THE y LIBRARY 
 
 OMIVJERSITY OF C SAN DIEGO 
 
 IA JULIA. CALIFORNIA 
 
 3 182202463 3554
 
 The growth of Truth
 
 The Growth of Truth 
 
 Illustrated in the Discovery of the 
 Circulation of the Blood 
 
 BEING THE HARVEIAN ORATION DELIVERED AT THE 
 
 ROYAL COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS, LONDON, 
 
 OCTOBER 18, 1906 
 
 WILLIAM OSLER, M.D., F.R.S. 
 
 REGIUS PROFESSOR OF MEDICINE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD 
 
 LONDON 
 HENRY FROWDE 
 
 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE 
 AMEN CORNER, E.C. 
 
 1906
 
 OXFORD : HORACE HART 
 RINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
 
 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 
 
 AS ILLUSTRATED IN THE DISCOVERY OF 
 THE CIRCULATION OF THE BLOOD 
 
 I. 
 
 ONLY those of us, Mr. President and Fellows, who have 
 had the good fortune to hold the distinguished position 
 which by your kind grace, Sir, I hold to-day, only those 
 of us who have delivered the Harveian Oration, can 
 appreciate the extraordinary difficulties besetting a 
 subject, every aspect of which has been considered, very 
 often too, by men who have brought to the task a com- 
 bination of learning and literary skill at once the envy 
 and the despair of their successors. But I take it, Sir, 
 that in this Ambarvalia or commemorative festival for 
 blessing the fruits of our great men, ordained definitely 
 as such by him whose memory is chiefly in our minds 
 to-day, our presence here in due order and array, 
 confers distinction upon an occasion of which the 
 oration is but an incident. But, honour worthy of such 
 a theme should be associated with full knowledge of 
 the conditions under which these great men lived and 
 moved ; and here comes in the real difficulty, because it 
 is rarely possible to bring the fruits of independent 
 critical investigation into their lives and works. Par- 
 ticularly hard is it for those of us who have had to live 
 the life of the arena : our best efforts bear the stamp of 
 the student, not of the scholar. In my own case, a deep
 
 6 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 
 
 reverence for the mighty minds of old, and a keen 
 appreciation of the importance to our profession of 
 a study of history, may be put in the scales against 
 defects as to the appreciation of which I have still 
 remaining sufficient self-detachment. The lesson of the 
 day is the lesson of their lives. But because of the 
 ever-increasing mental strain in this age of hurry, few 
 of us have the leisure, fewer still, I fear, the inclination, 
 to read it thoroughly. Only with a knowledge of the 
 persistency with which they waged the battle for Truth, 
 and the greatness of their victory, does the memory of 
 the illustrious dead become duly precious to us. 
 
 History is simply the biography of the mind of man ; 
 and our interest in history, and its educational value to 
 us, is directly proportionate to the completeness of our 
 study of the individuals through whom this mind has 
 been manifested. To understand clearly our position in 
 any science to-day, we must go back to its beginnings, 
 and trace its gradual development, following certain 
 laws, difficult to interpret and often obscured in the 
 brilliancy of achievements laws which everywhere 
 illustrate this biography, this human endeavour, working 
 through the long ages ; and particularly is this the case 
 with that history of the organized experience of the 
 race which we call science. 
 
 In the first place, like a living organism, Truth grows, 
 and its gradual evolution may be traced from the tiny 
 germ to the mature product. Never springing, Minerva- 
 like, to full stature at once, Truth may suffer all the 
 hazards incident to generation and gestation. Much of 
 history is a record of the mishaps of truths which have 
 struggled to the birth, only to die or else to wither in 
 premature decay. Or the germ may be dormant for 
 centuries, awaiting the fullness of time.
 
 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 7 
 
 Secondly, all scientific truth is conditioned by the 
 state of knowledge at the time of its announcement. 
 Thus, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the 
 science of optics and mechanical appliances had not 
 made possible (so far as the human mind was con- 
 cerned) the existence of blood capillaries and blood 
 corpuscles. Jenner could not have added to his Inquiry 
 a discourse on immunity ; Sir William Perkin and the 
 chemists made Koch possible ; Pasteur gave the condi- 
 tions that produced Lister ; Davy and others furnished 
 the preliminaries necessary for anaesthesia. Every- 
 where we find this invariable filiation, one event follow- 
 ing the other in orderly sequence' Mind begets mind,' 
 as Harvey says; 'opinion is the source of opinion. 
 Democritus with his atoms, and Eudoxus with his chief 
 good, which he placed in pleasure, impregnated Epi- 
 curus; the four elements of Empedocles, Aristotle; 
 the doctrine of the ancient Thebans, Pythagoras and 
 Plato ; geometry, Euclid ' (De Generation^). 
 
 And, thirdly, to scientific truth alone may the homo 
 mensura principle be applied, since of all mental treasures 
 of the race it alone compels general acquiescence. That 
 this general acquiescence, this aspect of certainty, is 
 not reached per saltum, but is of slow, often of difficult, 
 growth marked by failures and frailties, but crowned 
 at last with an acceptance accorded to no other product 
 of mental activity is illustrated by every important 
 discovery from Copernicus to Darwin. 
 
 The growth of Truth corresponds to the states of 
 knowledge described by Plato in the Theaetetus acquisi- 
 tion, latent possession, conscious possession. Scarcely 
 a discovery can be named which does not present these 
 phases in its evolution. Take, for example, one of the 
 most recent : Long years of labour gave us a full know-
 
 8 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 
 
 ledge of syphilis; centuries of acquisition added one 
 fact to another, until we had a body of clinical and 
 pathological knowledge of remarkable fullness. For 
 the last quarter of a century we have had latent posses- 
 sion of the cause of the disease, as no one could doubt 
 the legitimate inference from discoveries in other acute 
 infections. The conscious possession has just been 
 given to us. After scores of investigators had struggled 
 in vain with the problem, came Schaudinn with an 
 instinct for truth, with a capacity to pass beyond the 
 routine of his day, and with a vision for the whole 
 where others had seen but in part. It is one of the 
 tragedies of science that this brilliant investigator, with 
 capabilities for work so phenomenal, should have been 
 cut off at the very threshold of his career. The cancer 
 problem, still in the stage of latent possession, awaits 
 the advent of a man of the same type. In a hundred 
 other less important problems, acquisition has by slow 
 stages become latent possession ; and there needs but 
 the final touch the crystal in the saturated solution 
 to give us conscious possession of the truth. But when 
 these stages are ended, there remains the final struggle 
 for general acceptance. Locke's remark that 'Truth 
 scarce ever yet carried it by vote anywhere at its first 
 appearance ' is borne out by the history of all discoveries 
 of the first rank. The times, however, are changing ; 
 and it is interesting to compare the cordial welcome of 
 the pallid spirochaete with the chilly reception of the 
 tubercle bacillus. Villemin had done his great work, 
 Cohnheim and Salmonson had finally solved the prob- 
 lem of infectivity, when Koch published his memorable 
 studies. Others before him had seen the bacillus, but 
 the conscious possession of the truth only came with 
 his marvellous technique. Think of the struggle to
 
 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 9 
 
 secure acceptance! The seniors among us who lived 
 through that instructive period remember well that 
 only those who were awake when the dawn appeared 
 assented at once to the brilliant demonstration. We are 
 better prepared to-day ; and a great discovery like that 
 of Schaudinn is immediately put to the test by experts 
 in many lands, and a verdict is given in a few months. 
 We may have become more plastic and receptive, but 
 I doubt it ; even our generation that great generation 
 of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, had a 
 practical demonstration of the slowness of the accepta- 
 tion of an obvious truth in the long fight for the aseptic 
 treatment of wounds. There may be present some who 
 listened, as I did in October, 1873, to an introductory 
 lecture at one of the largest of the metropolitan schools, 
 the burden of which was the finality of surgery. The 
 distinguished author and teacher, dwelling on the 
 remarkable achievements of the past, concluded that 
 the art had all but reached its limit, little recking that 
 within a mile from where he spoke, the truth for which 
 he and thousands had been striving now a conscious 
 possession in the hands of Joseph Lister would revo- 
 lutionize it. With scores of surgeons here and there 
 throughout the world this truth had been a latent posses- 
 sion. Wounds had healed per primam since Machaon's 
 day; and there were men before Joseph Lister who 
 had striven for cleanliness in surgical technique; but 
 not until he appeared could a great truth become 
 so manifest that it everywhere compelled acquiescence. 
 Yet not without a battle a long and grievous battle, as 
 many of us well knew who had to contend in hospitals 
 with the opposition of men who could not not who 
 would not see the truth. 
 
