Harvey, William, 1578-1657; Physicians -- England -- Biography
The title-page, which is almost illegible, is written in red ink. It
runs, "Stat Jove principium, Musae, Jovis omnia plena. Prelectiones
Anatomiae Universalis per me Gulielmum Harveium Medicum Londinensem
Anatomie et Chirurgie Professorem. Anno Domini 1616. Anno aetatis 37
prelectae Aprili 16, 17, 18. Aristoteles Historia Animalium, lib. i.
cap. 16. Hominum partes interiores incertae et incognitae quam ob rem
ad caeterorum Animalium partes quarum similes humanae referentes eas
contemplare." The motto prefixed to the title-page that "everything is
full of Jove" is an incorrect quotation from the third Eclogue of his
favourite author Virgil, of whom he was so enamoured that after reading
him for a time he would throw away the book with the exclamation, "He
hath a devil." This particular line appears especially to have struck
his fancy, for he quotes it twice in his treatise on development, and
he works out the idea which it represents in his fifty-fourth essay.
He there shows that he understands it to mean that the finger of God or
nature, for with him they are synonymous terms, is manifest in every
detail of our structure whether great or small. For he says: "And to
none can these attributes be referred save to the Almighty, first
cause of all things by whatever this name has been designated--the
Divine Mind by Aristotle; the Soul of the Universe by Plato; the Natura
Naturans by others; Saturn and Jove by the Gentiles; by ourselves,
as is seemly in these days, the Creator and Father of all that is
in heaven and earth, on whom all things depend for their being, and
at whose will and pleasure all things are and were engendered." He
thus opened his lectures in a broad spirit of religious charity quite
foreign to his environment but befitting the position he has been
called upon to occupy in the history of science.
These notes of Harvey's visceral lecture are of especial value to us
though they are a mere skeleton of the course--a skeleton which he
was accustomed to clothe with facts drawn from his own vast stores of
observation, with the theories of all his great predecessors and with
the most apposite illustrations. Fortunately they deal with the thorax
and its contents so that they show us the exact point which he had
reached in connection with his great discovery of the circulation of
the blood and the true function of the heart. The notes therefore are
interesting reading quite apart from the peculiarities of their style.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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