 

 of the stars. The circulation of the blood was 

 one of the subordinate tides of the circulation 

 of the heavens. As regards the heart itself 

 Harvey was no mystic; the blood was the poten- 

 tial, the heart he reduced almost to a muscular 

 pump. But he had no lively idea of the circu- 

 lation as a hydrostatic and hydraulic mechanism, 

 and, perhaps, before Torricelli and Hales, could 

 not have had. 



One may, with all respect, hesitate to be sure 

 that Prof. Curtis was familiar with the pre- 

 Aristotelian thinkers, and the commentaries upon 

 them of Diels, Wellmann, Gomperz, and others. 

 ZeUer, indeed, he does mention in one place. It 

 is not altogether reassuring to be referred once or 

 twice to Cicero as a source of our knowledge of 

 their conceptions. From Harvey to Aristotle we 

 are carried back on sound learning, but there, as 

 at a sort of butt end, we stop. The author may 

 have decided, of course, that these were to be the 

 limits of his volume, and properly kept to them. 

 But the history of the circulation cannot be dealt 

 with historically without a wider survey of the 

 doctrine, and beyond the doctrines the ideas, of 

 the pneuma, and of what I have called elsewhere 

 the pathetic quest after oxygen, than he had 

 allowed himself to undertake. That elusive stuff 

 "between air and fire," so keenly apprehended by 

 the lonians and repeated by Galen, is scarcely 

 congenial to Harvey, or, indeed, to .Aristotle. 

 Har\'ey declared that the " innate heat " was not 

 akin to fire, which he said was a sterilising agent ; 

 he was probably unaware of the profound and 

 ancient distinction between fire in its capacity as 

 an artificer and as a destroyer. 



It is tantalising, under the restriction of 

 present limits, to bring the review of this remark- 

 able book to an end with so inadequate a discussion 

 of the principles discussed in it, and with no note 

 of the many particulars on which one would gladly 

 have tarried. The notes of reference to quotations 

 are constant and accurate ; would they had been, 

 or most of them, footnotes. Incessantly to be 

 turning to and fro between the text and an ap- 

 pendix is a nuisance. 



Clifford Allbutt. 

 M 



