June, 1657. From the only account we have of his last days, there is no question that he died of left cerebral hemorrhage, for he had aphasia and paralysis. In a death-mask made from the old bust in the church, the right eye is more closed than the left, which would agree with right-sided paresis.
He was buried on June 26 in the Harvey vault which his brother Eliab had constructed below the parish church of Hempstead only two years before. Hempstead is an ancient village seven miles southeast of Saffron Walden in Essex. The funeral was attended by the president of the College of Physicians and a deputation from the same, and by Aubrey, his biographer, who helped to place the body in the vault. Aubrey says he was "lapt in lead," and on his body in great letters his name, "Doctor William Harvey." Quite a number of the members of the Harvey family were buried in these curious mortuary cases. In 1847 the late Sir B. W. Richardson, on visiting the church, found the window of the vault broken and rain gaining access to the floor: the case containing Harvey's remains was cracked and a frog jumped out of it. Richardson rightly thought that this state of things was not as it should be. In 1878 the conditions were still worse; by aid of magnesium light and a mirror he managed to reflect some light into the case and convinced himself that some remains were there. Accordingly he obtained permission from Dean Stanley to have the shell reburied under a glass slab in the pavement of Westminster Abbey beside the grave of John Hunter, Hunter his descendant, not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit of a seeker after truth. Owing to the Dean's death, the project fell through. In 1882 the tower of the church fell through the roof, and so Richardson thought the sooner that Harvey's remains were put into a place of safety the better. At the expense of the College of Physicians, a beautiful sarcophagus of white Sicilian marble was built in the north transept of the church just above the vault, and on St. Luke's Day, 1883, Richardson and seven other Fellows placed the old shell in the sarcophagus which bears this inscription.
The remains of Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, were reverently placed in this sarcophagus in 1883 by the Royal College of Physicians of London.
On the wall of the chapel close to the tomb there is a bust above the family coat-of-arms and a Latin inscription, a translation of which I shall give here, as it is in no account of Harvey's life and because it is always interesting to know what the competent contemporary opinion of a man was. The translation I owe to the kindness of my learned friend, Professor Wallace Lindsay, M.A., LL.D., of the University of St. Andrews:
