Circulation

AS HARVEY TOILED away on his opus, images of the city around him crowded into his mind, just as the sounds of London must have filtered into the room in which he sat at his task. His writing was open to quotidian, as well as to intellectual and cultural, influences; the genius loci of seventeenth-century London presided over his treatise.

In one section of his work, he recalled having gazed on, fascinated, as the butchers in and around Smithfield went about their bloody business. ‘In killing an oxe’, he noticed, the butchers ‘cut the jugular arteries’, while the animal was still alive, in order to ‘drain out the whole mass of blood in less than a quarter of an hour, emptying all the vessels’. This was evidence, Harvey claimed, that the heart muscle, in forceful contraction, evacuated blood from the body. If the butchers made the mistake of knocking the ox dead with a blow to the head, it was impossible, he noted, ‘to draw from [the ox] above half the mass of blood’.

We may think of Harvey hurrying through London’s maze-like streets during the period in which he penned his treatise, observing everything, allowing numberless details of city life to permeate his prose. In notes written around this time he described the child on Holborn Bridge who had a beard only ‘on the one cheek’; a beggar behind Covent Garden with a hernia ‘bigger than his belly’. He evoked the boys ‘leaping’ and ‘hoping’ as they played football in Smithfield, along with the passing gentry and tradesmen who gathered round to watch their boisterous delights.

Harvey plundered the city’s streets of imaginative analogies for microcosmic features and processes. One day on his rambles he came across a horse drinking water at one of the city’s pools, and noticed how its neck muscles made a curious sound as they drew up the liquid. ‘The water is sup’d down into the belly,’ he wrote afterwards, the process ‘yielding a certain noise and pulse. In the same way,’ he reflected, ‘whilst some portion of the blood is drawn out of the veins into the arteries, there is a beating which is heard within the breast.’

In Harvey’s writings, the city itself is transformed into a vast body. On one occasion his professional duties took him from St Paul’s Cathedral to Leadenhall Market. As he made the short journey he noticed that though he was walking down a single long thoroughfare (‘from Powles to leden hale one way’), the roads were called ‘buy many names [such] as cheape powtry [Cheapside and Poultry]’. This reminded him of the way the intestine formed a single channel within the body, but was comprised of sections differing in ‘substance, shape and name’, such as the duodenum, colon and rectum.

The city-body metaphor, which is at least as old as Plato, was popular in Harvey’s period. London was often compared to a gluttonous body ‘grown great’ with overpopulation and overindulgence. Thomas Dekker, an extravagant and popular prose stylist of the period, ‘anatomized’ London’s sick and ‘bloated body’ in his writings; John Stow, the great Elizabethan London topographer, divides the city into separate parts in The Survey of London (1598), as though conducting a detailed dissection.

If London became a body in Harvey’s mind, it was also transformed into a heart. Here too, he drew on a commonplace of the time. The ‘lion-hearted’ Henry VIII had called London the ‘heart of the Kingdom’. The Jacobean dramatist Thomas Middleton noted that it stood ‘in the middle of the land’, thereby occupying ‘as in the body, the heart’s place’. London was, it was said, the first organ in the commonwealth to receive life, from the presence of the king and his government there; by the same logic it would also be the last organ to die. Dekker feared that the city’s death was imminent, Westminster, the city’s administrative ‘heart’, having become attenuated by greed. That organ was now so enfeebled, he complained, that it was unable to carry out its function of governing – it could no longer ‘stirr uppe’ the city’s ‘bloud’ and so maintain its health.

Harvey’s theory was unusual within the anatomical and physioogical tradition, as it emphasized the rapidity of the flow of the blood around the body. The etymology of cor, the Latin word for heart, was, Harvey believed, currere – something which ‘perpetually runs’ or is in ‘constant motion’. In evoking the quickness of the blood’s flow, and the rapid throbbing of the heart, Harvey’s prose resembles that of social commentators who described the traffic coursing through the veins of England’s capital city. The flow of people and four-wheeled traffic within late Elizabethan London was unremitting, as Stow pointed out. There were now numberless ‘cars, drays, carts, and coaches – more than hath been accustomed … the world runs on wheels with many whose parents were glad to go on foot.’

