fashion then was, which was very decent, now quite discontinued. The judges rode also with their footcloathes 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."1 Harvey appears to have preserved his faculties unimpaired to the very last. Aubrey, as we have seen, found him 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 few years 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 he had long been a martyr, at length asserted their mastery over the declining body, and on the 3rd of June, 1657, William Harvey, the great in intellect, the noble in nature, then in the 80th year of his age, finally ceased to be. 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 1 Aubrey, ib., p. 386. 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. "1 The funeral took place a few days afterwards, and was attended far beyond the walls of the city by a long train of his friends of the College of Physicians, the remains being finally deposited "in a vault at Hempstead, in Essex, which his brother Eliab had built; he was lapt in lead, and on his breast, in great 1 Aubrey gives a positive denial to "the scandall that ran strongly against him (Harvey), viz., that he made himself away, to put himself out of his paine, by opium." Aubrey proceeds: "The scandall aforesaid is from Sir Charles Scarborough's saying that he (Harvey) had, towards his latter end, a preparation of opium and I know not what, which he kept in his study to take if occasion should serve, to put him out of his paine, and which Sir Charles promised to give him. This I believe to be true; but do not at all believe that he really did give it him. The palsey did give him an easie passport." (p. 385.) Harvey, if he meditated anything of the kind above alluded to, would not be the only instance on record of even a strong-minded man shrinking from a struggle which he knows must prove hopeless, from which there is no issue but one. Nature, as the physician knows, does often kill the body by a very lingering and painful process. In his practice he is constantly required to smooth the way for the unhappy sufferer. In his own case he may be excused for wishing to shorten it. Such requests as Harvey may be presumed to have made to Scarborough, are frequently enough preferred to medical men: it were needless to say that they are never granted to the extent desired. letters, his name-DR. WILLIAM HARVEY. . . . I was at his funeral," continues Aubrey, "and helpt to carry him into the vault." And there, at this hour, he lies, the lead that laps him showing indistinctly the outline of the form within; for he lies not in an ordinary coffin, but wrapt in cerements that surround the body, these being in their turn invested by the lead. So lived, so died one of the great men who, in virtue of the eternal laws that rule the Universe, appear on earth from time to time, to enlighten and to ennoble mankind.1 1 On the Tablet placed in Hempstead church to Harvey's memory are inscribed these words: GULIELMUS HARVEIUS, Cui tam colendo Nomini assurgunt omnes Academiæ; Post tot annorum Millia Orbi salutem, sibi immortalitatem Consequutus. Qui ortum et generationem Animalium solus omnium Cui debet Quod sibi innotuit humanum Genus, seipsam Medicina. Collegii Med. Lond. Anatomes et Chirurgia Professor Quibus illustrem construxit Bibliothecam, Post triumphales Contemplando, sanando, inveniendo Sudores, Varias domi forisque statuas, Y Quum totum circuit Microcosmum, Improles obdormivit III Junii anno salutis MDCLVII, Ætat. LXXX. Annorum et Famæ satur. CHAPTER III. RECENT HISTORIANS OF THE DISCOVERY OF THE CIRCULATION OF THE BLOOD. My work would be incomplete were I not to conclude with a notice of some at least of my predecessors, historians of the Circulation, critics and advocates of one or another to whom the discovery has been ascribed. In exposing the views of the great anatomists of former times from their works, I have referred incidentally oftener than once to recent writers who believe that in these they detect a knowledge more or less complete of the Circulation. Among the most persistent of all in his advocacy of the claims of Hippocrates to such distinction is Jo. Ant. van der Linden, professor of medicine in the University of Leyden. In a series of no fewer than twenty-seven dissertations published under the names of his students on taking their medical degrees,' he has brought together and given his own interpretation to every passage in the writings of the Father of Physic which he thinks bears upon the question in 1 Jo. Ant. van der Linden. Hippocrates. de Circuitu Sanguinis, Dissertationes xxvii. Lugd. Batav., 1659–63. 4to. |