 Sooner or later insensibly, unconsciously the iron
 
 io THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 
 
 yoke of conformity is upon our necks; and in our 
 minds, as in our bodies, the force of habit becomes 
 irresistible. From our teachers and associates, from 
 our reading, from the social atmosphere about us we 
 catch the beliefs of the day, and they become ingrained 
 part of our nature. For most of us this happens in 
 the haphazard process we call education, and it goes on 
 just as long as we retain any mental receptivity. It 
 was never better expressed than in the famous lines 
 that occurred to Henry Sidgwick in his sleep : 
 
 We think so because all other people think so; 
 
 Or because or because after all, we do think so ; 
 
 Or because we were told so, and think we must think so ; 
 
 Or because we once thought so, and think we still think so; 
 
 Or because, having thought so, we think we will think so. 
 
 In departing from any settled opinion or belief, the 
 variation, the change, the break with custom may come 
 gradually; and the way is usually prepared; but the 
 final break is made, as a rule, by some one individual, 
 the masterless man of Kipling's splendid allegory, who 
 sees with his own eyes, and with an instinct or genius 
 for truth, escapes from the routine in which his fellows 
 live. But he often pays dearly for his boldness. 
 Walter Bagehot tells us that the pain of a new idea 
 is one of the greatest pains to human nature. ' It is, as 
 people say, so upsetting ; it makes you think that, after 
 all, your favourite notions may be wrong, your firmest 
 beliefs ill-founded ; it is certain that till now there was 
 no place allotted in your mind to the new and startling 
 inhabitant ; and now that it has conquered an entrance, 
 you do not at once see which of your old ideas it will 
 not turn out, with which of them it can be reconciled, 
 and with which it is at essential enmity.' It is on this 
 account that the man who expresses a new idea is very
 
 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH n 
 
 apt to be abused and ill-treated. All this is common 
 among common men, but there is something much 
 worse which has been illustrated over and over again 
 in history. How eminent soever a man may become 
 in science, he is very apt to carry with him errors 
 which were in vogue when he was young errors that 
 darken his understanding, and make him incapable of 
 accepting even the most obvious truths. It is a great 
 consolation to know that even Harvey came within the 
 range of this law in the matter of the lymphatic system 
 it is the most human touch in his career. 
 
 By no single event in the history of science is the 
 growth of truth, through the slow stages of acquisition, 
 the briefer period of latent possession, and the for us 
 glorious period of conscious possession, better shown 
 than in the discovery of the circulation of the blood. 
 You will all agree with me that a Fellow of this college 
 must take his courage in both hands who would, in this 
 place and before this audience, attempt to discuss any 
 aspect of this problem. After nearly three centuries of 
 orations the very pictures and books in this hall might 
 be expected to cry out upon him. But I have so taken 
 my courage, confident that in using it to illustrate 
 certain aspects of the growth of truth I am but obeying 
 the command of Plato, who insists that principles such 
 as these cannot be too often or too strongly enforced. 
 There is a younger generation, too, the members of 
 which are never the worse for the repetition of a good 
 story, stale though it may be in all its aspects to their 
 elders ; and then there is that larger audience to be 
 considered to which the season is never inappropriate 
 to speak a word.
 
 12 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 
 
 II. 
 
 The sixteenth century, drawing to a close, had been 
 a period of acquisition unequalled in history. Brooding 
 over the face of the waters of mediaevalism, the spirit of 
 the Renaissance brought forth a science of the world 
 and of man which practically created a new heaven and 
 a new earth, and the truths announced by Copernicus 
 and Galileo far transcended 
 
 the searching schoolmen's view 
 And half had staggered that stout Stagyrite. 
 
 Among other things, it had given to medicine a new 
 spirit, a new anatomy, and a new chemistry. In the 
 latter part of the fifteenth century Hippocrates and 
 Galen came to their own again. A wave of enthusiasm 
 for the fathers in medicine swept over the profession ; 
 and for at least two generations the best energies of its 
 best minds were devoted to the study of their writings. 
 How numerous and important is that remarkable group 
 of men, the medical humanists of the Renaissance, we 
 may judge by a glance at Bayle's Biographic Medicate, 
 in which the lives are arranged in chronological order. 
 From Garbo of Bologna, surnamed the expositor, to 
 Rabelais, more than 150 biographies and bibliographies 
 are given, and at least one-half of these men had either 
 translated or edited works of the Greek physicians. Of 
 our founder, one of the most distinguished of the group, 
 and of his influence in reviving the study of Galen and 
 so indirectly of his influence upon Harvey, Dr. Payne's 
 story still lingers in our memories. Leonicenus, Linacre, 
 Gonthier, Monti, Koch, Camerarius, Caius, Fuchs, 
 Zerbi, Cornarus, and men of their stamp not only 
 swept away Arabian impurities from the medicine of
 
 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 13 
 
 the day, but they revived Greek ideals and introduced 
 scientific methods. 
 
 The great practical acquisition of the century was 
 a new anatomy. Vesalius and his followers gave for 
 the first time an accurate account of the structure of 
 the human body, and while thus enlarging and correct- 
 ing the work of Galen, contributed to weaken the 
 almost divine authority with which he dominated 
 the schools. Nearly another century passed before 
 chemistry, in the hands of Boyle and others, reached 
 its modern phase, but the work of Paracelsus, based on 
 that of the ' pious Spagyrist ', Basil Valentine, by show- 
 ing its possibilities, had directed men's minds strongly 
 to the new science. Of the three, the new spirit alone 
 was essential, since it established the intellectual and 
 moral freedom by which the fetters of dogma, authority, 
 and scholasticism were for ever loosened from the 
 minds of men. 
 
 Into this world, we may say, stepped a young Folke- 
 stone lad, when, on the last day of May, 1593, he 
 matriculated at Cambridge. Harvey's education may 
 be traced without difficulty, because the influences 
 which shaped his studies were those which had for 
 a century prevailed in the profession of this country. 
 We do not know the reason for selection of Caius 
 College, which, so far as I can gather, had no special 
 connexion with the Canterbury school. Perhaps it was 
 chosen because of the advice of the family physician, or 
 of a friend, or of his rector ; or else his father may have 
 known Caius; or the foundation may already have 
 become famous as a resort for those about to ' enter 
 on the physic line '. Or, quite as likely, as we so often 
 find in our experience, some trivial incident may have 
 turned his thoughts towards medicine. When he came
 
 i 4 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 
 
 up in 1593, there were those of middle age who could 
 tell racy stories of Caius, the co-founder of the college, 
 against whose iron rule they had rebelled. 'Charged 
 not only with a show of a perverse stomach to the 
 professors of the Gospel, but with Atheism/ the last 
 days of Caius's noble life were embittered by strife and 
 misunderstanding. Doubtless the generous souls among 
 them had long since learned to realize the greatness of 
 his character, and were content to leave ' the heat of his 
 faith to God's sole judgement, and the light of his good 
 works to men's imitation ', with which words, half 
 a century later, the inimitable Fuller concludes a short 
 sketch of his life. I like to think that, perhaps, one 
 of these very rebels, noting the studious and inquisitive 
 nature of Harvey, had put into the lad's hand the little 
 tractate, De libris propriis, from which to glean a know- 
 ledge of the life and works of their great benefactor. 
 
 The contemplation of such a career as that of Caius 
 could not but inspire with enthusiasm any young man. 
 No one in the profession in England had before that 
 time reached a position which I may describe as 
 European. An enthusiastic student and the friend of 
 all the great scholars of the day ; a learned commentator 
 on the works of the Fathers ; the first English student 
 in clinical medicine; a successful teacher and practi- 
 tioner ; a keen naturalist ; a liberal patron of learning 
 and letters ; a tender and sympathetic friend Johannes 
 Caius is one of the great figures in our history. Nor 
 need I dwell, before this audience, on his devotion to 
 our interests, other than to say that the memory of no 
 Fellow on our roll should be more precious to us. 
 Four years hence, on October 6, will occur the quater- 
 centenary of his birth. As well in love as in gratitude, 
 we could celebrate it in no more appropriate manner,
 
 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 15 
 
 and in none that would touch his spirit more closely, 
 than by the issue of a fine edition of his principal works 
 (including the MS. annals of the College). For the 
 preparation of this there are those among us well fitted, 
 not less by veneration for his memory than by the 
 possession of that critical scholarship which he valued 
 so highly. 
 