Yet any obstruction to the frenetic flow of people and traffic was regarded by the city authorities as unwelcome and unhealthy. London’s governors compelled citizens to keep the streets unblocked; they were obliged to clean the roads in front of their houses, and were forbidden to deposit dung there. Large-scale traffic projects were also undertaken. Newgate had, according to Stow, been built with the express purpose of facilitating the flow of traffic within the city, allowing ‘men and cattle, with all manner of carriages, to pass more directly from Aldegate, through West Cheape by Pauls on the north side; and from thence to any part westward over Oldbourne bridge, or turning into Smithfielde, to any part North’. Harvey saw the traffic flowing freely beneath Newgate as he passed it on his weekly journey to and from St Bartholomew’s Hospital in Smithfield.

London was the beating heart of England so far as trade was concerned. The city, as one seventeenth-century economic commentator put it, ‘gathered commodities’ from the provinces and from foreign lands, then ‘dispersed them from thence into the country’. As such, London was ‘the source’ and ‘spring’ of all ‘rivers of trade’ in England: ‘all the weight of [English] trade falles to this centre, & comes within the circuit of this circle’.

Harvey knew all about the rapid and constant flow of trade within the kingdom (from circumference to centre, and then back to circumference again). Five of his six brothers were well established in business. Daniel Harvey, the fourth of Thomas Harvey’s sons, purchased and then transported all the tin mined in Devon and Cornwall to the London market. He also imported cloth, silk and ‘black velvett’ from Aleppo, Constantinople, Genoa and Hamburg. In the English capital he sold these goods for a tidy profit to men who in turn distributed them throughout the country. Daniel became wealthy, and with money came renown: he was one of the dedicatees of Lewis Roberts’ popular manual of trade The Merchants Mappe of Commerce (1638). Interestingly, William Harvey was another dedicatee, which suggests that he too was interested in trade, at least from a theoretical point of view; perhaps he dabbled in it also, speculating in commodities and on the money markets.

In Harvey’s treatise, the heart is described as gathering and dispensing blood within the body, via and the veins and the arteries, in the same way that London collected goods and money from the country, only to return them there. Harvey argued that for health to be preserved, there had to be a constant ‘activity’ of the heart, as well as a ‘vigorous circulation of the blood’. On no account should either the organ or the liquid become ‘sluggish’, ‘congested’, ‘slowed’ or ‘constricted’. This is strongly reminiscent of the recommendations made by contemporary economists concerning trade within the kingdom.

Medieval London had been serviced by a series of rivers and brooks. According to Stow, Walbrooke ran ‘through the midst of the city, serving the heart thereof’. There was also a ‘bourn, watering the part in the east’, as well as a network of fountains, wells and pools. ‘Besides all which, they had in every street and lane of the city divers fresh springs; and after this manner was the city served with sweet and fresh waters.’

These wells and waters had diminished by Stow’s and Harvey’s time, and had also become clogged up with refuse which typically included ‘dead Hogges, Dogges, Cats, Beasts’ guts’. Recognizing that a free circulation of fresh water was essential to the city’s health, the authorities sought ‘other means to supply the want.’ These included an intricate network of cisterns, fountains and conduits – a word generally used to denote the lead pipes that carried water to the fountains, but which was sometimes used as a synonym for the fountain itself.

As clean water was precious, illegal attempts were often made to divert it from the main pipes. The College of Physicians may have been among the offenders. The city authorities complained about a ‘quill [a pipe the width of a swan’s neck] of water taken by the College, which had been fraudulently cutt by [its] plummer’. They declared that the fellows either had to prove their right to the quill, or would have to construct at their own cost a pipe that would provide twenty-four gallons of water per day along with a cistern large enough to receive it. The college reacted angrily to the accusations, and its trusty delegate William Harvey was dispatched to the Star Chamber to settle the dispute. In investigating the affair, Harvey must have learned a fair deal about the city’s waterworks.

