Page:Lives of British Physicians.djvu/54

33 BRITISH PHYSICIANS. signification (quack), was applied to him by many in derision, and his researches and discoveries were treated by his adversaries with contempt and reproach. To an intimate friend he himself com- plained, that after his book of the circulation came out he fell considerably in his practice, and it was believed by the vulgar that he was crack-brained : all his contemporary physicians were against his opinion, and envied him the fame he was likely to acquire by his discovery. That reputation he did, however, ultimately enjoy ; — about twenty-five years after the publication of his system, it was received in all the universities of the world — and Hobbes has observed, that Harvey was the only man perhaps who ever lived to see his own doc- trine established in his lifetime. The original MSS. of Harvey's lectures are preserved, it is said, in the British Museum, and some very curious preparations, (rude enough as compared with the present ingenious methods of preserving parts of the human body,) which either he himself made at Padua, or procured from that celebrated school of medicine, and which most probably he exhibited to his class during his course of lectures on the circulation, are now in the College of Physicians ; they consist of six tables or boards, upon which are spread the differ- ent nerves and blood-vessels, carefully dissected out of the body ; in one of them the semilunar valves of the aorta are distinctly to be seen. Now, these valves, placed at the origin of the arteries, must, together with the valves of the veins, have furnished Harvey with the most striking and con- clusive arguments in support of his novel doctrines.