Part 18

HARVEY, SIR GEORGE (1806-1876), Scottish painter, the son of a watchmaker, was born at St Ninians, near Stirling, in February 1806. Soon after his birth his parents removed to Stirling, where George was apprenticed to a bookseller. His love for art having, however, become very decided, in his eighteenth year he entered the Trustees' Academy at Edinburgh. Here he so distinguished himself that in 1826 he was invited by the Scottish artists, who had resolved to found a Scottish academy, to join it as an associate. Harvey's first picture, "A Village School," was exhibited in 1826 at the Edinburgh Institution; and from the time of the opening of the Academy in the following year he continued annually to exhibit. His best-known pictures are those depicting historical episodes in religious history from a puritan or evangelical point of view, such as "Covenanters Preaching," "Covenanters' Communion," "John Bunyan and his Blind Daughter," "Sabbath Evening," and the "Quitting of the Manse." He was, however, equally popular in Scotland for subjects not directly religious; and "The Bowlers," "A Highland Funeral," "The Curlers," "A Schule Skailin'," and "Children Blowing Bubbles in the Churchyard of Greyfriars', Edinburgh," manifest the same close observation of character, artistic conception and conscientious elaboration of details. In "The Night Mail" and "Dawn Revealing the New World to Columbus" the aspects of nature are made use of in different ways, but with equal happiness, to lend impressiveness and solemnity to human concerns. He also painted landscapes and portraits. In 1829 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Scottish Academy; in 1864 he succeeded Sir J. W. Gordon as president; and he was knighted in 1867. He died at Edinburgh on the 22nd of January 1876.

Sir George Harvey was the author of a paper on the "Colour of the Atmosphere," read before the Edinburgh Royal Society, and afterwards published with illustrations in _Good Words_; and in 1870 he published a small volume entitled _Notes of the Early History of the Royal Scottish Academy. Selections from the Works of Sir George Harvey, P.R.S.A., described by the Rev. A. L. Simpson, F.S.A. Scot., and photographed by Thomas Annan_, appeared at Edinburgh in 1869.

HARVEY, WILLIAM (1578-1657), English physician, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, was the eldest son of Thomas Harvey, a prosperous Kentish yeoman, and was born at Folkestone on the 1st of April 1578. After passing through the grammar school of Canterbury, on the 31st of May 1593, having just entered his sixteenth year, he became a pensioner of Caius College, Cambridge, at nineteen he took his B.A. degree, and soon after, having chosen the profession of medicine, he went to study at Padua under H. Fabricius and Julius Casserius. At the age of twenty-four Harvey became doctor of medicine, in April 1602. Returning to England in the first year of James I., he settled in London; and two years later he married the daughter of Dr Lancelot Browne, who had been physician to Queen Elizabeth. In the same year he became a candidate of the Royal College of Physicians, and was duly admitted a fellow (June 1607). In 1609 he obtained the reversion of the post of physician to St Bartholomew's hospital. His application was supported by the king himself and by Dr Henry Atkins (1558-1635), the president of the college, and on the death of Dr Wilkinson in the course of the same year he succeeded to the post. He was thrice censor of the college, and in 1615 was appointed Lumleian lecturer.

In 1616 he began his course of lectures, and first brought forward his views upon the movements of the heart and blood. Meantime his practice increased, and he had the lord chancellor, Francis Bacon, and the earl of Arundel among his patients. In 1618 he was appointed physician extraordinary to James I., and on the next vacancy physician in ordinary to his successor. In 1628, the year of the publication of the _Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis_, he was elected treasurer of the College of Physicians, but at the end of the following year he resigned the office, in order, by command of Charles I., to accompany the young duke of Lennox (James Stuart, afterwards duke of Richmond) on his travels. He appears to have visited Italy, and returned in 1632. Four years later he accompanied the earl of Arundel on his embassy to the emperor Ferdinand II. He was eager in collecting objects of natural history, sometimes causing the earl anxiety for his safety by his excursions in a country infested by robbers in consequence of the Thirty Years' War. In a letter written on this journey, he says: "By the way we could scarce see a dogg, crow, kite, raven, or any bird, or anything to anatomise; only sum few miserable people, the reliques of the war and the plague, whom famine had made anatomies before I came." Having returned to his practice in London at the close of the year 1636, he accompanied Charles I. in one of his journeys to Scotland (1639 or 1641). While at Edinburgh he visited the Bass Rock; he minutely describes its abundant population of sea-fowl in his treatise _De generatione_, and incidentally speaks of the account then credited of the solan goose growing on trees as a fable. He was in attendance on the king at the battle of Edgehill (October 1642), where he withdrew under a hedge with the prince of Wales and the duke of York (then boys of twelve and ten years old), "and took out of his pocket a book and read. But he had not read very long before a bullet of a great gun grazed on the ground near him, which made him remove his station," as he afterwards told John Aubrey. After the indecisive battle, Harvey followed Charles I. to Oxford, "where," writes the same gossiping narrator, "I first saw him, but was then too young to be acquainted with so great a doctor. I remember he came several times to our college (Trinity) to George Bathurst, B.D. who had a hen to hatch eggs in his chamber, which they opened daily to see the progress and way of generation." In Oxford he remained three years, and there was some chance of his being superseded in his office at St Bartholomew's hospital, "because he hath withdrawn himself from his charge, and is retired to the party in arms against the Parliament." It was no doubt at this time that his lodgings at Whitehall were searched, and not only the furniture seized but also invaluable manuscripts and anatomical preparations.[1]

