The English physician to whom belongs the honor of having first shown that the course of the blood is nothing less than a kind of perpetual movement in a circle.
Elsewhere Bartholinus declared:
To have had the glory of discovering the movements of the heart and blood was enough for one man.
Haller, a very learned and discriminating authority, called the De Motu, "libelhis aureus."
I must refrain from any references to allusions to Harvey in contemporary English verse: both Dryden and Cowley have lines on him, but they are very poor stuff indeed.
Nor have we to-night time to discuss the large question of the claims of the Italian naturalist, Cassalpino, to the honor of the discovery, important as this undoubtedly is. Harvey's life and work, is rather too large a topic for one evening hour, but perhaps enough has been said to let us have some idea of both.
The "De Motu" is the greatest single essay on a biological or medical subject ever given to the world. It ranks on an equality with those other epoch-making monographs of Jenner, Schwann, Darwin, Simpson, Pasteur and Lister. Harvey did for physiology what Newton did for astronomy: gave a generalization which put many isolated facts into their places. It revealed an astonishing unity of plan amid manifold diversities of type. So grand was the simplicity of the mechanism of the circulation that that alone was enough to tell him he had attained to a great truth. He saw the one design everywhere, in the heart of the chick as yet unhatched, in the humblest insect, in the stately deer in the Royal park at Windsor. Harvey's work was epoch-making, because he broke with tradition and because it was founded on an experimental basis. Although his name is not in the original charter-book of the Royal Society (it could not be as its date is 1664), all Harvey's intimate friends were Fellows, and there is no possible doubt but that Harvey would have been in the Royal Society, as he was in that earlier unorganized nucleus of it at Oxford. Though a professional anatomist, he studied structures to discover their uses. Just as one of Galen's books is the "De usu partium," so Harvey's masterpiece is "Concerning the Motion and Uses of the Heart and Arteries." Harvey is always physiologically-minded. Harvey was a great man in an age that produced many great men; he was not dwarfed by his contemporaries because they too were great. What Shakespeare and Molière are to the drama, what Milton is to poetry, Bacon to prose, Bunyan to allegory, Murillo and Rembrandt to painting, Wren to architecture, Grotius to international law and theology, Galileo and Newton to terrestrial and celestial physics (and these, all his contemporaries, are masters), such is William Harvey in the realm of the knowledge of the most important system in the bodies of living beings.
