4. Paduan studies I (1599–c.1600): ‘Fair Padua, nursery of the arts’

ON 4 JULY 1599 Harvey left Caius for the long summer vacation. Some months later Harvey asked the college for permission to remain absent from the university beyond the beginning of the next term. He was suffering, he said, from a serious illness and required time and isolation to recover fully, doubtless at his family home in Kent. The illness may have been malaria, as Harvey would later complain of having been afflicted, at some point in his youth, by the ‘ague’ and by a ‘tumour’ on the liver – two symptoms of the disease. Harvey eventually returned to Caius on 27 October, but by then he had evidently made up his mind to leave university for good.

Harvey’s illness may have been a factor in his decision to ‘go down’ from Cambridge, malaria and other serious diseases being pervasive in the damp Fenlands. Yet it is more likely that he chose to leave before completing his medical degree for academic reasons. The statutes of Caius permitted students of medicine to finish their studies on the Continent, in Montpellier, Bologna or Padua, which boasted far more prestigious schools of medicine than Cambridge. Any Englishman wishing to place ‘his head among the stars’ of learning, and who aimed at raising himself from the ground through professional success as a physician, could not afford to linger on his intellectually infertile native ground.

No doubt after consulting his father, who must have felt confident enough in his son’s abilities to fund his further studies and travels, Harvey selected Padua University. His choice may have been influenced by an exposure to the works of Vesalius, who had taught in the Italian city; the famous modern anatomical school the Belgian had founded at the University was a Mecca for medical students throughout Europe. Another consideration may have been that Padua was John Caius’ alma mater.

On 30 October Harvey left Caius. We do not know if he made his exit via the Gate of Honour, but he had certainly earned the right to do so, having taken his arts degree back in 1597. He was worthy of the honour too, in a broader sense, as few Caius students could have stuck more unswervingly to the path of assiduous study, humility, virtue and wisdom symbolized in the college’s layout, than William Harvey.

The twenty-two-year-old embarked on his journey to Italy in the spring of 1600, travelling the short distance from Folkestone to the port of Dover. When Harvey showed his pass, the governor singled him out from a party about to board the boat for Calais. ‘You must not go’, the governor said, ‘but must be kept prisoner.’ Harvey desired to know for what reason he was detained. ‘Well,’ replied the governor, ‘it is my Will to have it so.’

The packet boat on which Harvey should have travelled hoisted sail in the evening, leaving behind a smouldering Kentishman on the shore, where he was forced to spend the night. He regarded all such delays as ‘unjust’, ‘barbarous’ and ‘tirannous’; he was a young man in a hurry ever ‘greedy to be gone’. Any officials who obstructed him were ‘most base and evel people’, incapable of dealing ‘playnly and rowndly’.

During the early hours of the next day a terrible storm ensued and the packet boat capsized. All of the passengers (among them many of Harvey’s acquaintances) were drowned. When the tragic news reached Dover the doctor sought out the governor to ask him why he alone of the company had been detained and thereby saved. After all, Harvey was ‘unknown to the Governor, both by Name and Face’. ‘Two nights previously’, the governor said, ‘I saw a perfect Vision in a Dream of Doctor Harvey, who came to pass over to Calais; and I was given a warning to stop you.’

Harvey often told this story to his acquaintances, ascribing his good fortune to God’s providence. Yet as well as illustrating his piety, the tale – and Harvey’s fondness for telling it – also suggest a man who believed that he had been marked out for greatness.

Apart from the desire to complete his medical studies abroad, Harvey ‘thought’, according to a friend, ‘that he should [also] travel … in the hope of acquiring thereby … teaching and wisdom … after the manner of the ancient philosophers (as they say about Plato and Pythagoras)’. Travel was moreover regarded as a social education for any young man aspiring to genteel status. To these ends, Harvey spent a few months visiting France and Germany before journeying down to Padua, having been supplied with the necessary funds by his father.

Along with money, Thomas probably furnished his eldest son with advice. Italy was notorious as the great continental market for gambling, drinking and whoring; the place where, it was popularly believed, an Englishman learned ‘the art of atheism (synonymous, for the Elizabethans, with Catholicism), of epicurizing, of poisoning’; he became proud in demeanour, prolix and pretentious in speech, depraved in morals, and above all grasping, calculating and two-faced. The strict yeoman patriarch had no desire to see Harvey return to him as an inglese italianizzato (Italianized Englishman).

