Harvey, William, 1578-1657; Physicians -- England -- Biography
The College of Physicians still preserve some interesting memorials
of this portion of Harvey's Lumleian lectures. They consist of a
series of six dissections of the blood vessels and nerves of the human
body, which are traditionally reported to have been made by Harvey
himself. The dissections are displayed upon six boards of the size
of the human body, and they exhibit the complete system of the blood
vessels separated from the other parts so as to form diagrams of the
circulatory apparatus. They have been made with such care that one
of the series still shows the semilunar valves at the beginning of
the aorta. These "tabulae Harveianae" were kept for many years at
Burley-on-the-Hill, the seat of the Earls of Winchelsea, one of whose
ancestors--Heneage Finch--the Lord Chancellor Nottingham, married
Elizabeth, a daughter of William Harvey's younger brother Daniel.
Harvey continued his Lumleian lectures year by year, but we know
nothing more of them until 1627, when he delivered a series of lectures
upon the anatomy and physiology of the human body, more especially of
the arm and leg, with a description of the veins, arteries, and nerves
of these parts. This was clearly the Muscular lecture, and if he had
followed the course prescribed by the founders of the lecture it should
have been given in the years 1619 and 1625, for the years 1621 and
1627 should not have embraced an anatomical course. The notes of the
Muscular lecture are in the Sloane collection at the British Museum,
where they have been preserved by as happy an accident as those of the
much more important Visceral lecture. The volume consists of 121 leaves
with writing upon both sides of each page. The notes are as rough and
as concise as those of the Visceral lecture, and the language is again
a mixture of Latin and homely English. They show, like the treatise on
development, that Harvey had by no means emancipated himself from the
trammels of authority. He felt for Aristotle what many of us still feel
for John Hunter, for he said of his great Master that he had hardly
ever made any discovery in connection with the structure of an animal
but that Aristotle either knew of it or explained it. He seems to have
given his fertile imagination full play in these lectures, and amongst
a wealth of similes we find:--
An cerebrum rex [Whether the Brain is to be looked upon as King,]
Nervi Magistratus [The nerves as his ministers,]
Ramuli nervorum officiales [and the branches of the nerves as
their subordinates,]
Musculi Cives, populus [whilst the muscles are the burgesses or the
commonalty].
And in another place:--
An Cerebrum, Master: Spina his mate.
Nervi, Boteswayne.
Musculi, Saylors.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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