9. Private research (late 1610s–1620s): ‘A dog, crow, kite, raven … anything to anatomize’

DURING THE 1610S and 1620s Harvey was busier than most of his colleagues, his professional life a ceaseless cycle of activity. The ‘little perpetual mov[ement] Dr Heruye’ examined patients at St Bartholomew’s Hospital and often visited private clients in every corner of the city; he attended his lord and master the king as soon as he was summoned; he lectured, or transacted other official college business, at Amen Corner. Harvey’s small feet and hands were always in motion, like the thoughts that raced around his head.

Having completed his numerous duties for the day, Harvey rode back to his black and white timber-framed Ludgate house. He might have been expected to pass most of his evenings at home pleasantly in the company of his wife, or with friends. Harvey was an amiable if not exactly gregarious man, and most physicians would have required leisure after the arduous labours of the day.

And yet it was often when Harvey returned home in the evenings that his real work – the work he pursued with all the obsessiveness of his ardent nature – began. Having entered his house, we may imagine him bidding his wife good evening, giving instructions to his servants, changing into his everyday black doublet, and then making his way to the chamber he had set aside for his private studies.¹

On his way to the chamber, Harvey passed well-furnished rooms containing pictures, decorative hangings and chests full of linen. There was red damasked furniture in one of the rooms and a magnificent fireplace in another. Friends remarked on the simplicity of Harvey’s taste and lifestyle, yet he was obliged to furnish his house as became a physician and a gentleman, because his colleagues, and some of his patients, visited him there. Sweet wax candles illuminated his home, rather than cheap ‘stinking’ tallow candles; he slept on ‘gentleman’s sheets’ instead of the so-called ‘yeoman’s sheets’ used by his servants.

Harvey’s study contained a dissection table, on which his anatomical instruments lay. There was a clean white apron and a pair of gloves, left there by his servants, along with various anatomical books. Either within the chamber or more likely in an adjacent room, there was a vast menagerie of animals. Bottles and buckets containing toads, crabs, shrimps, whelks, oysters and fish of various kinds, lined the walls; there were lizards, tortoises, serpents, fowls, pigeons, geese, rabbits and mice scurrying around or lying lazily in cages and hutches. There may also have been larger kennels which accommodated Harvey’s collection of clamorous sheep, pigs and dogs, although many of these animals were presumably kept in his garden or at a nearby stables. It was a private zoo, a Noah’s ark of constant motion and confusion. On entering, Harvey examined the animals, selecting some as the subject of his investigations.

All of the animals found their way into Harvey’s published writings, which also contain references to ants, dogfish, sharks, tadpoles, crocodiles, ostriches, emus, pheasants, wolves, horses, goats and elephants. It would, of course, have been impossible for Harvey to have kept, and experimented on, every one of these species at his Ludgate home – obtaining and housing an elephant in London would not have been easy. Some of his animal references are clearly to experiments and observations mentioned in books he read. Yet he undoubtedly examined the overwhelming majority of the animals he referred to.

Procuring ‘mollusca unspecified, mussels, eels, barbell, tench, skate, stingrays, carp, herring, smelt, mullet’ was easy enough for Harvey. The populous Thames gifted London fisherman ‘trouts, breams, shrimps, herrings, eels, whiting, plaice, cods, mackerel’ and ‘sweet and fat salmons’ by the ton. Fishwives sold them live in Fish Street Hill, Thames Street and Knyght Ryder Street: ‘Turbot! All alive turbot!’ they cried, ‘Fish soles, oy, oy, alive! Alive, O!’ Harvey also wandered down to the river at Blackfriars’ Stairs, Powle’s Wharf, Broken Wharf, and Queen Hithe, to examine the catches of the fishermen; vessels brimful of fish vied for the best position at these water gates.

Harvey was well known among the watermen of the Thames, and they kept the doctor abreast of curious occurrences. One day they told him of the Thames swallows who ‘towards the end of the year, assemble in great numbers on the little islands of the river, and then submerge themselves within the water’; the men believed that they either turned into fish there or hibernated for the winter (the idea of bird migration was yet to be born). Harvey’s curiosity was piqued. He asked the watermen to bring him some of the submerged birds. Dissecting them, he examined their insides for ‘either warmth or motion’ but found their organs to be lifeless and cold.

