3. Cambridge studies II (c.1593–1599): ‘Devoting himself assiduously to his studies’

HARVEY TOOK THE daily eighteen-hour grind in his short, rapid stride, racing to the end of each day’s intellectual journey with the same alacrity with which he dashed across the college lawns. The undergraduate syllabus was based on the medieval division of the ‘seven liberal arts’ into the trivium (the ‘three ways’), of rhetoric, ethics and logic, and the quadrivium (the ‘four ways’, or mathematical arts) of music, arithmetic, astronomy and geometry.

Rhetoric meant the study of Latin language and literature, with a little Greek and some Hebrew. It taught Harvey, in the words of the statutes, ‘the nature of men’s passions and affections’, ‘how to raise and move them’ through words, and ‘how to allay, quiet and change them’. Harvey had been prepared for the rigours of Cambridge rhetoric by his tutors at King’s, Canterbury. By his fourth year at the grammar school, he knew how to inflect every noun and verb in Latin, and was ‘practised in poetic tales, the familiar letters of learned men’. In his final year, he had mastered the art of varying his ‘speech to every mood’ and context. At Cambridge Harvey was urged to keep a commonplace book in order to gather there ‘phrases and idioms’ from poets, philosophers and historians. Their ‘choice and witty sayings’ would garnish his own discourse with a ‘copiousness of word and good expressions, and also raise [his] fancy to a poetic strain’.

Harvey later told a medical colleague that, at Cambridge, he had ‘drunk deep in poetry’, which he revered as ‘the purest and richest spring of all’. He was never happier than when busying himself, in his phrase, ‘with the inner rites of Phoebus Apollo’. The god of his idolatry was the Roman poet, Virgil. Harvey was especially drawn to the Eclogues and the Georgics in which Virgil, a Mantuan yeoman’s son, celebrates the beauties and virtues of the country life. The Kentishman read these poems in a state of rapture; coming to a more than usually magnificent passage he would throw the volume across the room with the exclamation ‘He hath a devil!’ Harvey would frequently quote Virgil, along with countless other classical authors, in his later writings on anatomy and physiology, which are themselves fine literary productions and models of rhetoric.

Harvey was drawn to philosophy too. The ethics course led Harvey through the problems, morals and politics of the fourth-century BC Greek philosopher Aristotle, with occasional detours to Pliny and Plato. During it, he was taught that the good life consisted of virtuous activity in the world, conducted under the dictates of reason. Logic, on the other hand, was ‘the art of directing the mind in the acquisition of knowledge’; it taught Harvey the definition, naming and classification of things. Here again, the master was Aristotle, who dominated the landscape of the Renaissance imagination, with his famous ‘four cause’ method of classification. The ‘material cause’ related to the substance an object was made of (i.e. a chair is made of wood); the ‘efficient cause’ focused on its action, and the agency by which its movement was brought about (i.e. a football moves because it is kicked); the ‘final cause’ was its ultimate purpose (i.e. an acorn grows because it wants to be a tree); its ‘formal cause’ related to the type of thing it was (i.e. Elizabeth was a woman.)

Having classified an entity using the four causes, Harvey was then taught to build up propositions concerning it, by means of a syllogism. A syllogism begins with a universal major premise, is followed by a minor premise, and ends with a conclusion:

All men are mortal.

Socrates was a man.

Therefore Socrates was mortal.

Harvey learned how to move his thoughts in accordance with these leaps of logic. He was taught that only conclusions reached via syllogisms had philosophical validity, just as objects could only exist in intellectual terms if their four causes were fully explained.

The quadrivium introduced Harvey to music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, and, in the process, to the principles of metaphysics, physics and mathematics. Metaphysics focused on ‘being’ and universal principles; physics concentrated on ‘the principles of objects in motion’, and investigated their qualitative aspects. Some branches of mathematics, such as arithmetic, concerned quantity and measurement instead; as a result, mathematics was often, as one student noted, looked down upon and hardly considered to be an ‘Academical study, but rather Mechanical; as the business of Traders, Merchants, Seamen.’

It was the duty of Harvey’s tutor George Estey to oversee his studies. Conscientious tutors devised detailed programmes for their charges, yet many students complained of having ‘none to direct [them], in what books to read, or what to seek, or in which method to proceed’. Estey may have left the intensely independent Harvey to his own devices.

University lectures at the Old Schools were compulsory, absence being punished with a twopenny fine. Usually beginning at 7 a.m., they lasted an hour. The gowned and capped students were required to remain ‘quiet and attentive’, but there was often a low murmur of noise and fidgeting in the wooden benches, especially in winter, as the students endeavoured to keep warm, and awake, in what was essentially an unheated barn. The lecturer typically took a passage from a classical author, ‘glossed’ it by elucidating linguistic or philosophical obscurities, then discussed the various commentaries it had inspired over the centuries. Students took verbatim notes – no easy task on the coldest days, with their hands frozen stiff.