 When Harvey set out on the grand tour, Italy was 
 still the mater gloriosa studiorum ; to which one hundred 
 years earlier, so tradition says, Linacre on leaving had 
 erected an altar. The glamour of the ideals of the Re- 
 naissance had faded somewhat since the days when 
 John Free, an Oxford man, had made the ancient learn- 
 ing his own ; and had so far bettered the instruction of 
 his masters that he was welcomed as a teacher in 
 Padua, Ferrara, and Florence. In a measure, too, the 
 national glory had departed, dimmed amid the strife and 
 warfare which had cost the old republics their indepen- 
 dence. Many years earlier Fracastorius, one of our 
 medical poets, had sung of her decadence : 
 
 To what estate, O wretched Italy, 
 Has civil strife reduc'd and moulder'd Thee ! 
 Where now are all thy ancient glories hurl'd ? 
 Where is thy boasted Empire of the world ? 
 What nook in Thee from barbarous Rage is freed 
 And has not seen thy captive children bleed? 1 
 
 And matters had not improved but had grown worse. 
 In the sixteenth century Italian influence had sunk 
 deeply into the social, professional, and commercial life 
 of England, more deeply, indeed, than we appreciate ; - 
 and it was not for a generation or two later that the 
 candlesticks were removed from the Cisalpine towns to 
 
 1 Syphilis. Englished by N. Tate, 1686. 
 
 2 Italian Renaissance in England, Einstein. Macmillan, 1902.
 
 16 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 
 
 Montpellier, Paris, and Leyden. In 1593 a well-to-do 
 young Englishman who wished to study medicine 
 thoroughly went to North Italy, and most naturally to 
 Padua ' fair Padua, nursery of the arts ' whose close 
 affiliations with us may be gathered from the fact that, 
 of universities next to Oxford and Cambridge, she has 
 given us more Presidents than any other. In the years 
 that had passed since Vesalius had retired in disgust, the 
 fame of its anatomical school had been well maintained 
 by Fallopius, Columbus, and Fabricius, worthy succes- 
 sors of the great master. Of each may be said what 
 Douglas says of the first named : ' In docendo maxime 
 methodicits, in medendo felicissimus, in secando expertissi- 
 mus.' While the story of Harvey's student life can 
 never be told as we could wish, we know enough to 
 enable us to understand the influences which moulded 
 his career. In Fabricius he found a man to make his 
 life-model. To the enthusiastic teacher and investigator 
 were added those other qualities so attractive to the 
 youthful mind, generous sympathies and a keen sense 
 of the wider responsibilities of his position, as shown in 
 building, at his own expense, a new anatomical theatre 
 for the University. Wide as was the range of his 
 master's studies, embracing not alone anatomy but 
 medicine and surgery, the contributions by which he is 
 most distinguished are upon subjects in which Harvey 
 himself subsequently made an undying reputation. The 
 activity of his literary life did not begin until he had 
 been teaching nearly forty years, and it is a fact of the 
 highest significance that, corresponding to the very 
 period of Harvey's stay in Padua, Fabricius must have 
 been deep in the study of embryology and of the 
 anatomy of the vascular system. His great work on 
 generation was the model on which Harvey based his
 
 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 17 
 
 own, in some ways, more accurate studies studies in 
 which, as my colleague Professor Brooks of the Johns 
 Hopkins University has pointed out, he has forestalled 
 Wolf and von Baer. 
 
 The work of Fabricius which really concerns us here 
 is the de Venarum Ostiolis. Others before him had 
 seen and described the valves of the veins, Carolus one 
 of the great Stephani, Sylvius and Paul Sarpi. But an 
 abler hand in this work has dealt with the subject, and 
 has left us a monograph which for completeness and for 
 accuracy and beauty of illustration has scarcely its equal 
 in anatomical literature. Compare Plate VII, for ex- 
 ample, with the illustrations of the same structures in 
 the Bidloo or the Cowper Anatomy, published nearly 
 one hundred years later; and we can appreciate the 
 advantages which Harvey must have enjoyed in working 
 with such a master. Indeed, it is not too far-fetched to 
 imagine him, scalpel in hand, making some of the very 
 dissections from which these wonderful drawings were 
 taken. But here comes in the mystery. How Fabricius, 
 a man who did such work how a teacher of such wide 
 learning and such remarkable powers of observation, 
 could have been so blinded as to overlook the truth 
 which was tumbling out, so to speak, at his feet, is to 
 us incomprehensible. But his eyes were sealed, and to 
 him, as to his greater predecessors in the chair, clear 
 vision was denied. The dead hand of the great Per- 
 gamite lay heavy on all thought, and Descartes had not 
 yet changed the beginning of philosophy from wonder 
 to doubt. Not without a feeling of pity do we read of 
 the hopeless struggle of these great men to escape from 
 slavish submission to authority. But it is not for us in 
 these light days to gauge the depth of the sacred venera- 
 tion with which they regarded the Fathers. Their 
 B
 
 i8 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 
 
 mental attitude is expressed in a well-known poem of 
 
 Browning's : 
 
 those divine men of old time 
 
 Have reached, thou sayest well, each at one point 
 The outside verge that rounds our faculty, 
 And where they reached who can do more than reach ? 
 
 Willing to correct observations or to extend anatomy 
 by careful dissection, it was too much to expect from 
 them either a new interpretation of the old facts or 
 a knowledge of the new method by which those facts 
 could be correctly interpreted. 
 
 The ingenious explanation which Fabricius gave of 
 the use of the valves of the veins to serve as dams or 
 checks to the flow of the blood, so that it would not 
 irrigate too rapidly and overflow the peripheral vessels 
 to the deprivation of the upper parts of the limbs 
 shows how the old physiology dominated the most 
 distinguished teacher of the time in the most distin- 
 guished school of Europe. This may have been the 
 very suggestion to his pupil of the more excellent way. 
 Was it while listening to this ingenious explanation of 
 his master that, in a moment of abstraction dimly 
 dreaming, perhaps, of an English home far away and 
 long forsaken that there came to Harvey a heaven-sent 
 moment, a sudden inspiration, a passing doubt nursed 
 for long in silence, which ultimately grew into the great 
 truth of I6I6? 1 
 
 The works of Vesalius, of Fallopius, and of Fabricius 
 effected a revolution in anatomy, but there was not at 
 the close of the sixteenth century a new physiology. 
 Though he had lost an anatomical throne, Galen ruled 
 
 1 Boyle states that in the only conversation he ever had with 
 him, Harvey acknowledged that a study of the valves of the veins 
 had led him to the discovery of the circulation of the blood.
 
 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 19 
 
 absolutely in all conceptions of the functions of the 
 body, and in no department more serenely than in that 
 relating to the heart, the blood and its movements. 
 Upon his views I need not dwell further than to remind 
 you that he regarded the liver as the source of the 
 blood, of which there were two kinds, the one in the 
 veins, the other in the arteries, both kinds in ceaseless 
 ebb and flow, the only communication between these 
 closed systems being through pores in the ventricular 
 septum. He knew the lesser circulation, but thought 
 it only for the nutrition of the lungs. The heart was 
 a lamp which is furnished with oil by the blood and 
 with air from the lungs. Practically until the middle of 
 the seventeenth century Galen's physiology ruled the 
 schools, and yet for years the profession had been in 
 latent possession of a knowledge of the circulation. 
 Indeed, a good case has been made out for Hippocrates, 
 in whose works occur some remarkably suggestive sen- 
 tences. 1 In the sixteenth century the lesser circulation 
 was described with admirable fullness by Servetus and 
 by Columbus, and both Sarpi and Caesalpinus had 
 Hippocratic glimmerings of the greater circulation. 
 These men, with others doubtless, were in latent posses- 
 sion of the truth. But every one of them saw darkly 
 through Galenical glasses, and theirs was the hard but 
 the common lot never to reach such conscious posses- 
 sion as everywhere to make men acquiesce. One must 
 have the disinterestedness of the dead to deal with 
 a problem about which controversy has raged, and in 
 which national issues have been allowed to blur the 
 brightness of an image which would be clear as day to 
 those with eyes to see. Nor would I refer to a matter 
 long since settled by those best competent to judge, had 
 1 Willis's Harvey, pp. 21-2. 
 
