Harvey in the 1650s. Afflictions have visibly diminished him into Shakespeare’s emblem of the penultimate ‘age of man’ – the ‘lean and slippered pantaloon’, as though the yellow bile in his body has turned black, the choler into melancholy.
15. Last years (the 1650s): ‘Shitt-breeches’
DURING THE CIVIL War, Harvey lost numerous possessions, and all of his research papers, when the Roundheads ransacked his London lodgings. ‘Of all the losses he sustained, no grief’, according to a friend, ‘was so crucifying to him as the loss of his papers, which for love or money he could never retrieve or obtain.’ These documents contained details of Harvey’s countless experiments on animals, as well perhaps as various draft treatises which he had hoped to publish.
Under the English Republic Harvey was classified as a ‘delinquent’ because of his close association with the executed king. He was banished, at the beginning of the 1650s, ‘to a distance of not less than twenty miles from London on pain of imprisonment’. Harvey was probably assessed for various forced loans by Parliament too, and compelled to hand over thousands of pounds. It was around this troubled time that Elizabeth Harvey died; Harvey mourned the loss of the woman who had been his ‘dear loving’ wife for more than forty years. Harvey also lost three of his brothers, perhaps as casualties of the political conflict or its aftermath. With their death, the close-knit Harvey fellowship was dissolved.
The private medical practice of the political exile was greatly diminished, as many of his patients had been prominent members of Charles’ court. In any case, Harvey displayed little enthusiasm now for medical work. When approached for advice or treatment, he would decline to help all but ‘special friends’.
When the republic eventually relaxed restrictions on Harvey’s movements, the widower elected to live a retired life with his brother Eliab in Bishopsgate, London. His days in Cockaine House, Broad Street, were passed in great physical discomfort. A martyr to the gout, friends remembered how Harvey would seek relief by sitting with his legs in a bucket of freezing water, on the roof of the house, ‘till he was almost dead with cold’. Then he would suddenly get up and ‘betake himself to the stove’ to warm them.
Harvey in the 1650s. Afflictions have visibly diminished him into Shakespeare’s emblem of the penultimate ‘age of man’ – the ‘lean and slippered pantaloon’, as though the yellow bile in his body has turned black, the choler into melancholy.
In 1652 Harvey’s sufferings became increasingly acute until one day (or so a friend’s story went) he sent for a physician friend. ‘Acquainting him with his intention to die by laudanum that night’, Harvey ‘desired he would come next morning to take care of his papers and affairs.’ Yet if Harvey did indeed swallow the opium, the dose proved insufficient to kill him.
As Harvey crawled painfully towards death there were some consolations. He took up the habit of drinking coffee, brewed in a special ‘Coffey pot’, thereby becoming famed as one of very first Englishmen ‘wont to drinke’ the ‘blacke as soot’ beverage. Physicians believed that the drink comforted the heart, aided digestion, alleviated the gout and fortified one against lethargy of the brain.
Harvey’s weakening heart is also rumoured to have drawn comfort and stimulation from a ‘pretty young wench’ whom he employed ‘to wayte on him’. Friends gossiped that he ‘made use of’ the girl at night ‘for warmeth-sake, and tooke care of her in his Will’. In that testament, which was compiled at this time, Harvey acknowledged with an annuity of £20 ‘the diligence and the service’ of one Alice Garth, who may be the woman in question.
The venerable natural philosopher, now in his seventies, derived solace too from the twin gods of his idolatry and ambition – worldly success and intellectual renown. We may recall here that two representations of the goddess Fortune were carved on the Gate of Virtue at Caius College, Cambridge – one goddess holding a bag of gold, the other a palm and a laurel wreath. These sculptures symbolized the college founder’s belief that it was only through wisdom, ‘and learning grafted in grace and virtue’ that men come to wealth and immortality.
Harvey was living testimony to the truth of this motto. Having dedicated his life to intellectual labour, he now reaped the rewards. Despite the best efforts of Parliament, the yeoman’s son, and unrepentant Royalist, clung tenaciously to his personal fortune of around £20,000. Part of this money he bequeathed to the College of Physicians, so that it could build a library and a museum at Amen Corner, to be named after him.
That noble building, done in the grandiose style of rustic Roman architecture Harvey favoured, was completed in early 1653. A white marble statue of Harvey, attired in his doctoral robes, greeted visitors at the entrance. An inscription beneath the figure proudly informed them that the benefactor of the buildings was the eldest son of Thomas Harvey of Folkestone.
At the official opening Harvey was elected president of the college. The ‘munificent old man’ an eyewitness reported, ‘gave thanks for the dignity’, which was tantamount, he said, to being elected ‘prince of all the doctors in England’ – a dangerous yet characteristic monarchical allusion. Harvey regretted, however, that he must ask ‘to be excused from the office’ on the grounds of ‘infirmity and age’.