While with the king at Oxford he was made warden of Merton College, but a year later, in 1646, that city surrendered to Fairfax, and Harvey returned to London. He was now sixty-eight years old, and, having resigned his appointments and relinquished the cares of practice, lived in learned retirement with one or other of his brothers. It was in his brother Daniel's house at Combe that Dr (afterwards Sir George) Ent, a faithful friend and disciple (1604-1689), visited him in 1650. "I found him," he says, "with a cheerful and sprightly countenance investigating, like Democritus, the nature of things. Asking if all were well with him--'How can that be,' he replied, 'when the state is so agitated with storms and I myself am yet in the open sea? And indeed, were not my mind solaced by my studies and the recollection of the observations I have formerly made, there is nothing which should make me desirous of a longer continuance. But thus employed, this obscure life and vacation from public cares which would disgust other minds is the medicine of mine.'" The work on which he had been chiefly engaged at Oxford, and indeed since the publication of his treatise on the circulation in 1628, was an investigation into the recondite but deeply interesting subject of generation. Charles I. had been an enlightened patron of Harvey's studies, had put the royal deer parks at Windsor and Hampton Court at his disposal, and had watched his demonstration of the growth of the chick with no less interest than the movements of the living heart. Harvey had now collected a large number of observations, though he would probably have delayed their publication. But Ent succeeded in obtaining the manuscripts, with authority to print them or not as he should find them. "I went from him," he says, "like another Jason in possession of the golden fleece, and when I came home and perused the pieces singly, I was amazed that so vast a treasure should have been so long hidden." The result was the publication of the _Exercitationes de generatione_ (1651).

This was the last of Harvey's labours. He had now reached his seventy-third year. His theory of the circulation had been opposed and defended, and was now generally accepted by the most eminent anatomists both in his own country and abroad. He was known and honoured throughout Europe, and his own college (Caius) voted a statue in his honour (1652) _viro monumentis suis immortali_. In 1654 he was elected to the highest post in his profession, that of president of the college; but the following day he met the assembled fellows, and, declining the honour for himself on account of the infirmities of age, recommended the re-election of the late president Dr Francis Prujean (1593-1666). He accepted, however, the office of consiliarius, which he again held in the two following years. He had already enriched the college with other gifts besides the honour of his name. He had raised for them "a noble building of Roman architecture (rustic work with Corinthian pilasters), comprising a great parlour or conversation room below and a library above"; he had furnished the library with books, and filled the museum with "simples and rarities," as well as with specimens of instruments used in the surgical and obstetric branches of medicine. At last he determined to give to his beloved college his paternal estate at Burmarsh in Kent. His wife had died some years before, his brothers were wealthy men, and he was childless, so that he was defrauding no heir when, in July 1656, he made the transfer of this property, then valued at L56 per annum, with provision for a salary to the college librarian and for the endowment of an annual oration, which is still given on the anniversary of the day. The orator, so Harvey orders in his deed of gift, is to exhort the fellows of the college "to search out and study the secrets of nature by way of experiment, and also for the honour of the profession to continue mutual love and affection among themselves."

Harvey, like his contemporary and great successor Thomas Sydenham, was long afflicted with gout, but he preserved his activity of mind to an advanced age. In his eightieth year, on the 3rd of June 1657, he was attacked by paralysis, and though deprived of speech was able to send for his nephews and distribute his watch, ring, and other personal trinkets among them. He died the same evening, "the palsy giving him an easy passport," and was buried with great honour in his brother Eliab's vault at Hempstead in Essex, _annorum et famae satur_. In 1883 the lead coffin containing his remains was enclosed in a marble sarcophagus and moved to the Harvey chapel within the church.