 B a
 
 20 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 
 
 not the well-known work of Luciani, the distinguished 
 Professor of Physiology at Rome, appeared recently in 
 German dress, edited by Professor Verworn, and spread 
 broadcast views to which, with a chauvinism unworthy 
 of their history, our Italian brethren still adhere. It 
 has been well said 'that he alone discovers who proves', 
 and in the matter of the circulation of the blood, this 
 was reserved for the pupil of Fabricius. Skipping many 
 arduous years we next meet him as Lumleian Lecturer 
 to the College. 
 
 III. 
 
 The really notable years in the annals of medicine 
 are not very numerous. We have a calendar filled with 
 glorious names, but among the saints of science, if we 
 know an era it is as much as can be expected perhaps 
 because such men are less identified with achievements 
 than representative of the times in which they lived. 
 With many of our greatest names we cannot associate 
 any fixed dates. The Grecians who made Hippocrates 
 possible, live in memory with some theory, or a small 
 point in anatomy, or in regard to the place of their 
 birth; while the 'floruit' cannot always be fixed with 
 accuracy. 
 
 Hippocrates himself, Erasistratus, Galen, and Araetius 
 have no days in our calendar. We keep no festival in 
 their honour as the churches do those of St. Jerome and 
 St. Chrysostom. It is not until after the Renaissance 
 that certain years (anni mirabiles) stand out in bold 
 relief as connected with memorable discoveries, or with 
 the publication of revolutionary works. Nevertheless, 
 only a few in each century ; even the sixteenth, so rich 
 in discoveries, has not more than five or six such years, 
 and not one of them is connected with work done in
 
 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 21 
 
 this country. As to the seventeenth century, it is hard 
 to name four made memorable by the announcement of 
 great discoveries or the publication of famous works ; 
 in the eighteenth century not three, while in the century 
 just completed, though it is replete with extraordinary 
 discoveries, one is hard pressed to name half a dozen 
 years which flash into memory as made ever memorable 
 by great achievements. Of the three most important, 
 anaesthesia, sanitation, and antiseptic surgery, only of 
 the first can the date be fixed, 1846, and that for its 
 practical application. For the other two discoveries, 
 who will settle upon the year in which the greatest 
 advance was made, or one which could be selected for 
 an anniversary in our calendar ? 
 
 There is one dies mirabilis in the history of the 
 College in the history, indeed, of the medical profes- 
 sion of this country, and the circumstances which made 
 it memorable are well known to us. At ten o'clock on 
 a bright spring morning, April 17, 1616, an unusually 
 large company was attracted to the New Anatomical 
 Theatre of the Physicians' College, Amen Street. The 
 second Lumleian Lecture of the annual course, given 
 that year by a new man, had drawn a larger gathering 
 than usual, due in part to the brilliancy of the demon- 
 stration on the previous day, but also it may be because 
 rumours had spread abroad about strange views to be 
 propounded by the lecturer. I do not know if at the 
 College the same stringent rules as to compulsory 
 attendance prevailed as at the Barber Surgeons' Hall. 
 Doubtless not, 1 but the President, and Censors, and 
 Fellows would be there in due array ; and with the help 
 
 1 Mr. William Fleming, the College Bedell, calls my attention 
 to the Statutes of that period. Under penalty of a fine all Fellows 
 and candidates were commanded to attend for at least five years.
 
 22 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 
 
 of the picture of ' The Anatomy Lecture by Bannister ', 
 which is in the Hunterian collection, Glasgow, and 
 a photograph of which Dr. Payne has recently put in 
 our library, we can bring to mind this memorable 
 occasion. We see the 'Anatomy', one of the six an- 
 nually handed over to the College, on the table, the 
 prosector standing by the skeleton near at hand, and 
 very probably on the wall the very Tabulae of dissection 
 of the arteries, veins, and nerves that hang above us 
 to-day. But the centre of attention is the lecturer 
 a small dark man, wand in hand, with black piercing 
 eyes, a quick vivacious manner, and with an ease and 
 grace in demonstrating, which bespeaks the mastery of 
 a subject studied for twenty years with a devotion that 
 we can describe as Hunterian. A Fellow of nine years' 
 standing, there was still the salt of youth in William 
 Harvey when, not as we may suppose, without some 
 trepidation, he faced his auditors on this second day 
 a not uncritical audience, including many men well 
 versed in the knowledge of the time and many who had 
 heard all the best lecturers of Europe. 
 
 The President, Henry Atkins, after whose name in 
 our Register stands the mysterious word ' Corb ', had 
 already had his full share of official lectures, less 
 burdensome three hundred years ago than now. Let 
 us hope the lecture of the previous day had whetted 
 his somewhat jaded appetite. The Censors of the year 
 formed an interesting group : John Argent, a Cambridge 
 man, a ' great prop of the college ', and often President, 
 of whom but little seems known ; Richard Palmer, also of 
 Cambridge, and remembered now only for his connexion 
 with Prince Henry's typhoid fever, as Dr. Norman 
 Moore has told us; Mathew Gwinne of Oxford, first 
 Professor of Physic at Gresham College and a play-
 
 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 23 
 
 wright of some note in his day ; and Theodore Goulston 
 of Merton College, one of our great benefactors, and 
 for 267 years past and gone purveyor-in-chief of reputa- 
 tion to the younger Fellows of the College. Mayerne 
 would be there, not yet a Fellow, but happy in his escape 
 from the Paris Faculty; still dusty with conflict, he 
 would scent the battle afar in the revolutionary state- 
 ments which he heard. Meverell, fresh from incorpora- 
 tion at Cambridge, also not yet a Fellow ; Moundeford, 
 often President, whose little book Vir Bonus sets forth 
 his life. Paddy, a noteworthy benefactor, a keen stu- 
 dent, still gratefully remembered at Oxford, would have 
 strolled in with his old friend Gwinne ; Baldwin Hamey 
 the elder, also a benefactor, would be there, and perhaps 
 he had brought his more interesting son, then preparing 
 to enter Leyden, whose memory should be ever green 
 among us. Let us hope Thomas Winston, probably an 
 old fellow-student at Padua, and later appointed Pro- 
 fessor of Physic at Gresham College, was absent, as we 
 can then be more charitable towards the sins of omission 
 in his work on Anatomy, published after his death, 
 which, so far as I can read, contrary to the statement of 
 Munk (Roll of the College), contains no word of the new 
 doctrine. As an old Paduan, and fresh from its ana- 
 tomical school, the younger Craige would not be absent. 
 Fludd, the Rosicrucian, of course, was present; attracted, 
 perhaps, by rumours of anti-Galenical doctrines which 
 had served to keep him out of the College ; nor would 
 he be likely to be absent at the festival of one whom he 
 calls his ' physicall and theosophicall patron '. And 
 certainly on such an occasion that able Aberdonian, 
 Alexander Reid, would be there, whose 2o>/iaroypa<ia 
 had just appeared, 1 with an extraordinary full account 
 1 Copy in Bodleian Library.
 
 24 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 
 
 of the vascular system. Reid was a good anatomist, 
 one of our most distinguished Medico - Chirurgical 
 Fellows, and a liberal benefactor. If, as has been 
 stated, he was not a convert on account of his age, it 
 was on account of his youth, for the Harveian doctrine, 
 if in meagre form, is to be found in the later editions 
 (5th) of his Manual. But we would miss Lodge, the 
 poet, ' cried up to the last for physic,' as he had recently 
 started for the Continent. And we may be sure that 
 Harvey's old fellow-students at Padua Fortescue, Fox, 
 Willoughby, Mounsell, and Darcy would honour their 
 friend and colleague with their presence ; and Edward 
 Lister, also a fellow- Paduan, the first of his name in 
 a family which has given three other members to our 
 profession two distinguished and one immortal. 1 It 
 was not a large gathering, as the Fellows, members, 
 licentiates, and candidates numbered only about forty ; 
 but as the lecture was a great event in the community, 
 there would be present many interested and intelligent 
 laymen, of the type of Digby, and Ashmole, and Pepys 
 the ' curious ', as they were called, for whom throughout 
 the seventeenth century the anatomy lecture equalled in 
 attraction the play. Delivered in Latin, and interspersed 
 here and there with English words and illustrations, 
 there were probably more who saw than who com- 
 prehended, as Sir Thomas Browne indicated to his son 
 Edward when he lectured at Chirurgeons' Hall. 
 
