The Works of William Harvey M.D.: Translated from the Latin with a life of the authorHarvey, William
Science
The Works of William Harvey M.D.: Translated from the Latin with a life of the author
Harvey, William
Blood -- Circulation -- Early works to 1800; Embryology -- Early works to 1800; Physiology -- Early works to 1800
Among other tastes or habits which Harvey had, Aubrey informs us that
“he was wont to drink coffee, which he and his brother Eliab did before
coffee-houses were in fashion in London.”[76] This was probably a
cherished taste with Harvey. In his will he makes a special reservation
of his “coffey-pot;”--his niece Mary West and her daughter have all his
plate except this precious utensil, which, with the residue, he
evidently desired should descend to his brother Eliab as a memorial
doubtless of the pleasure they had often enjoyed together over its
contents--the brewage from the ‘sober berry.’
In visiting his patients, Harvey “rode on horseback with a foot-cloath,
his men following on foot, as the fashion then was, which was very
decent, now quite discontinued. The judges rode also with their
foot-cloathes to Westminster Hall, which ended at the death of Sir
Robert Hyde, Lord Chief Justice; Anthony Earl of Shaftesbury would have
revived it, but several of the judges being old and ill horsemen would
not agree to it.”[77]
Harvey appears to have preserved his faculties unimpaired to the very
last. Aubrey, as we have seen, found the anatomist perusing Oughtred’s
‘Clavis Mathematica,’ and working the problems not long before he died;
and the registers of the College of Physicians further assure us that
Harvey, when very far stricken in years, still lost little or nothing of
his old activity of mind. He continued to deliver his lectures till
within a year or two of his death, when he was succeeded by his friend
Sir Charles Scarborough, and he never failed at the comitia of the
college when anything of moment was under consideration.
Accumulating years, however, and repeated attacks of gout, to which
Harvey had long been a martyr, at length asserted their mastery over the
declining body, and William Harvey, the great in intellect, the noble in
nature, finally ceased to be, on the 3d of June, 1657, in the eightieth
year of his age. About ten o’clock in the morning, as Aubrey tells us,
on attempting to speak, he found that he had lost the power of
utterance, that, in the language of the vulgar, he had the dead palsy in
his tongue. He did not lose his other faculties, however; but knowing
that his end was approaching, he sent for his nephews, to each of whom
he gave some token of remembrance,--his watch to one, his signet ring to
another, and so on. He farther made signs to Sambroke, his apothecary,
to let him blood in the tongue; but this did little or no good, and by
and by, in the evening of the day on which he was stricken, he died;
“the palsy,” as Aubrey has it, “giving him an easy passport.”[78]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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