Harvey played a more active role when it came to the ‘declamation’, a species of essay the student read out to his tutor. A declamation could also be public, performed in the Old Schools in front of university dignitaries. Harvey would be given a question to consider – ‘Is spring the pleasantest season of the year?’, ‘Was Homer’s Penelope faithful?’ – and instructed to discuss it in ‘perspicuous, smooth, plaine, vivid, masculine’ Latin, embellishing his oration with illustrations and quotations from the classical authors.

A more argumentative and forceful style was required for the academic ‘disputation’ – a duel of words between a student who defended a thesis and several adversaries who offered objections to it, performed either in college or publicly at the Old Schools. Harvey had to dispute at least twice in public (once as defendant, once as opponent) before taking his Bachelor degree.

Public disputations began with a procession – the various disputants, accompanied by their tutors, walking solemnly from their colleges to form a line in front of the Old Schools. Harvey, leaving the Gate of Humility, made his slow progress southwards through the High Street, taking the first right down University Street and so under the arch of the Schools. The participants were then led into a vast hall inside the Old Schools by esquire bedells, dressed in tall hats and gowns.

As Harvey took his place at his designated stall the bell of the Old Schools rang one o’clock, then the bedell declared ‘Bona nova, Bona nova’ (‘Good news, good news’ – the entire affair being conducted in Latin). The vice chancellor sat down in his chair as Harvey, if cast in the defending role, ‘made curtsy’ to him (in three customary bows), as well as to his various opponents, saying ‘Gratias ago vobis’ (Thank you) to each. The vice chancellor recited a prayer and made a short speech, before the moderator (always a don) announced to ‘their highnesses’ the theses that would be disputed. The theses were posted on the door of the Old Schools at least eight days before the disputation to give the participants time to prepare. These might be anything from ‘The production of the rational soul involves a new creation’, to ‘The threat of punishment is a sufficient deterrent of crime’, all seven of the ‘liberal arts’ providing topics for discussion. The discussion of controversial political and religious subjects was, however, expressly forbidden under the Elizabethan statutes.

The moderator, having made his own general comment on the theses, asked the defending student’s tutor to make a speech on behalf of his charge; Estey spoke for Harvey. Meanwhile the bedell presented to the vice chancellor some Latin verses Harvey had composed on the theme of the theses, which served as an elegant introduction to the debate. Estey proceeded to raise potential objections to the theses – straw men that Harvey could dispatch easily, as a means of limbering up for the duel proper.

The first opponent (who had to be a member of a different college) then attacked one thesis, attempting to force the defendant into logical and rhetorical dead ends. While the participants should not, according to the moderator, become too ‘hot & fiery & fierce’, neither should they recite their arguments mechanically, but speak always with vigour and imagination. Colourful exclamations reverberated around the walls and ceiling of the Old Schools as the disputants had at each other. ‘I progress with my argument thus’ came the thrust; ‘You are not progressing, but merely shifting your ground’, the clever parry. ‘Tuo gladio jugulabo!’ cried the student who sensed victory – ‘Now I will slit your throat with your own rhetorical sword.’

For three hours the argument twisted and turned in the dank air, accompanied by the encouragement and applause of the audience. If the speeches became convoluted the moderators disentangled the rhetorical and logical knots; they also cut short tedious lines of enquiry. A disputation was also intended as entertainment, with local nobles, dignitaries and even the queen herself sometimes attending. At the end of the proceedings the vice chancellor would declare as winner either the defendant or the challengers. The victor would be cheered as enthusiastically as a triumphant fencer after a match, before being led out of the Old Schools in procession.

Circular disputations, held at college in chapel or hall, were less formal affairs, with a number of defendants and opponents standing in a circle, each student taking an argument up where his predecessor’s voice trailed off. Yet they could be equally heated. Many gentlemen objected to the discord and violence disputations inspired. In their view, the exercise encouraged litigiousness, and turned young men into ‘excellent wranglers – which art, though it may be tolerable in a mercenary lawyer’ was hardly the attribute of a ‘sober and well-governed gentleman’, whose aim was always to promote social harmony.

Harvey, however, stood on the side of the academic authorities, who believed that ‘disputations lead not only to knowledge of the truth, but also to promptitude, and to boldness in scholars’. He relished the rhetorical swordplay, becoming famous in later life, and perhaps even among his Cambridge peers, as a ‘wrangler’ of genius.

Harvey completed his arts course in the customary four years, graduating in 1597. He more than merited his degree. With an intellect ‘not to be held bound by the laws of a single discipline’ he took, a friend said, ‘the whole of Nature’, and the entire intellectual universe, ‘as his province’, reading beyond the bounds of the course.

From 1597 Harvey focused much of his attention on medicine, one of the ‘sciences’¹ he was now at liberty to study. The subject was in its infancy at Cambridge, the teaching conservative and second rate by continental standards. Still, Harvey was at the best college to study it. A physician and scholar of international renown, John Caius had established two medical college fellowships; he had also stipulated that the fellows organize regular medical disputations and an annual dissection in college. Because of a paucity of suitable corpses or sufficiently skilled practitioners, this statute was, however, largely ignored.

