“The private character of this great man,” says Aikin, in his Biographical Memoirs of Medicine in Great Britain, “appears to have been in every respect worthy of his public reputation. Cheerful, candid, and upright, he was not the prey of any mean or ungentle passion. He was as little disposed by nature to detract from the merits of others, or make an ostentatious display of his own, as necessitated to use such methods for advancing his fame. The many antagonists whom his renown and the novelty of his opinions excited were, in general, treated by him with modest and temperate language, frequently very different from their own; and while he refuted their arguments, he decorated them with all due praises. He lived on terms of perfect harmony and friendship with his brethren of the college; and seems to have been very little ambitious of engrossing a disproportionate share of medical practice. In extreme old age, pain and sickness were said to have rendered him somewhat irritable in his temper.... It is certain that the profoundest veneration for the great Cause of all those wonders he was so well acquainted with appears eminently conspicuous in every part of his works. He was used to say, that he never dissected the body of any animal without discovering something which he had not expected or conceived of, and in which he recognised the hand of an all-wise Creator. To His particular agency, and not to the operation of general laws, he ascribed all the phenomena of nature. In familiar conversation Harvey was easy and unassuming, and singularly clear in expressing his ideas. His mind was furnished with an ample store of knowledge, not only in matters connected with his profession, but in most of the objects of liberal inquiry, especially in ancient and modern history, and the science of politics. He took great delight in reading the ancient poets, Virgil in particular, with whose divine productions he is said to have been sometimes so transported as to throw the book from him with exclamations of rapture. To complete his character, he did not want that polish and courtly address which are necessary to the scholar who would also appear as a gentleman.” According to Aubrey, who knew him well, Harvey was not tall, but of the lowest stature; round-faced, olivaster in complexion, with little round eyes, very black and full of spirit, his hair black as a raven, but quite white twenty years before he died. His portrait in the College of Physicians corresponds with this account, indicating a nervous, bilious temperament, and showing a compact, square, wide forehead. The general expression is highly intellectual, contemplative, and manly.