Harvey regularly visited the butchers’ shops and slaughter-houses near Smithfield, to negotiate the purchase of warm-blooded animals and birds. For the horses, goats and sheep that prowled around his private zoo, he either went to Smithfield or had supplies sent up from family in Kent. On excursions outside the city he picked up everything and anything, living or dead, that happened to cross his path. Encountering a toad on a ramble he caught it up and stowed it away, or opened its belly there and then with a knife he always carried around with him. He often scoured the woods in search of ‘a dog, crow, kite, raven or any bird, or anything to anatomize’. Harvey also had the free run of the royal parks, Charles granting him ‘daily opportunity of dissecting’ the buck and doe there, ‘and of making inspection and observation of all their parts’. The king, Harvey boasted, ‘much delighted in this kind of curiosity’, and was ‘many times pleased to be an eyewitness’ at his physician’s anatomies.

When Harvey compiled his Lumleian lecture notes in a notebook in the mid-1610s, he designed for them a title page on which he transcribed the following quotation from Aristotle: ‘There is doubt about the internal parts of man, wherefore it is necessary to study in other animals those parts which bear a similarity to the parts of man.’ The words were a proud declaration of faith – Harvey’s private research would be Aristotelian. On the same page there was also a quotation from Virgil: ‘I begin with Jove, O Muses. All things are filled with Jove.’ This was a statement of Harvey’s broader aim as a natural philosopher – to discern and reveal the hand of God working within His creation.

Fabricius had shown Harvey what an Aristotleian research programme might consist of. The Paduan professor had endeavoured to produce a complete description of every bodily organ, examining it in isolation and identifying its Aristotelian ‘causes’. As those causes were displayed in diverse animal bodies, and as his definition of the organ had to be universally valid, Fabricius had cut up the carcasses of various animal species, including man.

Over the course of his illustrious career, Fabricius published the results of his investigations in volumes dedicated to the organs of ‘vision’, ‘speech’ and ‘hearing’; he also wrote monographs on the ‘respiration’, ‘generation’ and ‘motion’ of animals, building directly on the researches of Aristotle himself in these areas. The Italian never realized his dream of producing an Aristotelian map of the entire body, yet he was acknowledged as a European authority on the areas he managed to cover.

Fabricius’ approach seemed to Harvey to hold out the promise of yielding philosophically valid truth, as well as empirical knowledge, by combining inductive investigation based on the observation of the senses, and deductive Aristotelian reasoning. In his own work, Harvey solemnly vowed to ‘tread in the footsteps of those who have lighted me the way; in chief, of all the Ancients, I follow Aristotle, and of the later Writers, Hieronymous Fabricius ab Aquapendente, Him as my general, and this as my guide.’

Harvey now resolved to replicate and if possible extend Fabricius’ ‘Aristotle project’. He was determined to bring Padua to London, to reconstruct the theatre of the Bo in his Ludgate home. Just like Linacre and Caius before him, Harvey would transplant the Italian revival of learning to England. It is not known exactly when, or precisely why, Harvey embarked on his research programme, at considerable expense to himself, but it must have been sometime after 1610 when he had fully established his medical practice and achieved a comfortable degree of wealth. His insatiable curiosity and extraordinary ambition obviously inspired his decision. The yeoman’s son craved intellectual renown, now that he had secured social recognition. He dreamed of arriving at the point where he could boast that ‘there was nothing in nature encompassed in so great obscurity or so recondite that he could not immediately unfold an explanation’ of it.

As part of his research programme Harvey examined a set of specific organs and body parts in isolation, analyzing their structure, purpose and function in as many animals as he could lay his hands on. In investigating the anus, he compared those of fowl such as geese and ducks to those of smaller birds such as the hedge sparrow, woodcock, thrush and blackbird; he then contrasted the anuses of these birds with those of fish such as the stingray.