Through his association with the college, and its magnificent buildings, Harvey hoped that his name would live on beyond his death, as a sort of second Thomas Linacre. In his will Harvey left the college some of the many lands he had acquired, with the instruction that the rent accrued from them fund an annual banquet. During the yearly feast a Latin oration was, he stipulated, to be delivered, commemorating all the benefactors of the college (himself included), and containing an exhortation to fellows to diligently study the mysteries of nature. Harvey also left to the college some books and papers from his library, in the hope that this would ensure their survival.1
Yet Harvey must have known that De motus cordis would be his true monument – the ‘son’, as one admirer described it, which the ‘childless doctor’ bequeathed to future generations. Writing to a fellow author Harvey had expressed the hope that his friend’s ‘little anatomical book’ would ‘live for ever and tell the glory of your name to posterity long after even marble has perished’. He surely harboured similar ambitions for his own volume. ‘Perish my thoughts’, he would tell friends, ‘if they are empty and … wrong … let my writings lie neglected. [However] if I am right, sometime, in the end, the human race will not disdain the truth.’
If ever Harvey expressed doubts about his posthumous fame, the numerous disciples who gathered around him in his twilight years would try to set his mind at ease. Sitting beside the grand old man ‘2 or 3 hours together in his meditating apartment discoursing’, these young men would remind him of the ‘tireless industry in the advancement of natural philosophy’ that had made him ‘the chiefest glory and ornament’ of both the College of Physicians and of his country.
Basking in the glow of their praise, Harvey would rouse himself momentarily to speak again with ‘admirable readiness’ and a ‘cheerful countenance’ of the work that had been the ruling passion of his life. Yet invariably he would soon lapse back into melancholy. How could he be happy? he asked his acolytes, employing his favourite body-politic metaphor, ‘when the Commonwealth is full of intestine troubles, and I myself as yet upon the high seas’. Even the memory of his circulation theory was often as wormwood to him. ‘Much better’, he would reflect, ‘is it oftentimes to grow wise at home and in private, than by publishing what you have amassed with infinite labour, to stir up tempests that may rob you of your peace and quiet for the rest of your days.’
Harvey’s theory had indeed stirred up a tempest in the world of anatomy, and provoked discord among the physicians, many of whom feared that it would revolutionize medicine.2 It also produced powerful philosophical and cultural vibrations. Having grown out of the prevailing culture and language of the time, it in turn exercised a profound influence on them. The theory encouraged radical ideas with regard to the body politic. Indeed, it was not without justice that in 1653 a poet addressed Harvey as the ‘disturber of the quiet of Physicians! [The] seditious Citizen of the Physical Common Wealth! Who first of all durst oppose an opinion confirm’d for so many ages by the consent of all.’ One wonders whether Harvey read these words and reflected on the role his theories may have indirectly played in the downfall of his king. In one version of the body politic, yeomen are assigned the role of the ribs, for they were regarded as ‘the king’s citadel, constructed so that the heart, might be protected like a king’; looking back, did Harvey consider that, in promoting his radical theory, he had unwittingly done his sovereign less than ‘yeoman’s service’?
Harvey had also unintentionally lent inspiration, and credence, to Descartes’ profoundly influential mechanical philosophy. The ailing anatomist was now celebrated as the great English prophet of Descartes’ clockwork universe. Through his explorations of the body’s interior, the poet Martin Lluelyn wrote, Harvey had unveiled mechanical workings that had been hidden to previous ages:
There thy Observing Eye first found the Art
Of all the Wheels and Clock-work of the Heart …
What secret Engines tune the Pulse, whose din
By Chimes without, Strikes how things fare within.
The long shadow of Descartes was often cast over Harvey’s conversations with his disciples, many of whom subscribed to the new philosophy, much to their mentor’s annoyance. When one acolyte asked him which philosophical books he ought to read, Harvey bid his pupil ‘goe to the Fountain head, and read Aristotle … and [he] did call the Neoteriques [i.e. the new theorists of the mechanical philosophy] shitt-breeches’.
In the early summer of 1657, with Cromwell ruling over the Commonwealth as Lord Protector, the seventy-nine-year-old William Harvey suffered a serious stroke. Apparently, he once again discussed suicide with his friends, but he began to sink so fast that such a step was deemed unnecessary. On the morning of 3 June at about ten o’clock, Harvey tried to speak but ‘found he had the dead palsey in his tongue’. Realizing what was to become of him he sent for his brother Eliab and his young nephews. When they had come up to him, Harvey mustered the strength to present to one of his brother’s sons ‘the minute watch with which he had made his experiments’, as a ‘remembrance of him’. Harvey then made a gesture to his apothecary ‘to let him blood in the tongue, which did little or no good … so he ended his dayes’.
And so William Harvey – dutiful son of the yeoman Thomas Harvey, and author of one of the most magnificent generalizations in what we now call the ‘history of science’ – humbly rendered, to quote his will, his ‘soul to Him that gave it’. It is fitting that his final moments should have featured both a watch – the symbol of the new mechanical epoch that had just begun – and an ineffectual attempt at bloodletting – the emblem of a Galenic age that was passing. Few men deserve to be regarded as the mainspring of that vast historical change more than William Harvey.
1 It did not. These items would be lost to the flames of the Great Fire of 1666, along with the college buildings and the statue of Harvey at Amen Corner.
2 Their fears proved to be unfounded. After the publication of De motu cordis, most physicians (Harvey included) continued to use therapies such as bloodletting, as though the blood moved within the body in accordance with Galen’s theories, rather than in a rapid circle. Bloodletting in fact survived as a common treatment well into the eighteenth century. And while the circulation theory inspired one or two new medical treatments, such as blood transfusions, these were dismissed as worthless by most physicians and by Harvey himself.