To ‘raise himself effectively from the ground’ and place ‘his head among the stars’ Harvey needed to master more medical knowledge than Cambridge had to offer. He appears to have embarked on an intense and sustained course of ‘private’ reading – private meaning individual rather than solitary. Only gentlemen could afford to live alone in college, their spacious and lavishly furnished rooms costing over a pound a year in rent. Harvey had to share a spartan room with his tutor and as many as three other students. The students studied and slept in an attic known as the cockloft, which was reached by a ladder from the tutor’s room below. In this tiny eyrie, the student had his own narrow hard bed and wooden study cubicle. Casements gave him a partial view of the quad, but offered no glass protection from the wind or the damp air that rose from the fens around Cambridge. Fireless, the loft was scarcely habitable in winter, when the student’s ink would freeze in its well.

The alternative was to read in the college library, a long white medieval room, with five windows on either side and a large window at the end. Walking through it, Harvey passed a series of wooden bays with lecterns, beneath which numerous chained leather volumes were shelved. Entering a bay, Harvey bent down to pick up a heavy folio volume, then placed it on the lectern in front of him; remaining standing he opened it, and began to read. The library was the quietest and one of the brightest rooms in the college. Yet, as the day waned, the gloom spread along with the cold, there being neither artificial lighting nor heating. Harvey, hunched over his book in the dwindling light, peering down ever more closely at the printed or handwritten words, might have struck any gentleman present as the very emblem of the book-fool.

A ‘book-fool’ from The Ship of Fools (1509).

Yet though Harvey may often have been seen reading at Cambridge, he was by no means a book-fool. He despised ‘bookish’ study divorced from experience, and frequently criticized pedants. It is easy to imagine him laughing at, and agreeing with, Michel de Montaigne’s (1533–1592) famous contemporary caricature of the block-headed book-fool. ‘When I ask him what he knows’, Montaigne remarked, ‘he asks me for a book in order to point it out to me, and wouldn’t tell me that he has an itchy backside unless he goes immediately and studies in his lexicon what is itchy and what backside.’

Harvey gained a scholarly reputation among Caius students by ‘devoting himself assiduously to his studies’. Overzealous students often set peers gossiping, and gentlemen laughing in scorn. It was rumoured of one young man that he ‘went not out of the College gates in a good while, nor (I think) out of his Chamber, but was in his slip shoes, and wore out his gowne and cloathes on the bord and benches of his chamber, but profited in knowledge exceedingly’. No such anecdotes of Harvey survive, however, his affable nature perhaps tempering his image as a ‘gown-man’.

There may have been a rule at Caius, as there was in the University Library, ‘that none tarry at one booke above one hour’. In that case, Harvey would have had to read hard, and with ferocious speed and concentration – something that came easily, no doubt, to the alert and eager young man. Students were advised to accompany their reading with ‘perpetual meditations, repetitions, recapitulations, reiterations’ and ‘deepe imprinting in ye memory’.

Harvey read the works of Galen with wrapt attention. His well-thumbed copy of the Greek physician’s Miscellaneous Writings (studied during a later period of his life and one of the few books from his library to have survived) attests to the concentration he lavished on the author. Students were encouraged to highlight difficult phrases, or matters of special observation in books – to literally mark an author’s words. ‘Doe it’, they were instructed, ‘with little lines under them, or above them … to the end that you may oftimes reade over these, until you be perfect in them.’ They were also urged to ‘gloss’ obscure sentences, writing out definitions in the margin in simple Latin. On some pages of Harvey’s Galen every sentence is underlined; on many pages he glosses a word or phrase from the text. He also made countless notes in the margins of the book, and some of his annotations are rather droll. At one point, Galen declares that learning is a superior attribute to social rank, being internal, rather than external to man. As an illustration of this idea Harvey scribbled the words ‘wooden leggs’ in the margin, vividly conjuring up the image of a man attempting to raise his status by ‘external’ means – i.e. walking on stilts. When he reached the end of the book, Harvey followed scholarly etiquette, by compiling a list of subjects of interest, as a sort of personalized index, for easy reference at a later date.

The college library was well stocked with Galen’s works, John Caius having bequeathed many of the Greek’s writings to the college. Caius had himself edited a Greek edition of Galen’s Anatomical Procedures during his spell as a student, and tutor, at the University of Padua in the 1540s. Exemplary Renaissance humanist, and devoted disciple of Galen that he was, Caius aimed to restore the pristine Greek original, the text having been corrupted over the centuries. It was a Herculean labour, but also a labour of love for Caius, who believed Galen to be virtually infallible. Caius’ edition, along with other Galenic texts in the college library, shrouded the Greek physician in an aura of what Harvey called ‘omnipotence’.

As he stood in Caius library, Harvey read Galen’s works with reverence and concentration, his beady eyes scouring them for passages of particular interest. He would transcribe these in his commonplace book, where he stored all the ‘best things out of an author’, for future use in declamations and at disputations. Later on, after a long day’s reading, when the light had faded, Harvey closed up the volumes he had been studying, set them back in their places, and walked out of the valley of the shadow of books.

1 The word ‘science’, meant ‘study’ in its broadest sense, and only acquired its modern signification of knowledge derived through experimentation and observation in the first half of the nineteenth century.