 It is a fortunate, and perhaps a unique, circumstance 
 in bibliography that the manuscript of this course of 
 lectures should have been preserved, and that we 
 should be able to follow step by step the demonstration 
 
 1 I followed Munk's Roll, but Lord Lister tells me that he does 
 not know of a relationship. I am sorry, as Martin Lister deserves 
 the honour.
 
 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 25 
 
 < a long and formidable procedure, as the whole 
 anatomy of the thoracic organs was discussed. I dare say 
 there was a prolonged break between the morning and 
 the afternoon lecture ' for a fine dinner ', such as Pepys 
 described, when, on February 27, 1663, he went with 
 Harvey's pupil, Scarborough, to Chirurgeons' Hall and 
 was used with ' extraordinary great respect '. Towards 
 the close, after discussing, in novel and modern terms, 
 the structure and action of the heart, Harvey summed 
 up in a few sentences the conclusion of the matter. 
 They stand as follows in the Praelectiones (published 
 by the College in i! 
 
 W. H. constat per fabricam cordis sanguinem 
 per pulmones in Aortam perpetuo 
 transferri, as by two clacks of a 
 water bellows to rayse water 
 constat per ligaturam transitum sanguinis 
 ab arteriis ad venas 
 unde perpetuum sanguinis motum 
 in circulo fieri pulsu cordis. 
 
 Probably few in the lecture hall appreciated the full 
 meaning of these words, which to some must have 
 seemed a blot on the whole performance ; while others, 
 perhaps, all with the feelings of the fishes after St. 
 Anthony's well-known sermon, 
 
 Much delighted were they, 
 But preferred the old way, 
 
 returned to their homes wondering what he would say 
 on the morrow when the ' divine banquet of the brain ' 
 was to be spread before them. 
 
 One thing was certain the lecture gave evidence of 
 a skilled anatomist of remarkably wide experience and 
 well versed in literature from Aristotle to Fabricius. 
 While Harvey could agree with John Hunter, who
 
 26 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 
 
 states in a manuscript introductory lecture in the College 
 library ' I deliver nothing I have not seen and observed 
 myself 'he could not add with him, ' I am not a reader 
 of books.' Nearly one hundred references to some 
 twenty authors occur in the manuscript of the thorax, 
 or, as he calls it, the ' parlour ' lecture. 
 
 It is a great pity that we have no contemporary 
 account of the impression on such men as Mayerne or 
 Reid of the new doctrines, for which we have the 
 author's statement that they were taught annually and 
 elaborated. So far as I know there is no reference to 
 show that the lectures had any immediate influence in 
 the profession, or indeed that the subject-matter ever 
 got beyond the circle of the college. We are not with- 
 out a first-hand account by the author of his reception : 
 1 These views as usual pleased some more, others less ; 
 some chid and calumniated me, and laid it to me as 
 a crime that I had dared to depart from the precepts 
 and opinions of all anatomists ; others desired further 
 explanation of the novelties.' 
 
 It is difficult for us to realize the mental attitude of 
 the men who listened year by year as the turn of the 
 ' Parlour Lecture ' came. Their opinions, no less firmly 
 held than is our positive knowledge, did not get much 
 beyond : ' The great dictator Hippocrates puts us in 
 mind of it, Galen has a thousand times inculcated the 
 same, the prince of the Arabian tribe, Avicen, has set 
 his seal unto it.' This expresses their mental state, and 
 such a heresy as a general circulation could scarcely be 
 appreciated ; and in a man of such good parts as Harvey 
 would in pity be condoned, just as we overlook the 
 mild intellectual vagaries of our friends. 
 
 Bootless to ask, impossible to answer, is the question 
 why Harvey delayed for twelve years the publication
 
 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 27 
 
 of his views. He seems to have belonged to that 
 interesting type of man, not uncommon in every age, 
 who knows too much to write. It is not a little remark- 
 able that this reticence of learning has been a strong 
 mental feature in some of the greatest of discoverers. 
 Perhaps it was the motive of Copernicus, who so 
 dreaded the prejudices of mankind that for thirty years 
 he is said to have detained in his closet the Treatise of 
 Revolutions. From what Harvey says, very much the 
 same reasons restrained the publication of his work. 
 To the lesser circulation, with the authority of Galen 
 and Columbus to support it, men 'will give their 
 adhesion', but the general circulation 'is of so novel 
 and unheard-of character that I not only fear injury to 
 myself from the envy of a few, but I tremble lest I have 
 mankind at large for my enemies, so much doth wont 
 and custom, that has become as another nature, and 
 doctrine once sown and that hath struck deep root and 
 rested from antiquity, influence all men '. He felt, as he 
 says to Riolan, that it was in some sort criminal to call 
 in question doctrines that had descended through a 
 long succession of ages and carry the authority of the 
 ancients ; but he appealed unto Nature that bowed to 
 no antiquity and was of still higher authority than the 
 ancients. Men have been for years in conscious posses- 
 sion of some of the greatest of truths before venturing 
 to publish them. Napier spent twenty years developing 
 the theory of Logarithms ; and Bacon kept the Novum 
 Organum by him for twelve years, and year by year 
 touched it up indeed, Rowley states that he saw 
 twelve copies. Two other famous discoveries by 
 Englishmen have the same curious history the two 
 which can alone be said to be greater than the demon- 
 stration of the circulation of the blood. Zachariah
 
 28 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 
 
 Wood speaks of Harvey as the surmiser of the little 
 world, to distinguish him from another Englishman 
 who first went about the greater world. But a greater 
 than both Isaac Newton had grasped the secret of 
 a cosmic circulation, and brooded in silence over the 
 motion of the spheres for more than twenty years before 
 publishing the Principia. Between the writing of the 
 rough sketch in 1842 and the appearance of the Origin 
 of Species seventeen years elapsed ; and from the date 
 of the journal notes, 1836, in which we have the first 
 intimation of Darwin's theory, more than twenty years. 
 In Harvey's case this intellectual reticence, this hesita- 
 tion 'to quit the peaceful haven', as he says, has cost us 
 dear. Only a happy accident gave us the De Genera- 
 ttone, and the College can never be too grateful to Sir 
 George Ent for that Christmas visit, 1650, so graphically 
 described, and to which we owe one of the masterpieces 
 of English medicine. How many seventeenth-century 
 treatises we could have spared to have had the Practice 
 of Medicine conformable to his Thesis of the Circulation of 
 the Blood! How instructive his prospective Medical 
 Observations would have been we can gather from the 
 remarkable series of cases scattered through the manu- 
 script notes and his published writings. His ' treatise 
 apart' on Eventilation or Respiration', the Medical 
 Anatomy, or Anatomy in its Application to Medicine, 
 as he says, ' I also intend putting to press ' ; the work 
 1 from observations in my possession ' on Organs of 
 Motion in Animals all of these, with the work on 
 Generation in Insects, and others mentioned by Dr. 
 Merrett, 1 the then library keeper, 1667, were probably 
 dispersed when those sons of Belial ransacked his 
 chambers at Whitehall. 
 
 1 Munk, Roll of the College, vol. i, p. 132.
 
 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 29 
 
 ' Still the die is cast, and my trust is in the love of 
 truth and the candour that inheres in cultivated minds/ 
 With these words he consoles himself, knowing from 
 experience that the publication of even a portion of the 
 work, as in one place he calls the little book, would 
 raise a tempest. Zachafiah Wood in the preface to the 
 English edition, 1673, expresses what many of his con- 
 temporaries must have felt, ' Truly a bold man indeed, 
 O disturber of the quiet of physicians! O seditious 
 citizen of the Physical Commonwealth ! who first of all 
 durst oppose an opinion conformed for so many ages 
 by the consent of all.' De Bach of Amsterdam 
 describes the dilemma in which teachers found them- 
 selves : ' This new thing I did examine, which the first 
 entrance did seem very easily to be refuted, but being 
 weighed in a just balance, and having added to reason 
 my own ey-sight it was found inexpugnable, nay (the 
 very prick of truth enforcing) to be embraced with both 
 arms. What should I doe? Must Hippocrates be left, 
 Galen slighted ? No, if we follow the truth senced 
 with reason and our sense, we are still Hippocrates his, 
 we are still Galens ' (English edition, 1653). 
 
