CHAPTER II The Circulation and the Feeding of the Tissues 7 CHAPTER III Respiration and the Circulation 11 CHAPTER IV The Circulation and the Aristotelian Primacy of the Heart 42 CHAPTER V Physicians versus Philosophers—Harvey for the Philosophers 55 CHAPTER VI The Circulation and the Primacy of the Blood 64 CHAPTER VII The Cause of the Heart-beat 79 CHAPTER VIII Harvey's Delineation of the Venous Return 95 CHAPTER IX The Blood the Seat of the Soul 103 CHAPTER X The Blood the Innate Heat 116 CHAPTER XI The Innate Heat not Derived from Elemental Fire 139 CHAPTER XII The Circulation of the Blood and the Circulation of the Heavens 154 Notes 159 Index 191

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ILLUSTRATIONS

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HARVEY'S VIEWS ON THE USE OF THE CIRCULATION OF THE BLOOD

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CHAPTER I

HARVEY'S ATTITUDE TOWARD THE QUESTION OF THE USE OF THE CIRCULATION

It is a happy moment for a physiologist when the train which is bearing him across the luxuriant plain of Venetia stops at the cry of "Padova!" If he have not informed himself too thoroughly about the sights which he will see at the Paduan University, he will enjoy his own surprise when he is ushered into the Anatomical Theater of Fabricius ab Aquapendente—a room in which standing-places rise steeply, tier above tier, entirely around a small central oval pit. Looking down into this, as he leans upon the rail, the traveler will realize with sudden pleasure that William Harvey, when a medical student, may often have leaned upon the self-same rail to see Fabricius demonstrate the anatomy of man. The place looks fit to have been a nursery of object-teachers, for it is too small to hold a pompous cathedra; and the veteran to whose Latin the young Englishman listened must have stood directly beside the dead body. To an American, musing there alone, the closing years of the sixteenth century, the last years of Queen Elizabeth of England, which seem so remote to him when at home, are but as yesterday.

Recent, indeed, in the history of medicine is the year 1602, when Harvey received his doctor's degree at Padua and returned to London; but for all that we are right in feeling that our day is far removed from his. The tireless progress of modern times has swept on at the charging pace; but in Harvey's time books were still a living force which had been written in days five and six times as far removed from the student of Padua as he from us. Galen, the Greek who practised medicine at imperial Rome in the second century of the Christian era; Aristotle, who had been the tutor of Alexander the Great five hundred years before Galen, when Rome was but a petty state warring with her Italian neighbors;—these ancients were still great working authorities in Harvey's day.[1]

It is against this persistent glow of the Greek thought that Harvey stands out so vividly as the first great