There was a cistern close to Harvey’s home in Ludgate, the water being carried there by lead pipes from Paddington. It was, according to Stow, ‘garnished with images of St Christopher on the top, and angels lower down, with sweet sounding bells before them, whereupon, by an engine placed, the divers hours of the day and night chimed such an hymn as was appointed’. ‘The poor’ of the area drank from it while rich families, such as the Harveys, used the water to ‘dress their meats’ – indicating its indifferent quality.

‘London’, an observer wrote, has ‘good veins in her body … [and] good blood in her Veins, by those many Aqueducts, Conduits, and conveyances of fresh waters, to serve for all uses.’ This common comparison transplanted the ancient parallel between rivers and the blood vessels to a new artificial context. John Donne, ever a conduit for the spirit of his age, had spoken in a sermon of the ‘conduits and cisterns of the body’ which house its blood.

Harvey used the metaphor to great effect in his writing, comparing the heart and its vessels to the man-made waterways within the city. The vena cava, he remarked, opened ‘into the heart just as into a cistern’ – suggesting that the blood poured into it, like water from lead pipes. The organ indeed functioned, according to Harvey, exactly like one of the ‘fowntayns [and] conduits’, which he saw all around him.

Diverting the course of a river, or conveying water via lead pipes to cisterns, was often compared to a natural process, one commentator likening the pipes and conduits of the city to ‘rivulets’ and ‘springs’. Yet the capital’s water system was of course an ‘ingenious fabrick’, as Stow called it, a ‘Herculean work’ of artifice, heavily reliant on mechanical devices.

In 1582 the Dutch hydraulic engineer Peter Morice had built a huge waterwheel on the north arch of London Bridge. A series of water pumps attached to it squirted a jet of water as high as the steeple of the nearby Church of St Magnus Martyr. These pumps propelled the water from the wheel towards Laurence Poultney, where a fountain was constructed. A similar device was built in the sixteenth century at Bygot House, just to the west in Queen Hithe, a stone’s throw from Harvey’s home. Bevis Bulmar had, Stow recorded, constructed an engine in that building ‘for the conveying and forcing [i.e. pumping] of Thames water to … the middle and west parts of the city’.

Pumps had been used in Europe for centuries to drain and irrigate arable land, as well as to raise water out of mines. During Harvey’s lifetime, they started to be built in the ‘engins’ used by firefighters. In the early seventeenth century John Bates described, in his Mysteries of Nature and Art, one such device ‘which being placed in water will cast the same with violence on high’. In Bates’ homely English, the valves inside this pump are referred to as ‘clacks’ – pieces of ‘Leather nailed over any hole having a peece of Lead to make it lie close, so that ayre or water in any vessel may thereby bee kept from going out’. Clacks were built into wind and water bellows as well as water pumps; opened by the upward or downward movement of wind or water, the purpose of the clack was to regulate its flow.

Fire pumps shown in Salomon de Caus’ 1615 volume Les raisons des forces mouvantes. ‘There are two valves in the pump,’ de Caus wrote, ‘one below to open when the handle is lifted up and shut when it is down, another to open to let out the water.’

As Harvey penned his treatise, his mind moved in a perpetual process of analogy, seeking out similarities, sympathies and correspondences between the microcosm and the macrocosm. Sometimes, and probably without any particular intention or philosophical consideration in mind, Harvey likened the insides of the body to artificial devices. Thus, discussing the movement of the heart, Harvey first compared it to the action of the neck muscles of a horse as it swallowed water. To elucidate the idea further he then used the parallel of ‘that mechanical device fitted to firearms in which, on pressure of a trigger, a flint falls and strikes and advances the steel, a spark is evoked and falls upon the powder, the powder is fired and the flame leaps inside and spreads, and the ball flies out’.

