THE UMIYERSJTY LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF • SAN DIEGf)

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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

PRINTER 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 conies 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 Generatione}.

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

i4 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 ; 2
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
methodicus, 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

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 Sunaroypafaa
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 1886):

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
1 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-
tione, 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
' 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 (sic) 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. 2 Cousins's edition, vol. ix, p. 159.
1 Opuscula Anatotnica, 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 iltombe 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 coeur, 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.

C 2

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 1 1' — 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 Reynaud1
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 Medecins 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 nouvelle
me'thode ; 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 circulationem
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 ot
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 n.ot 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 himselt 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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