Harvey followed in the footsteps of his mentors Fabricius and Aristotle in another sense too – by investigating and writing extensively in his manuscript notebooks on respiration, motion and generation. He may well have begun his research project with these areas chiefly in mind, and then branched off into other topics, in preparation for his discussions of the major organs and body parts during his lectures. At a certain point Harvey decided to focus on the heart.

Here again Harvey’s intellectual guides were probably influential. According to Aristotle, the heart was the ‘foundation of life’, an all-important organ where blood was heated and became mingled with pneuma, the body’s life-giving spirit or soul – an idea Galen had echoed. Fabricius may, instead, have inspired Harvey’s decision because of his neglect of the heart. ‘After having dealt carefully with almost all parts of animals’, the Italian had, Harvey noted, ‘left only the heart untouched’ – the pupil could therefore complete his master’s work. Harvey probably also concentrated on the heart because of the anomalies revealed by the preliminary investigations he made into the organ, perhaps in preparation for his lectures, his observations appearing inconsistent, in several respects, with traditional Galenic views. And then there was of course the heart’s profound cultural significance, which prompted Harvey to examine an organ he regarded as the source ‘of all affections’, as the ‘God’ of the body and the citadel of the soul.

Over a series of evenings in the late 1610s and early 1620s Harvey attempted, through various ‘trials’ in his private research chamber, to finally settle the thorny questions he had touched on in his anatomical lecture on the heart, concerning the porous septum, the movement of the blood across the lungs, and the motion of the heart.

Harvey hauled the body of a hanged man on to his dissection table, doubtless with the help of a servant, anatomizing a cadaver being an enormous physical and practical challenge for one man. The corpse had been obtained through the auspices of the College of Physicians.

Having cut open the thorax and exposed the heart, Harvey tied (or ligated) the man’s pulmonary artery. Introducing a tube through the vena cava to the right ventricle of the heart, he injected a large quantity of water into it with great force. The right ventricle swelled violently, until it seemed that it would burst. Yet ‘not even a single drop’, he observed, ‘escaped through’ the septum into the left ventricle. ‘By my troth,’ Harvey concluded, ‘there are no pores, nor can they be demonstrated’ – he was now certain that the all-powerful Galen had erred.

Releasing the ligature from the pulmonary artery Harvey then attempted to drive water into the lungs in order to test Colombo’s notion of the pulmonary transit of the blood. After again injecting water into the vena cava, it almost instantly ‘shot forward, mixed with a large amount of blood’ out of the pulmonary artery and into the left ventricle. This convinced Harvey that blood passed ‘from the right ventricle of the heart, into the lungs, and from thence into the left ventricle’, via the pulmonary vein, just as Colombo had claimed.

Resolving the question of the movement of the heart – determining its active and passive phases – was a far more difficult proposition. The beating of the human heart could not be observed directly, but animals’ hearts could be laid bare during vivisections. Colombo, whose Galenic focus was exclusively on human anatomy, had been forced to open up the thoraxes of living dogs, sheep and rabbits in his attempt to settle the issue; the Aristotelian Harvey regarded such experiments as routine.

Harvey now reprised Colombo’s experiments in his private chamber, cutting up animals night after night, week after week, year after year. Yet after these bloody trials the physician still found the matter murky, being unable to ‘rightly perceive at first when the systole (contraction) and when the diastole (expansion) took place, by reason of the rapidity of the motion’ of the animal’s heart, which was ‘accomplished in the twinkling of an eye, coming and going like a flash of lightning’.

Observation was slightly easier when an animal’s ‘heart began to die and move faintly, and life is as if it were departing’. The organ’s motions then became ‘slow and seldom, and the restings of longer continuance’, as the heart ‘yields, flags, weakens’ and ‘lyes as it were drooping’. The movements of the flagging heart seemed to bear out Colombo’s idea that contraction was the active phase and expansion the passive. The motions were still not entirely clear to Harvey, however – nor indeed had they been to Colombo, whose account of the matter was at times ambiguous and obscure.

At some point in his investigations, Harvey’s Aristotelian approach offered him a crucial inspiration. As his aim was to investigate the heart in all animals, he turned from hot-blooded to cold-blooded creatures. Toads, serpents, frogs, snails and all manner of little fishes now went under his knife. Colombo had never thought to examine these species, partly because he was not interested in the anatomy of the lesser animals per se, and partly because he studied organs in their broader physiological context rather than in Aristotelian isolation. Like Galen and Vesalius, Colombo investigated the heart as part of the respiratory system; this meant that fish, which do not have lungs, bore no relevance to his researches.