While scribbling away, Harvey’s rapid train of thought, and the links of his language, carried him irresistibly to idea that the heart worked like a set of water bellows. ‘From the structure of the heart’, he wrote, ‘it is clear that the blood is constantly carried to the lungs and into the aorta as by two clacks of a water bellows to rayse water.’ Harvey was suggesting that the heart’s valves (the ‘little doors’ located at the base of the pulmonary artery and aorta) act like clacks, preventing the flow of blood back into the heart and facilitating its journey out of the organ.

Harvey must have seen these ‘clacks’ in action in water or wind bellows. In the description of the lungs he made during his Lumleian lectures, he had remarked that ‘respiration occurs in two ways’ as ‘in two sides of bellows; the upper part in the bellows is where ye clack’. This parallel between the valve and the clack in a set of bellows was novel; so too was the implication that the heart was a sort of machine that maintained pressure within the blood vessels. Tradition taught that the arteries had an active ‘pulsative force’, but to Harvey the blood vessels were passive, like the lead pipes that conveyed pumped water into London’s cisterns. The heart was the machine that carried out all the work.

And indeed, perhaps Harvey was already thinking of the heart as a kind of pump. ‘When you cut off an arterie’, he would write some years later, clarifying the ideas of his treatise, ‘you observe that the flux’ of the blood is ‘continuall; though it be sometimes nigher, sometimes further.’ He compared this to ‘water’ that ‘by the force and impulsion of a spout, is driven aloft through pipes of lead … [with] all the forcings of the Engine’, which was continual though of increasing and decreasing ‘vehemency’. Harvey probably had in mind here a water pump such as that designed by Bevis Bulmar. On another occasion, when he described the same phenomenon, he seems to have been thinking of a fire engine. The ‘blood spurts out’ of the artery, he wrote, ‘as if spurted out from a syringe or piston pump’.

Following the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, William Harvey believed that the immortal gods were present everywhere, which was to say that ‘nature is nowhere wont to reveal her secrets more openly than where she shows faint traces of herself away from the beaten track’. Important lessons could be learned from apparently inconsequential objects and events; inspiration could be found in everything, including the latest developments in trade and technology.

The city around Harvey fed and fired his imagination as he wrote; London got under his skin, and permeated his blood vessels. Its rush and push entered his head and the relentless and repetitive rhythms of his prose. Always ‘hott-headed’, according to a friend, Harvey’s ‘thoughts working would many times keep him from sleeping’. When his rapid reflections tortured him with insomnia, Harvey would ‘rise out of Bed and walk about his Chamber in his Shirt’. At other times he paced round and round, tracing circles on the roof of his London house. Harvey’s mind was synchronized with London time; if his thoughts never slept, neither did the city ever find complete rest. Even in the quietest hours, Harvey saw activity in the street as he gazed down from the rooftops – drunken revellers wandering home, shouting ‘knave, rogue, coxcomb’ at each other; horses and carts bringing produce up from the country to London’s markets; servants rising before the sun.

And if Harvey was a man who discovered inspiration in everything, then who is to say that he did not tap into that reservoir of personal memories, which no doubt filled his mind on sleepless nights, when he sat down to work on his treatise? At many earlier stages of his life, he had encountered a host of suggestive circular symbols and processes. There was the circulatory system of goods and letters that formed the basis of his father’s business; Cambridge’s circulatory river system (in the south, the Cam resembles the city’s vena cava, bringing water, people and goods, to its beating heart; in the north the river turns into an aorta, carrying liquid away from the city); the circular botanical gardens and anatomical theatre at Padua; the images of religious hearts Harvey may have seen in the city’s cathedral; and the circular disputations he had participated in there. There is also a suggestive symmetry between Harvey’s idea of the blood’s fast, continuous motion, and the perpetual movement of Harvey’s body and mind, often remarked on by his friends.

Caius Court at Cambridge offered possible inspiration too, not only through its circulating air. In the court there was a pump which servants used for washing and from which the students drank. Pushing down hard on its metal handle generated enough pressure to draw water up through the valve or ‘clack’. Even this simple device may have offered the shadow of a crucial suggestion to a mind so fertile in recognizing resemblances.