Yet Thomas would also have known that Italy was the cradle of the new humanistic learning. Ever since the thirteenth century, its scholars and artists laboured to restore, emulate, and even to surpass the philosophical wisdom and cultural achievements of the classical world (that wisdom having been locked up in so many ancient texts that had been recently recovered, and shorn of their interpolations). In The Taming of the Shrew, first performed in the 1590s, Lucentio enters Padua for the first time in a state of euphoria, having finally satisfied his great desire ‘To see fair Padua, nursery of the arts’. He resolves to ‘plunge him in the deep’ philosophical waters, ‘And with satiety … quench his thirst.’

Padua was the intellectual capital of the Venetian Republic and one of the jewels of north-east Italy. Padua’s historical heart, situated on the most westerly of the three tiny islands that comprised it, beat very quickly. Every day hundreds of tradesmen and farmers flooded the city’s vast market squares and jostled with noblemen and students in the labyrinthine streets. The clothes of the nobility must have dazzled Harvey with their colourful splendour: the men wrapped themselves up in long blue or red silk mantles; the women carried jewel-encrusted gloves and fans, and dyed their hair blonde, after the Venetian fashion. They were paraded around the piazzas in sedan chairs, by liveried servants, as though they were living works of art.

Attire denoted rank and profession. Students, immediately recognizable by their black gowns, were placed within the social hierarchy according to the status of their families. Whenever representatives of different classes met on the pavement, by law the social inferior was obliged to step down into the road. Stepping down was a serious business, in part because it was such a dirty one. Goats and cows ate and defecated in the highways, and citizens diluted their excrement by micturating everywhere, especially near the government buildings.

Padua University was known locally as ‘Il Bo’ (the Ox), having been built on the site of a famous fifteenth-century inn whose sign was an ox’s head. The transformation of the inn, and surrounding buildings, into the magnificent Palazzo del Bo was the work of a century; the finishing touches were still being put to the facade in Harvey’s time.

The facade of the Palazzo del Bo c. 1600.

Where the gates of Caius symbolized moral qualities, the entrance of the Bo was an eloquent emblem of temporal power. Students walking beneath the arch were watched closely by the animal perched on top of it – the lion of St Mark, symbol of the Venetian Republic’s century-long hegemony over Padua. The winged lion had reason to be watchful as the university was the alma mater of the sons of those Venetian aristocrats whose names were written in the city’s famous golden book. The future rulers of Venice had to be protected from harm, as well as from any form of political radicalism that might disturb the legendary harmony of La Serenissima, the ‘most serene’ Republic of Venice.

Venetian sovereignty gave the university great freedom in religious matters. A bitter rival of Rome, the republic ensured that the Vatican had limited influence over the institution, which was, in consequence, extremely tolerant of non-Catholics. It had offered a safe haven to English Protestants during the turbulent reign of ‘Bloody’ Mary, and attracted Protestants and Jews from Northern Europe. Among its 1,500 members there were it was said ‘more students of forraine and remote nations then in any one University of Christendome’.

Students were organized into their various ‘Nations’, each of which had a representative consiliarius (councillor). This was a position of some influence in a university run entirely by the students. University statutes had to conform to the broader laws of the republic, yet within those limits students could determine the daily working of the institution, devising their own courses, selecting and paying the professors. The choice of tutors was often inspired: Vesalius had taught there, and Galileo Galilei was occupying the chair of mathematics when Harvey arrived.

Soon after his arrival, in the summer of 1600, Harvey paid a mandatory visit to the councillor of the English Nation. Entering the main gate of the Bo, he passed into the cool shade and calming quiet of the recently built sand-coloured courtyard, which had a double loggia held up by Doric and Ionic columns.

The English councillor organized Harvey’s matriculation, and advised the freshman where to find lodgings. On his limited budget, Harvey could either reside with a professor such as Galileo, who had turned his home into a student hostel, or share a large room with another student, just as John Caius had done with Vesalius. Either way, his room would have been in one of the tall narrow buildings of the historical centre; cramped, dark and fireless, its windows were covered only with linen sheets. Harvey’s landlord provided board along with lodging. The food was probably of limited quality by the luxurious standards of the Veneto, but the variety and plenty of the cheap fruit and vegetables, available all year round, made many simple meals seem like banquets to English students.

By law, Harvey’s landlord had to ensure that his tenant did not stash firearms in his rooms; he was, however, permitted to keep a sword. Officially sported only on ceremonial occasions, and with express permission from the university and the civic authorities, swords were in fact worn on a daily basis, and with good reason. Bandits patrolled the vaulted city arcades after sundown, where they preyed upon drunken students, robbing them of their money and clothes.

The students were, however, usually far more comfortable in the role of aggressor than that of victim. There are numerous reports of their rampaging through the city. One more than usually boisterous spree took place in Harvey’s time, when some students ransacked the shops of the historical centre, then broke into two monasteries. There they pummelled the monks and set all their chickens free. Immediately after the attack the monks and the shopkeepers joined forces in the public squares, drumming up reinforcements with the chant ‘Kill, kill, kill all the students!’

The various student nations often challenged each other to armed combat. One evening during this period, the Italians were out scouring the city for their hated enemies the French, when they happened upon some Germans, whom they mistook for their rivals. The Italians proceeded to attack the unsuspecting party with swords, spears and stones. After a few seconds, they realized their error, but decided to continue the onslaught on the grounds that the Germans were almost as odious as the French. The Italian students also frequently fought among themselves – the Bresciani against the Trentini, the Veronesi against the Bergamaschi, the Genoese often challenging the Venetians, their old enemy in numerous wars of the medieval period.

It is not known whether Harvey participated in these violent delights, but it is possible. It certainly seems likely that it was at Padua that the proud Englishman acquired his habit of wearing a dagger. Whenever roused to anger, the ‘very cholerique’ Harvey would, in later life, finger the pommel of the dagger, and ‘be apt to draw it out … upon every slight occasion’. The streets of Padua offered daily occasions for him to display such bravado, and to learn how to handle his weapon of choice; there provocative insults – ‘Ma, non vorrete mica attaccar briga?’ (‘Do you quarrel sir?’) – led quickly to the drawing of swords, followed by futile attempts to keep the peace – ‘Fermi, insensati, fermi! Giù le spade! Andate in pace, O!’ (‘Put down your swords. Part, fools! Go in peace.’)

Walking through the courtyard of the Bo, Harvey heard Flemish, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Magyar and Dutch, as well as the various Italian dialects. Yet along with the cosmopolitan accents and colours of this brave new world, there were also familiar shades and sounds. The English Nation was dominated by gentlemen who came to Padua to perfect the aristocratic arts of dancing, fencing, hunting and music, and to acquire that effortless sprezzatura for which Italians were famous. As at Cambridge, whenever an English gentleman approached on the pavement, Harvey halted, bowed low, and stepped down into the dung of the street.

English students such as Harvey, hailing from the lower classes, attended Padua University with an eye to a career back home, in the law, the church or the medical establishment. Yet he also aimed higher than membership of a professional elite, expressing to friends the hope of becoming a ‘second Aesculapius’ (the Roman god of medicine). He doubtless wished to emulate those English alumni of Padua who had won immortal renown for their intellectual achievements. Along with Caius, there was the physician Thomas Linacre, who also achieved fame as the editor of Galenic texts. These two men had been among the first scholars to import Italian humanistic studies into England.

As a statement of intent, only a few months after his arrival, Harvey put himself forward for the vacant position of councillor of the English Nation. His election campaign was a success. Although the opposition may have been limited, Harvey’s triumph testifies to his ambition and confidence, especially as aristocrats had often occupied the position previously.

In the autumn of 1600, Harvey removed his students’ gown and replaced it with a darker, more capacious mantle, the symbol of his newly acquired councillor status. In this garb, which must have threatened to engulf his tiny frame, he witnessed the matriculations and graduations of English students, fought their corner in the university senate, and cast their vote in the election of the all-important rector.

Councillors had to provide the university with a copy of their stemma, or coat of arms, to be emblazoned on the walls and vaults of the courtyard. Not being a gentleman, Harvey had no arms, so he set about designing his own elaborate symbol. Against a red background, a white right arm, issuing from the right, holds a white candle with a golden flame. Around the candle two green entwined serpents lean towards the fire.

Harvey’s stemma.

The serpents recalled Aesculapius, whose traditional symbol was a snake coiled around a staff; there was also a clear association with Caius College and its founder. The college’s coat of arms, derived from John Caius’ own emblem, contained two entwined serpents, representing the wisdom and grace through which students might come to scholarly immortality. The flame of the candle reinforces this idea of immortality, while also suggesting the illumination of the medical world through genius.¹

The academic year began on 18 October, St Luke’s Day, with solemn Mass in the cathedral attended by the bishop and various civic officials. This was followed a few days later by another cathedral Mass to mark the inauguration of the new rector. After the service, students huddled excitedly around the cathedral entrance. When the new rector emerged they fell upon him with violence and ripped off his multicoloured robes in a ceremony know as vestium laceratio. The rector sometimes tried to appease his student attackers by distributing silver coins in all directions, but rarely to much effect.

The medical degree at Padua placed great emphasis on practical experience. Students were obliged to shadow an experienced physician for at least a year, accompanying him on his visits to the sick in Padua’s San Francesco hospital. There the student learned the arts of diagnosis and prognosis, mastered the physician’s bedside manner and acquired the skill of compiling case notes. The eminently pragmatic Northern European students valued this aspect of Padua’s course: ‘We do not lack for lecturers at home,’ a councillor of the German Nation said, ‘and we also have books … It is the study of practice that has led us to cross many mountains and at such great expense.’

Harvey threw himself with customary ardour into the hospital rounds, examining patients closely, listening to their complaints good-humouredly, and acquiring an eagle eye for recognizing ailments. He recalled treating a Paduan boy whose penis had been bitten by a dog and which had afterwards retracted, in a way ‘usual in eunuchs’. To the rustic yeoman’s son, his genitals seemed to resemble those of ‘a monkey: two stones and no yearde’. Harvey also encountered a Venetian courtesan whose syphilitic ulcers slowly ate away at her stomach. The hospital was often packed with ailing courtesans, some of whom, one English visitor said, ‘even in the midst of their tortures, are not very modest, & when they begin to be well, plainely lew’d’.

‘There are’, an English student remarked of San Francesco’s patients, ‘the most miserable & deplorable objects to exercise upon, both of men & women, young & old.’ These wretched creatures underwent the tortures of ‘trepanning, launcing, salivating, sweating &c’ often at the hands of inexperienced students. ‘I observed [terrible] things’, Harvey remarked, ‘with much nausea, loathing and foetor’ adding that he had tried, but failed, to forget them. The noxious smells especially disturbed him, as he struggled to overcome a novice’s squeamishness.

Students were also taught the art of making up medicines from plants and herbs. In the south of the city, the first physick (or botanical) garden in Europe had been laid out in 1546 at the cost of the students in physick and philosophy, ‘that they might the more commodiously search into the nature & virtue of every Medicinal Herb’. Referred to as the ‘garden of simples’, because medicines were derived from plants in their natural or simple state, without additional concoction, the garden boasted a profusion of rare and colourful flowers and herbs, and long avenues of variegated trees.

The Botanical Garden at Padua (1654).

The garden had been designed in the shape of a perfect circle enclosed by a square. The circle was divided into quadrants, with fanciful circular-shaped beds inside: a graceful and complex play of geometrical forms and flourishing nature. A conduit had been built in the garden, so that the plants were furnished with a constant supply of water from the nearby River Bacchigliano.

Other aspects of the medical degree were more familiar to the Englishman. Academic exercises took the conventional form of disputations and lectures. The pomp that accompanied formal disputations was however, remarkable, even by Cambridge standards. As a prologue, the university statutes were read out in their entirety, in Venetian dialect, the interminable litany of laws being punctuated at intervals by the rasp of a chorus of trumpets.

The Paduan syllabus was largely based on the works of Aristotle, almost half of all lectures involving the reading, and glossing, of the Greek philosopher’s writings. Aristotle had always reigned supreme in the university. In 1306 Peter of Abano had been one of the first professors of medicine to teach him in the original language and one sixteenth-century English student described his Paduan tutors as ‘philosophers into whom the mind of Aristotle seems to have migrated’.