John Aubrey, to whom we owe most of the minor particulars about Harvey which have been preserved, says: "In person he was not tall, but of the lowest stature, round faced, olivaster complexion, little eyes, round, very black, full of spirits; his hair black as a raven, but quite white twenty years before he died." The best portrait of him extant is by Cornelius Jansen in the library of the College of Physicians, one of those rescued from the great fire, which destroyed their original hall in 1666. It has been often engraved, and is prefixed to the fine edition of his works published in 1766.

_Harvey's Work on the Circulation._--In estimating the character and value of the discovery announced in the _Exercitatio de motu cordis et sanguinis_, it is necessary to bear in mind the previous state of knowledge on the subject. Aristotle taught that in man and the higher animals the blood was elaborated from the food in the liver, thence carried to the heart, and sent by it through the veins over the body. His successors of the Alexandrian school of medicine, Erasistratus and Herophilus, further elaborated his system, and taught that, while the veins carried blood from the heart to the members, the arteries carried a subtle kind of air or spirit. For the practical physician only two changes had been made in this theory of the circulation between the Christian era and the 16th century. Galen had discovered that the arteries were not, as their name implies, merely air-pipes, but that they contained blood as well as vital air or spirit. And it had been gradually ascertained that the nerves ([Greek: neura]) which arose from the brain and conveyed "animal spirits" to the body were different from the tendons or sinews ([Greek: neura]) which attach muscles to bones. _First_, then, the physicians of the time of Thomas Linacre knew that the blood is not stagnant in the body. So did Shakespeare and Homer, and every augur who inspected the entrails of a victim, and every village barber who breathed a vein. Plato even uses the expression to [Greek: to aima kata panta ta mele sphodros peripheresthai]. But no one had a conception of a continuous stream returning to its source (a circulation in the true sense of the word) either in the system or in the lungs. If they used the word _circulatio_, as did Caesalpinus,[2] it was as vaguely as the French policeman cries "Circulez." The movements of the blood were in fact thought to be slow and irregular in direction as well as in speed, like the "circulation" of air in a house, or the circulation of a crowd in the streets of a city. _Secondly_, they supposed that one kind of blood flowed from the liver to the right ventricle of the heart, and thence to the lungs and the general system by the veins, and that another kind flowed from the left ventricle to the lungs and general system by the arteries. _Thirdly_, they supposed that the septum of the heart was pervious and allowed blood to pass directly from the right to the left side. _Fourthly_, they had no conception of the functions of the heart as the motor power of the movement of the blood. They doubted whether its substance was muscular; they supposed its pulsation to be due to expansion of the spirits it contained; they believed the only dynamic effect which it had on the blood to be sucking it in during its active diastole, and they supposed the chief use of its constant movements to be the due mixture of blood and spirits.

Of the great anatomists of the 16th century, Sylvius (_In Hipp. et Gal. phys. partem anatom. isagoge_) described the valves of the veins; Vesalius (_De humani corporis fabrica_, 1542) ascertained that the septum between the right and left ventricles is complete, though he could not bring himself to deny the invisible pores which Galen's system demanded. Servetus, in his _Christianismi restitutio_ (1553), goes somewhat farther than his fellow-student Vesalius, and says: "Paries ille medius non est aptus ad communicationem et elaborationem illam; licet aliquid resudare possit"; and, from this anatomical fact and the large size of the pulmonary arteries he concludes that there is a communication in the lungs by which blood passes from the pulmonary artery to the pulmonary vein: "Eodem artificio quo in hepate fit transfusio a vena porta ad venam cavam propter sanguinem, fit etiam in pulmone transfusio a vena arteriosa ad arteriam venosam propter spiritum." The natural spirit of the left side and the vital spirit of the right side of the heart were therefore, he concluded, practically the same, and hence two instead of three distinct _spiritus_ should be admitted. It seems doubtful whether even Servetus rightly conceived of the entire mass of the blood passing through the pulmonary artery and the lungs. The transference of the _spiritus naturalis_ to the lungs, and its return to the left ventricle as _spiritus vitalis_, was the function which he regarded as important. Indeed a true conception of the lesser circulation as a transference of the whole blood of the right side to the left was impossible until the corresponding transference in the greater or systematic circulation was discovered. Servetus, however, was the true predecessor of Harvey in physiology, and his claims to that honour are perfectly authentic and universally admitted.[3]

The way then to Harvey's great work had been paved by the discovery of the valves in the veins, and by that of the lesser circulation--the former due to Sylvius and Fabricius, the latter to Servetus--but the significance of the valves was unsuspected and the fact of even the pulmonary circulation was not generally admitted in its full meaning.