To his intense excitement, Harvey found that the hearts of cold-blooded animals beat far more slowly than those of warm-blooded creatures, so their movements were much easier to observe. Harvey held up to the artificial light of his private chamber a jar that contained ‘a sort of very little fish, called in English a shrimp, taken in the River of the Thames’. Its body was transparent, ‘the outward parts nothing at all obstructing’ his sight, but acting ‘like a window’. With the aid of a magnifying glass, its heart could be seen slowly expanding and contracting. Gazing intently at the shrimp, Harvey was convinced that he saw the blood leaving the heart ‘through a pipe or artery’, when the organ contracted.

To investigate further Harvey brought various containers full of fish over to his dissection table. Removing one of the larger creatures (a cod or barbell) he laid it down on the table and cut open its writhing body to expose its beating heart. He observed that, in a state of contraction, the fish’s heart became smaller and narrower, as well as ‘whiter in the tightening’. Putting his finger on the heart during systole, he noticed that it became ‘relatively hard, like a muscle in contraction’. Harvey knew that ‘all muscles in active movement gain in strength, contract, change from soft to hard, and thicken’; he felt this to be equally true of the fish’s heart. Lengthy examination was impossible however, as the fish lay dead a short while after Harvey had cut it open, its tight white heart slowly turning into a flaccid chamber as it ceased to struggle.

Harvey also experimented on eels. Holding a wriggling eel down on the table, and tying its ends, he sliced it down the middle to reveal its heart. He then gouged the organ out with a blunt knife, as the heartless fish struggled violently and died. The bodiless heart continued to beat for a few seconds on the table; again, it seemed to become smaller, narrower and whiter in contracting. Harvey cut the organ up into little pieces and watched, enthralled, as the individual segments continued to beat to the same rhythm and in the same motion. What Harvey observed persuaded him that the heart was indeed a muscle whose active phase was contraction, not expansion as Galen had held. The Englishman was now sure that Colombo had guessed right, and he was equally sure that he could demonstrate this to others.

Buoyed up by his experiments on fish and eels, and having acquired from them what he believed to be a clearer understanding, Harvey returned, at some point, to his investigation of warm-blooded animals. He doubtless desired further confirmation of his conclusions; he also wished to investigate additional issues concerning the heart. Bringing a dog over to his dissection table, he tied it down, belly up, with the help of his servant. Exposing an animal’s beating heart without killing it was a very delicate operation; if ‘normal’ living conditions were to be preserved for as long as possible the lungs must on no account be collapsed. Harvey’s hands had to be steady and sure as he opened the thorax, bent back and broke the animal’s ribs and cleared away the fat surrounding the heart.

Harvey gazed down at the dog’s beating heart. What he saw appeared to confirm his idea of the blood’s movement in and around the organ. Blood seemed to enter the right side of the heart via the vena cava. When the organ contracted, it appeared, he thought, to ‘to drive out the blood as it were by force from the right ventricle, via the pulmonary artery into the lungs, and from thence to the left ventricle via the pulmonary vein’, thus completing Colombo’s ‘pulmonary transit’. The contracting left ventricle, meanwhile, seemed to ‘force blood into the aorta and so out into the rest of the body’.

To test this Harvey ligated the dog’s vena cava. ‘And here, wonderful to see, the pulmonary vein and pulmonary artery, along with the aorta’ suddenly became ‘empty of blood, and collapsed’, their liquid supply cut off. The vena cava, on the other hand, was ‘raised up with a great swelling; it beat on the obstructing barriers, vainly eager to break through’. Harvey then loosened the knots and ‘suddenly the blood rushed into the empty chamber of the heart’, and so through the pulmonary artery into the lungs.