 The history of the next thirty years illustrates the 
 truth of Locke's dictum in the struggle for acceptance. 
 Not the least interesting part of the story, it should be 
 told at greater length and with more detail than it has 
 yet received more than I am able to give it. That the 
 repeated demonstrations, aided by the strong personal 
 influence of the man, brought the College, as a body, to 
 the new views is witnessed rather by the esteem and 
 affection the Fellows bore to Harvey than by any direct 
 evidence. The appearance of the book in 1628 made 
 no great stir; it was not a literary sensation a not 
 uncommon fate of epoch-making works, the authors of
 
 30 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 
 
 which are too far ahead of their contemporaries to be 
 appreciated. The same event happened to Newton's 
 Principia; as Sir William Petty remarks, 'I have not 
 met with one man that put an extraordinary value on 
 the book.' 
 
 Among Englishmen, Primrose alone, brought up 
 among the strictest sect of the Galenists, and at the 
 time not a Fellow wrote a criticism from the old 
 standpoint (1632), and remained unconvinced twelve 
 years later, as his controversy with Regius shows. 
 And only one special treatise in favour of the circula- 
 tion was written in England that of Sir George Ent, 
 a pupil and friend of Harvey, who wrote (1641) specially 
 against Parisanus, a Venetian, a foeman quite unworthy 
 of his quill. In the universities the new doctrine 
 rapidly gained acceptance in Cambridge through the 
 influence of Glisson, while in part to Harvey's work 
 and influence may be attributed that only too brief but 
 golden renaissance of science at Oxford. A little inci- 
 dent mentioned in the autobiographical notes of the 
 celebrated Wallis shows how the subject was taken up 
 quite early in the universities : ' And I took into it the 
 speculative part of physick and anatomy as parts of 
 natural philosophy, and, as Dr. Glisson has since told 
 me, I was the first of his sons who (in a public disputa- 
 tion) maintained the circulation of the blood, which was 
 then a new doctrine, though I had no design of 
 practising physick.' This was in the early 'thirties'. 
 But the older views were very hard to displace, and 
 as late as 1651 we find such intelligent members of 
 the ' invisible college ' as Boyle and Petty carrying 
 out experiments together in Ireland to satisfy them- 
 selves as to the truth of the circulation of the blood. 
 
 It took much longer for the new views to reach the
 
 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 31 
 
 textbooks of the day. From no work of the period 
 does one get a better idea of the current anatomical and 
 physiological teaching in London than from Crooke's 
 Body of Man (1615 and 1631). Collected out of Vesalius, 
 Plantinus, Platerius, Laurentius, Valverda, Bauchinus, 
 and others, it is an epitome of their opinions, with the 
 comments of the professor who read the anatomy lecture 
 to the Company of the Barber-Surgeons. In the preface 
 to the first edition he speaks of the contentment and 
 profit he had received from Dr. Davies's Lumleian 
 Lectures at the College of Physicians. There is no indi- 
 cation in the second edition that he had benefited by the 
 instruction of Dr. Davies's successor. Galen is followed 
 implicitly, with here and there minor deviations. The 
 views of Columbus on the lesser circulation are men- 
 tioned only to be dismissed as superfluous and erro- 
 neous. The Gresham Professor of the day, Dr. Winston, 
 makes no mention of the new doctrine in his Anatomy 
 Lectures which were published after his death, 1651, and 
 are of special interest as showing that at so late a date 
 a work could be issued with the Galenical physiology 
 unchanged. In Alexander Reid's Manual, the popular 
 textbook of the day, the Harveian views are given in 
 part in the fifth edition, in which, as he says in the 
 preface, 'the book of the breast ' is altogether new an 
 item of no little interest, since he was a man advanced 
 in years, and, as he says, ' the hourglass hasteneth, and 
 but a few sands remain unrun.' Highmore, the distin- 
 guished Dorsetshire anatomist, and a pupil of Harvey, 
 in his well-known Anatomy published in 1651, gives the 
 ablest exposition of his master's views that had appeared 
 in any systematic work of the period, and he urges his 
 readers to study the de Motu Cordis as ' fontem ipsum ' 
 from which to get clearer knowledge. He quotes an
 
 32 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 
 
 appropriate motto for the period laudamus veteres : sed 
 nostris utimur annis. But even so late as 1671 the old 
 views were maintained in the English edition of Riolan. 
 And yet the knowledge of Harvey's views must have 
 spread broadcast, not only in the profession, but in that 
 large outside circle of distinguished men who felt the 
 new spirit of science working in their veins. From 
 converse or from the Lumleian lectures, which no doubt 
 he often attended, Kenelm Digby must have had the 
 information about Harvey's views on generation, as at 
 the date of the issue of his Two Treatises, 1644, they 
 had not been published anywhere. While he knew well 
 the motion of the blood as expounded by Harvey, and 
 having, in making his great antidote, studied the action 
 of the viper's heart, Digby, like Descartes, could not 
 emancipate himself from the old views, as shown in the 
 following passage : ' But if you desire to follow the 
 blood all along every steppe, in its progresse from the 
 hart round about the body, till it returne back againe to 
 its center, Doctor Harvey, who most acutely teacheth 
 this doctrine, must be your guide. He will show you 
 how it issueth from the hart by the arteries ; from whence 
 it goeth on warming the flesh, untill it arrive to some of 
 the extremities of the body : and by then it is grown so 
 coole (by long absence from the fountaine of its heate ; 
 and by evaporating its owne stocke of spirits, without any 
 new supply) that it hath need of being warmed anew ; 
 it findeth itself returned backe againe to the hart, and is 
 there heated againe, which returne is made by the veines, 
 as its going forwardes, is performed only by the arteries.' 
 Sir William Temple well expresses the attitude of 
 mind of the intellectual Philistine of the time, who 
 looked for immediate results. Speaking of the work of 
 Harvey and of Copernicus he says : ' Whether either of
 
 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 33 
 
 these be modern discoveries or derived from old founda- 
 tions is disputed; nay, it is so too, whether they are 
 true or no ; for though reason may seem to favour them 
 more than the contrary opinions, yet sense can hardly 
 allow them, and to satisfy mankind both these must con- 
 cur. But if they are true, yet these two great discoveries 
 have made no change in the conclusions of Astronomy 
 nor in the practice of Physic, and so have been but little 
 use to the world, though, perhaps, of much honour to 
 the authors.' 1 It is pleasant to notice that our old friend, 
 Sir Thomas Browne, with his love of paradox, declared 
 that he preferred the circulation of the blood to the 
 discovery of America. 
 
 Of the reception of Harvey's views in Holland and 
 Germany there is nothing to add to the admirable 
 account given by Willis. The early and strenuous 
 advocacy of Descartes must have influenced the Dutch 
 physicians ; but in this, as in so many other things, the 
 infection of his early years proved too powerful, and he 
 could not get rid of the ' ancient spirits '. Of the dis- 
 covery of the circulation he says 2 it is ' la plus belle et la 
 plus utile que Ton put faire en medecine ' . ' Tout a fait 
 contraire au sein (stc) touchant le mouvement du cceur/ 
 which he held to be due to an ebullition of the spirits 
 a sort of ferment (espece de levain] existing in it. Much 
 more actively discussed in Holland than elsewhere, the 
 writings of Drake, Walaeus, Regius, Plempius, Sylvius, 
 de Bach, Conringius, T. Bartholini (the Dane), and 
 others threshed out the whole question very thoroughly, 
 and their views, with those of Hoffman, Slegel, and 
 others, are referred to by Willis and given in greater 
 detail by Riolan. 3 
 