In his treatise Harvey proves (1) that it is the contraction, not the dilatation, of the heart which coincides with the pulse, and that the ventricles as true muscular sacs squeeze the blood which they contain into the aorta and pulmonary artery; (2) that the pulse is not produced by the arteries enlarging and so filling, but by the arteries being filled with blood and so enlarging; (3) that there are no pores in the septum of the heart, so that the whole blood in the right ventricle is sent to the lungs and round by the pulmonary veins to the left ventricle, and also that the whole blood in the left ventricle is again sent into the arteries, round by the smaller veins into the venae cavae, and by them to the right ventricle again--thus making a complete "circulation"; (4) that the blood in the arteries and that in the veins is the same blood; (5) that the action of the right and left sides of the heart, auricles, ventricles and valves, is the same, the mechanism in both being for reception and propulsion of liquid and not of air, since the blood on the right side, though mixed with air, is still blood; (6) that the blood sent through the arteries to the tissues is not all used, but that most of it runs through into the veins; (7) that there is no to and fro undulation in the veins, but a constant stream from the distant parts towards the heart; (8) that the dynamical starting-point of the blood is the heart and not the liver.

The _method_ by which Harvey arrived at his complete and almost faultless solution of the most fundamental and difficult problem in physiology has been often discussed, and is well worthy of attention. He begins his treatise by pointing out the many inconsistencies and defects in the Galenical theory, quoting the writings of Galen himself, of Fabricius, Columbus and others, with great respect, but with unflinching criticism. For, in his own noble language, wise men must learn anatomy, not from the decrees of philosophers, but from the fabric of nature herself, "nec ita in verba jurare antiquitatis magistrae, ut veritatem amicam in apertis relinquant, et in conspectu omnium deserant." He had, as we know, not only furnished himself with all the knowledge that books and the instructions of the best anatomists of Italy could give, but, by a long series of dissections, had gained a far more complete knowledge of the comparative anatomy of the heart and vessels than any contemporary--we may almost say than any successor--until the times of John Hunter and J. F. Meckel. Thus equipped, he tells us that he began his investigations into the movements of the heart and blood by looking at them--i.e. by seeing their action in living animals. After a modest preface, he heads his first chapter "Ex vivorum dissectione, qualis sit cordis motus." He minutely describes what he saw and handled in dogs, pigs, serpents, frogs and fishes, and even in slugs, oysters, lobsters and insects, in the transparent _minima squilla_, "quae Anglice dicitur _a shrimp_," and lastly in the chick while still in the shell. In these investigations he used a _perspicillum_ or simple lens. He particularly describes his observations and experiments on the ventricles, the auricles, the arteries and the veins. He shows how the arrangement of the vessels in the foetus supports his theory. He adduces facts observed in disease as well as in health to prove the rapidity of the circulation. He explains how the mechanism of the valves in the veins is adapted, not, as Fabricius believed, to moderate the flow of blood from the heart, but to favour its flow to the heart. He estimates the capacity of each ventricle, and reckons the rate at which the whole mass of blood passes through it. He elaborately and clearly demonstrates the effect of obstruction of the blood-stream in arteries or in veins, by the forceps in the case of a snake, by a ligature on the arm of a man, and illustrates his argument by figures. He then sums up his conclusion thus: "Circulari quodam motu, in circuitu, agitari in animalibus sanguinem, et esse in perpetuo motu; et hanc esse actionem sive functionem cordis quam pulsu peragit; et omnino motus et pulsus cordis causam unam esse." Lastly, in the 15th, 16th and 17th chapters, he adds certain confirmatory evidence, as the effect of position on the circulation, the absorption of animal poisons and of medicines applied externally, the muscular structure of the heart and the necessary working of its valves. The whole treatise, which occupies only 67 pages of large print in the quarto edition of 1766, is a model of accurate observation, patient accumulation of facts, ingenious experimentation, bold yet cautious hypothesis and logical deduction.

In one point only was the demonstration of the circulation incomplete. Harvey could not discover the capillary channels by which the blood passes from the arteries to the veins. This gap in the circulation was supplied several years later by the great anatomist Marcello Malpighi, who in 1661 saw in the lungs of a frog, by the newly invented microscope, how the blood passes from the one set of vessels to the other. Harvey saw all that could be seen by the unaided eye in his observations on living animals; Malpighi, four years after Harvey's death, by another observation on a living animal, completed the splendid chain of evidence. If this detracts from Harvey's merit it leaves Servetus no merit at all. But in fact the existence of the channels first seen by Malpighi was as clearly pointed to by Harvey's reasoning as the existence of Neptune by the calculations of Leverrier and of Adams.