Having established his conclusions regarding the blood’s flow to his complete satisfaction, Harvey turned his attention to the arteries. These vessels appeared to dilate ‘at the moment of contraction, impelled by the heart’, rather than of their own accord, as Galen had suggested. The heart’s contraction thus appeared to be the cause of the arterial pulse. Harvey tested this by ligating the aorta of the dog, which caused the pulse in that artery to cease, as well as an ‘enlargement’ and ‘swelling’ that ‘almost ruptured’ the left side of the heart. On releasing the knot, the flow of blood and the movement of the pulse in the aorta were immediately renewed. ‘The pulse of the arteries’, he concluded, ‘was nothing but the impulsion of blood.’

At some point during his researches Harvey decided to slice through a dog’s aorta at the moment of the heart’s contraction, in a bid to investigate the amount and speed of the blood that was expelled by the heart in systole. Taking a knife, he cut down through the large artery. The blood immediately gushed out with force, and in copious quantity, in a series of expulsions. The spurts came intermittently, when the heart contracted, or so it seemed to Harvey. In a few seconds the tortured animal gave up the ghost, and the blood eventually stopped sputtering out of the perforated artery altogether. Here was another extraordinary anomaly. Most anatomists, following Galen, believed that the heart ejected only a very small amount of blood into the arteries, where it was supposed to gently ebb and flow in all directions, just as it did in the veins.

Many years later the goddess Fortune, or perhaps the gods of learning, rewarded Harvey for his patient labours by offering him the opportunity to examine a remarkable subject.

One day, the curious medical case of a young nobleman came to Charles I’s ear. Apparently, as a child, the man had experienced a fall, which had caused a fracture in the ribs on the left side of his breast. A ‘great quantity of putrified matter’, as Harvey explained in his account of the incident, ‘had been voided out of the wound’, leaving the man with a wide gap open in his breast through which the movement of his lungs could, it was rumoured, be dimly perceived. His intellectual interest piqued, Charles dispatched Harvey to investigate.

Having explained to the young man the reason for his visit, Harvey ‘opened the void part of his left side, taking off that small plate, which he wore to defend it against any outward injury’. There he beheld ‘a vast hole in his breast, into which I could easily put my three Fore-fingers and my Thumb’. He soon perceived ‘a certain fleshy part sticking out, which was driven in and out by a reciprocal motion, whereupon I gently handled it in my hand (without offense to the Gentleman)’. Amazed ‘at the novelty of the thing’ Harvey touched the fleshy substance repeatedly, and became convinced that it was not the lobe of the lungs, as most people supposed. Rather, what he was touching and gazing down at was ‘the Heart and its Ventricles in their pulsation’. Harvey suddenly understood that he was realizing the dream dreamt by anatomists down the centuries, for neither Aristotle, Galen, Vesalius, Colombo nor Fabricius had ever seen or touched a beating human heart.

Harvey cleaned the wound then brought the young gentleman into the king’s presence. During the ensuing examination Charles placed his hand in the young man’s wound in order to touch his heart. His aim was to verify whether the heart, famed as the source of all feeling, was itself sensitive or deprived of sense. After testing the matter the king, along with his physician, concluded that the organ was incapable of feeling, ‘For [the young man] perceived not that we touched him at all.’

Then Harvey invited his master to peer down closely into the wound, taking especial ‘notice of the motion of the heart’ – evidently the crucial issue for the physician. He asked the king to observe that ‘the proper [i.e. active] motion of the heart is the Systole’, when the blood is expelled from the organ; after careful examination Charles concurred with Harvey’s conclusion.

And so the patient and lengthy observations Harvey had made on fish, toads and dogs had given him the clue to interpreting, and describing to witnesses, the movement of the heart of that most perfect animal, man.

1 Harvey was not the only natural philosopher of the period to dedicate a chamber in his house to private ‘research’, to use a modern term. It was not unknown for physicians to perform anatomies and autopsies in their private studies, or for those with alchemical interests to set up ‘laboratories’ there. Robert Hooke, the great experimenter of the later seventeenth century, used a dingy ‘workshop-cellar’ in his house, full of ‘odd utensils and lumber’. Hooke’s employer, the aristocrat Robert Boyle, constructed for himself a grand, temple-like ‘laboratory’ for his experiments, crammed full of marvellous devices, which was open to disciples and visitors.