 1 Works, 1814, vol. iii, p. 293. a Cousins's edition, vol. ix, p. 159. 
 1 Opuscula Anatomica. London, 1649. 
 C
 
 34 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 
 
 In the oft-quoted statement that Harvey, ' conquering 
 envy, hath established a new doctrine in his lifetime,' 
 Hobbes was right so far as England and Holland are 
 concerned. But it was far otherwise in France, where 
 it met with a bitter and protracted hostility. The 
 Medical School of the University of Paris, at the time 
 one of the best-organized and most important in Europe, 
 declined to accept the circulation of the blood during 
 his lifetime and for some years after his death. The 
 history of the period is pictured for us in vivid colours 
 in that journal intime which Gui Patin kept up with his 
 friends, Spohn and Falconet of Lyons and the Belins 
 (pere et fils). With all his faults, particularly his scan- 
 dalous lack of charity, one cannot but feel the keenest 
 sympathy with this dear old man. Devoted to his 
 saints, Hippocrates and Galen, Fernel and Duret, and 
 to his teachers, Pietre and Riolan, to him the circulation 
 of the blood was never more than an ingenious paradox. 
 To such a lover of books and of good literature every- 
 thing can be forgiven, and in his letters we follow with 
 deepest interest his vigorous campaign against his dear 
 enemies, the Cuisiniers arabesques, who had enslaved 
 people and physicians alike, the haemophobes, the 
 chemists, the astrologers and the stibiate, or as he calls 
 it, the Stygiate group. To him the Koran was less 
 dangerous than the works of Paracelsus, the appearance 
 of the new Geneva edition of which he deeply deplores. 
 Reverence for Galen and' friendship with Riolan, rather 
 than any deep interest in the question, inspired his 
 opposition. To him the new doctrine was ridiculous, 
 and it was he who called the partisans of it circulateurs 
 in allusion to the Latin word, circulator, meaning char- 
 latan. In 1652 he writes to Spohn that the question is 
 still open whether the blood passes through the septum
 
 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 35 
 
 of the heart or through the lungs. In 1659 he promises 
 to send him a work of Vinean against the circulation. 1 
 More extraordinary still is the fact that as late as 1670, 
 twelve years after Harvey's death, the thesis of one 
 Cordelle, a bachelor of medicine, publicly discussed the 
 circulation of the blood, and Gui Patin, who presided, 
 decided in the negative. The fiction of an ingenious 
 narrator, le doux songe of Harvey, are the terms in 
 which he speaks of it. The whole passage is worth 
 quoting as possibly the last public denouncement of what 
 seemed a rank heresy to the old Galenists : ' Supposer 
 que le sang se meut toujours circulairement, que de la 
 veine cave ascendante il tombe dans 1'oreillette droite du 
 cceur, que de la il aille traverser toute la substance du 
 poumon pour retomber de la dans 1'oreillette gauche en 
 passant par la veine pulmonaire, et qu'enfin de la il soit 
 projete dans 1'aorte et toutes les arteres qui le feront 
 passer dans les veines et dans le cceur, lui faisant par 
 ce moyen suivre un circuit, voila le doux songe de 
 Harvey, la fiction d'un narrateur ingenieux, mais nulle- 
 ment prouvee par 1' evidence. La circulation du sang, 
 son transport circulaire par les vaisseaux, c'est 1'enfante- 
 ment d'un esprit oisif, un vrai nuage qu'embrassent les 
 Ixions pour procreer les Centaurs et les monstres.' 2 
 
 As I said, we can forgive a great deal to the man who 
 has left us such a picture of seventeenth-century life, 
 drawn, all unconsciously, with a master hand; and 
 through the mists of prejudice and hate we can recognize 
 the good sense which had the courage to protest against 
 the forfanterie arabesque et be'zoardesque in much of the 
 therapeutics of the day. 
 
 1 Lettres, vol. i, p. 324, Edition 1694. 
 
 2 Gui Patin, par Felix Larrieu. Paris, 1889. 
 
 C2
 
 36 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 
 
 Though a professor in the Paris Faculty and a 
 brilliant lecturer, Patin at that time did not occupy such 
 a distinguished position, nor was his opposition of such 
 importance as that of Riolan 'John Riolan, the Son, 
 the most experienced Physician in the Universitie of 
 Paris, the Prince of Dissection of Bodies, and the 
 King's professor, and Dean of Anatomic and of the 
 knowledge of simples, chief physician to the queen- 
 mother of Louis XI I F as he is quaintly, but very truly, 
 described by Harvey. 1 Brought up by his father to 
 regard Hippocrates and Galen as the sources of all 
 wisdom, the intensity of his zeal increased with his 
 years until at last 'to see the physic of Galen kept in 
 good repair ' became the passion of his life. The deep 
 pity of it all is that such mental blindness should have 
 stricken a really great man, for he was a brilliant ana- 
 tomist and teacher, the author of the best anatomical 
 textbook of its day, a man of affairs, profoundly versed 
 in literature, a successful practitioner, and for years the 
 head of the profession in France. 
 
 The opposition of such a man was serious, and natu- 
 rally had a profound influence. Not content with the 
 comparatively brief statement in the Encheiridion, 1648, 
 Riolan published in England the following year his 
 Opuscula Anatomica nova, one very large section of 
 which is taken up with the problem of circulation. It 
 was this probably as much as a present of the Enchei- 
 ridion that induced Harvey to break his long silence 
 and to reply. After a report of a discussion upon a 
 thesis in 1645 and a statement of objections, a most 
 interesting discussion follows of the literature, in which 
 the opinions of various writers are examined, particu- 
 
 1 Title-page of English edition of the Letter.
 
 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 37 
 
 larly those of Cartesius, Conringius, Walaeus, and 
 Plempius. 
 
 It is quite possible that the second Disquisition of 
 Harvey to Riolan, published with the first in duodecimo 
 form at Cambridge in 1649, was brought out by Riolan's 
 latter publication, though it is not directly referred to. 
 Little did Harvey appreciate that his old friend was both 
 blind and deaf incapable of seeing obvious facts. It was 
 not a question of being conversant with anatomy or of 
 having had experience, on both of which points Harvey 
 dwells at length. Riolan knew his anatomy as well as, 
 or better, than any man of his generation. It was not 
 that he would not but he that could not see the truth 
 which was staring him in the face. As Reynaud 1 
 mentions, an occasional thesis (Fagon, 1663; Mattot, 
 1665) supporting the circulation did slip through the 
 Faculty : but the official recognition in France did not 
 come until 1673, when Louis XIV founded a special 
 Chair of Anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes for the 
 propagation of the new discoveries. 
 
 The satire of Moliere and the Arret Burlesque of 
 Boileau completed the discomfiture of the ' anticircula- 
 teurs', but it had taken nearly half a century to overcome 
 the opposition of those who saw in the new doctrines 
 the complete destruction of the ancient system of 
 medicine. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Even when full grown in the conscious stage Truth 
 may remain sterile without influence or progress on any 
 aspects of human activity. One of the most remarkable 
 
 1 Les Me'decins an Temps de Moliere, 1863.
 
 38 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 
 
 of phenomena in mental biography is the failure of the 
 Greeks to succeed after giving the world such a glorious 
 start. They had every essential for permanent success : 
 scientific imagination, keen powers of observation ; and 
 if in the days of Hippocrates the mathematical method 
 of interrogating Nature prevailed rather than the experi- 
 mental, Galen carried the latter to a degree of perfection 
 never again reached until the time of Harvey. Only 
 when placed in its true position in relation to Greek 
 religion and philosophy, as has been done so skilfully 
 by Gomperz, 1 do we realize the immensity of the debt 
 we owe to those 'our young light-hearted masters'. 
 And Gomperz makes clear the nature of the debt of 
 Greek thought to the practical sense of the physicians. 
 But alas ! upon the fires they kindled were poured the 
 dust and ashes of contending philosophies, and neither 
 the men of the Alexandrian school nor the brilliant 
 labours of the most encyclopaedic mind that has ever 
 been given to medicine sufficed to replenish them. 
 Fortunately, here and there amid the embers of the 
 Middle Ages glowed the coals from which we have 
 lighted the fires of modern progress. The special dis- 
 tinction which divides modern from ancient science is 
 its fruitful application to human needs not that this 
 was unknown to the Greeks; but the practical re- 
 cognition of the laws of life and matter has in the 
 past century remade the world. In making knowledge 
 effective we have succeeded where our masters failed. 
 But this last and final stage, always of slow and painful 
 
 1 The three volumes of his Greek Thinkers, now in English dress, 
 should be studied by every young man who wishes to get at the 
 foundations of philosophy. The picturesque style of Professor 
 Gomperz and his strong sympathy with science add greatly to the 
 interest of the work.
 