Cesare Cremonini (1550–1631), chief professor of philosophy at Padua, had inherited the mantle of ‘Aristotle’s reincarnation’ and was regarded throughout Europe as the true keeper of the flame. Harvey must have attended the compulsory lectures of the thin Italian, his bulbous head and dark, sunken eyes clearly visible to the Englishman from the front row of the low-ceilinged lecture hall at the Bo, where he sat beside the other councillors.

Cremonini’s lectures were popular because they were provocative. He loved to rail against the Jesuit order, blaming them for the demise of intellectual culture in Europe. Such bombshells surprised members of the English Nation, unaccustomed to hearing controversial pronouncements from the lectern. Cremonini’s style was as flamboyant as his subjects were incendiary; an author of poems and plays, and a prince of witty paradox in the dining rooms of the city, he brought students into a vivid understanding of Aristotle’s ideas through his elegant epigrams and dazzling rhetorical flourishes. Cremonini’s close personal identification with the Greek philosopher also facilitated his students’ understanding: he showed them what it meant to see the world through Aristotle’s eyes.

Aristotle had, Crenonini explained to the students, sought to identify the purposes or essences of the phenomena around him. ‘Men do not know a thing’, he quoted the Greek, ‘until they have grasped the “why” of it (which is to grasp its final cause).’ Students of natural philosophy² should, he declared, fathom the final cause of everyday, universal phenomena, such as a falling stone. In the ‘ordinary course’ of events, a stone fell because its ‘nature’ impelled it towards the centre of the universe – that was its ultimate purpose. If it was seen to swing in the air, some force must be impeding its natural progress, and that force should be investigated. Without understanding the ‘why’ of things, there could, Cremonini said, be no knowledge of philosophical value. Anyone who merely produced an account of the dimensions of a particular entity, for example, covered only its ‘material’ cause. Such data might allow one to speculate on the probable efficient, final or formal causes of a phenomenon, but it offered no philosophic certainty.

In this context Cremonini often poured scorn on Padua’s school of anatomy, made famous by Vesalius some sixty years previously. It is a sign of a weakness of the brain, he scoffed, for anatomists to gather myriad empirical details about the internal organs that are of no philosophic value. Anatomists, he said, boasted that their subject was ‘the foundation of all medicine’ but how could that be so when it was not grounded in the universal and rational principles of Aristotle’s natural philosophy? As an instrument for the other arts the study might have its place, but it was not a serious discipline in itself: ‘it is for the fool to collect trivia’, Cremonini thundered, not for ‘philosophical geniuses’ such as himself.

As a corrective to the empirical approach of the anatomists, Cremonini offered the vision of Aristotle, who had left a significant space for particulars, and inductive enquiry, within his writings, always placing it, however, within a broader philosophic context. That space gave natural philosophers considerable scope for investigation based on observation, allowing them to infer general, philosophically valid laws from individual instances. Only by treading this particular intellectual path, he claimed, could the University of Padua fulfill its destiny and revive the ‘glory of Athens’.

The English councillor in the front row of the hall could not have failed to be roused by this giddy rhetoric. He was certainly invigorated by the broader philosophical debates the lecturer outlined, and especially intrigued by Aristotle’s subtle and complex opinion on the relationship between singulars and universals. It was a stance that he would one day embrace as his own.

1 It is fitting that the golden flame, and the rest of Harvey’s emblem, is still visible today just above a column in a corner of the lower loggia of the courtyard of the Bo.

2 Natural philosophy, or the philosophic investigation of the workings of nature, was regarded as a theoretical rather than a practical branch of philosophy. It aimed to furnish explanations for natural phenomena, and to allow the student to reason about the universe in a philosophic way. It is often described as a forerunner of modern physics or natural science but its philosophic content renders such comparisons unhelpful. Paduan natural philosophy might be described as the investigation of the physical world through Aristotelian principles and methods. The first ever professor of natural philosophy was Cremonini’s predecessor at Padua, Jacopo Zabarella, an ardent Aristotelian. It is worth bearing in mind that, throughout his life, Harvey always identified himself as a natural philosopher.