 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 39 
 
 consummation, is evolved directly from truths which 
 cannot be translated into terms intelligible to ordinary 
 minds. Newton's great work influenced neither the 
 morals nor the manners of his age, nor was there any 
 immediate tangible benefit that could be explained to 
 the edification or appreciation of the ' ordinary man ' of 
 his day; yet it set forward at a bound the human mind, 
 as did such truths as were proclaimed by Copernicus, 
 by Kepler, by Darwin, and others. In a less conspicuous 
 manner Harvey's triumph was on the same high plane. 
 There was nothing in it which could be converted 
 immediately into practical benefit, nothing that even 
 the Sydenhams of his day could take hold of and use. 
 Not so much really in the demonstration of the fact of 
 the circulation as in the demonstration of the method 
 the Inventum mirabile sought for by Descartes, the 
 Novum Organum of Bacon lies the true merit of 
 Harvey's work. While Bacon was thinking, Harvey 
 was acting; and before Descartes had left his happy 
 school at La Fleche Harvey was using la nouvette 
 ntethode ; and it is in this way that the de Motu Cordis 
 marks the break of the modern spirit with the old 
 traditions. No longer were men to rest content with 
 careful observation and with accurate description ; no 
 longer were men to be content with finely-spun theories 
 and dreams, which ' serve as a common subterfuge of 
 ignorance ' ; but here for the first time a great physio- 
 logical problem was approached from the experimental 
 side by a man with a modern scientific mind, who could 
 weigh evidence and not go beyond it, and who had the 
 sense to let the conclusions emerge naturally but firmly 
 from the observations. To the age of the hearer, in 
 which men had heard, and heard only, had succeeded 
 the age of the eye, in which men had seen and had been
 
 40 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 
 
 content only to see. But at last came the age of the 
 hand the thinking, devising, planning hand ; the hand 
 as an instrument of the mind, now reintroduced into 
 the world in a modest little monograph of seventy-two 
 pages, from which we may date the beginning ot 
 experimental medicine. 
 
 No great discovery in science is ever without a corre- 
 sponding influence on medical thought, not always 
 evident at first, and apt to be characterized by the 
 usual vagaries associated with human effort. Very 
 marked in each generation has been the change wrought 
 in the conceptions of disease and in its treatment by 
 epoch-making discoveries as to the functions of the 
 body. We ourselves are deeply involved to-day in 
 toxins and antitoxins, in opsonins, tulases, and extracts 
 as a direct result of the researches in bacteriology and 
 in internal secretion. There were sanguine souls in 
 Harvey's day, who lamented with Floyer that the dis- 
 covery had not brought great and general innovations 
 into the whole practice of physic. But had the old 
 Litchfield physician lived he would have seen the rise 
 of a school based directly upon the studies of Harvey 
 and Sanctorius, the brilliant reasonings of Descartes 
 and the works of Bellini and Borelli. The mechanical 
 school rose in its pride on solid foundations which ap- 
 pealed to practical men with singular force. Very soon 
 that ' beatific epitome of creation ', man, was ' marked 
 out like a spot of earth or a piece of timber with rules 
 and compasses', and the medical terminology of the 
 day became unintelligible to the older practitioners who 
 could make nothing of the 'wheels and pulley, wedges, 
 levers, screws, cords, canals and cisterns, sieves and 
 strainers', and they cracked their jokes on 'angles, 
 cylinders, celerity, percussion, resistance, and such-like
 
 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 41 
 
 terms which they said had no more to do with physic 
 on the human body than a carpenter has in making 
 Venice treacle or curing a fever '. Once accepted, men 
 had a feeling that so important a discovery must change 
 all the usual conceptions of disease. As has been said 
 before, Harvey tells that he had in preparation a Practice 
 of Medicine conformable to his Thesis of the Circulation of 
 the Blood, and it soon became customary to put in the 
 title-pages of works some reference to the new doctrine. 
 Even Riolan's Opuscula Anatomia makes an allusion to 
 it. Walaeus, a keen defender of Harvey, published in 
 1660 a little compendium of practice ad circidationem 
 sanguinis adornata, but there is nothing in it to suggest 
 any radical change in treatment. Rolfinck's Disserta- 
 tiones Anatomicae, 1650, embracing the older and more 
 recent views in medicine are ad circulationem accommo- 
 datae, and even as late as 1690 the well-known anatomy 
 of Dionis was suivant la circulation. With the loss of 
 his work on the Practice of Medicine it is impossible to 
 say whether Harvey's own practice was modified in any 
 way. To part from the spirits and humours must have 
 left his attitude of mind very sceptical, and that his 
 1 therapeutic way ' was not admired (as Aubrey tells us) 
 speaks for a change which may have set many against 
 him. More important than any influence upon treat- 
 ment was the irresistible change in the conceptions of 
 disease caused by destruction of the doctrine of spirits 
 and humours, which had prevailed from the days of 
 Hippocrates. While Harvey, as he says, had in places 
 to use the language of physiology, that is, the language 
 of the day, he makes it very clear, particularly in the 
 second letter to Riolan, that he will have none of the 
 old doctrine to which the de Motu Cordis dealt the death 
 blow.
 
 42 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 
 
 But the moving hand reminds your orator, Mr. Presi- 
 dent, of a bounden duty laid upon him by our great 
 Dictator to commemorate on this occasion by name all 
 of our benefactors; to urge others to follow their 
 example ; to exhort the Fellows and Members to study 
 out the secrets of Nature by way of experiment ; and, 
 lastly, for the honour of the profession, to continue in 
 love and affection among ourselves. No greater tribute 
 to Harvey exists than in these simple sentences in which 
 he established this lectureship, breathing as they do the 
 very spirit of the man, and revealing to us his heart of 
 hearts. Doubtless, no one more than he rejoices that 
 our benefactors have now become so numerous as to 
 nullify the first injunction ; and the best one can do is to 
 give a general expression of our thanks, and to mention 
 here and there, as I have done, the more notable among 
 them. But this is not enough. While we are praising 
 famous men, honoured in their day and still the glory of 
 this College, the touching words of the son of Sirach 
 remind us : ' Some there be that have no memory, who 
 are perished as though they had never been, and are 
 become as though they had never been born.' Such 
 renown as they had, time has blotted out ; and on them 
 the iniquity of oblivion has blindly scattered her poppy. 
 A few are embalmed in the biographical dictionaries; 
 a few are dragged to light every year at Sotheby's, or 
 the memory is stirred to reminiscence as one takes down 
 an old volume from our shelves. But for the immense 
 majority on the long roll of our Fellows names! 
 names ! names ! nothing more ; a catalogue as dry and 
 meaningless as that of the ships, or as the genealogy of 
 David in the Book of Chronicles. Even the dignity of 
 the Presidential chair does not suffice to float a man down 
 the few centuries that have passed since the foundation
 
 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 43 
 
 of the College. Who was Richard Forster ? Who was 
 Henry Atkins ? Perhaps two or three among us could 
 tell at once. And yet by these men the continuity and 
 organic life of the College has been carried on, and in 
 maintaining its honour, and furthering its welfare, each 
 one in his day was a benefactor, whose memory it is our 
 duty, as well as our pleasure, to recall. Much of the 
 nobility of the profession depends upon this great cloud 
 of witnesses, who pass into the silent land pass, and 
 leave no sign, becoming as though they had never been 
 born. And it was the pathos of this fate, not less pathetic 
 because common to all but a few, that wrung from the 
 poet that sadly true comparison of the race of man to 
 the race of leaves ! 
 
 The story of Harvey's life, and a knowledge of the 
 method of his work, should be the best stimulus to the 
 Fellows and Members to carry out the second and third 
 of his commands ; and the final one, to continue in love 
 and affection among ourselves, should not be difficult to 
 realize. Sorely tried as he must have been, and naturally 
 testy, only once in his writings, so far as I have read, 
 does the old Adam break out. With his temperament, 
 and with such provocation, this is an unexampled record, 
 and one can appreciate how much was resisted in those 
 days when tongue and pen were free. Over and over 
 again he must have restrained himself as he did in the 
 controversy with Riolan, of whom, for the sake of old 
 friendship, he could not find it in his heart to say 
 anything severe. To-day his commands are easier to 
 follow, when the deepened courtesies of life have made 
 us all more tolerant of those small weaknesses, inherent 
 in our nature, which give diversity to character without 
 necessarily marring it. To no man does the right spirit 
 in these matters come by nature, and I would urge upon
 
 44 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 
 
 our younger Fellows and Members, weighing well these 
 winged words, to emulate our great exemplar, whose 
 work shed such lustre upon British Medicine, and 
 whom we honour in this College not less for the scien- 
 tific method which he inculcated than for the admirable 
 virtues of his character.
 
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