Preface

IN 1628 WILLIAM Harvey published his revolutionary ‘circulation’ theory of the movement of the blood. The theory demolished centuries of anatomical and physiological orthodoxy, and introduced a radical conception of the workings of the human body that had profound cultural consequences, influencing economists, poets and political thinkers. Its impact on what we now call the ‘history of science’, and on general culture, was arguably as great as Darwin’s theory of evolution and Newton’s theory of gravity.

Harvey was one of the great heroes of the English Renaissance. He illuminated England with the flame of continental learning, having acquired the basis of his intellectual vision at Padua University. In the process, he became famous among his discerning contemporaries as the first Englishman to be deeply ‘curious in Anatomie’, and the first to make vivisections of ‘Frogges, Toades, and a number of other Animals’. He was also revered as the only man in history who lived to see his revolutionary idea gain wide currency.

Yet despite all this, Harvey is not as well known as many other English ‘scientists’ (to use a nineteenth century term), or indeed as many other notable English men and women of his period. His life, and the story of his quest to understand the movement of the blood and the function of the heart, deserve to be better known. Circulation tells that story – it is the biography of an idea as much as it is the biography of a man.

Born of Kentish yeoman stock, William Harvey had two great ambitions: worldly advancement and intellectual immortality. These aims were closely linked for him, just as they were for William Shakespeare. For both these sons of the English yeomanry, intellectual achievement offered the only accessible route to social progress. Harvey’s twin ambitions were related in a practical sense as well: it was only when he had achieved material success, and established his name as a physician, that he could buy time for his researches and gain an audience for his theory. His unconventional ideas would have been disregarded had they not been endorsed by the President of the College of Physicians, or by his beloved patron, King Charles I.

Harvey’s rise through the professional and social ranks provides the background to my account of his private anatomical studies. His worldly progress is outlined in Part I, along with his intellectual formation. The story of his quest proper begins in Part II, where Harvey’s countless ‘experiments’ (as we would call them) on human corpses and live animals are described, and the development of his revolutionary idea is charted.

Harvey’s experiments – the cutting and the observing – were crucial to his theory. Yet I believe that Harvey’s most important work was done not by his hands and eyes, but by his brain. We must always remember that Harvey was a natural philosopher, engaged in an overtly philosophical endeavour, rather than a prototype of the modern inductive scientist, dressed in doublet and hose rather than a lab coat. We should also bear in mind that the circulation theory was far from self-evident in his time, and that it could not be demonstrated to the senses. Men could no more see blood coursing around their arteries and veins, going to and from the heart, than they could perceive that the earth was spinning round. Neither did the theory have the weight of ‘empirical’ evidence on its side (and in any case, empirical evidence was not the litmus test of truth in the seventeenth century). Harvey’s theory was born (and would have to triumph) as a philosophical idea.

The Harvey who paces through the pages of this book is a thinker – and, more specifically, a seventeenth-century thinker. His mind was incredibly sensitive to the intellectual and cultural spirit of his age, and his ideas were expressive of that spirit. That is why I have placed his work in the broader scholarly, cultural and social context of his time, in a series of thematic essays interspersed between the chronological chapters. In some of these I compare Harvey’s ideas to those of contemporary poets, playwrights, economists, alchemists and preachers, and consider their possible influence on his theory; in others I look at how London, and seventeenth-century technology, shaped his thinking. The essays conjure up the late Renaissance world that Harvey inhabited; they also offer the reader an opportunity to wander around a remarkable seventeenth-century mind, and to enter into a dialogue with a culture that is rich and strange.

One of the unfamiliar things about seventeenth-century intellectual culture is its homogeneity: while science and the humanities today form two separate, highly specialized cultures, at that time a theologian could understand an astronomer without much difficulty, and law students and poets attended anatomical lectures. A broad sympathy – based on a shared language and a common set of ideas and aims – connected every discipline. These concepts and metaphors formed the landscape of Harvey’s imagination, and determined the movements of his mind. They shaped and prompted his circulation theory, which grew organically, though not fully formed, out of the culture of the period.

Many of Harvey’s research papers were destroyed by a wilful act of political vandalism during the English Civil War. Some of the manuscripts compiled after that date went up in the flames of the Great Fire of 1666, along with his personal library. Nevertheless there are plenty of alternative primary sources available, and these provide the foundation for the educated conjectures I make about his investigations. Did Harvey use his servants as guinea pigs for his experiments? There is no way of knowing, but other natural philosophers of the period did (Robert Boyle went so far as to administer poison to his), so I have suggested that Harvey followed the general rule. What did Harvey’s private research chamber look like? We do not know, but from references in Harvey’s writings, and the descriptions of the rooms of other natural philosophers, I have built an imaginative reconstruction.

All of the dramatized episodes that appear in this book have been fashioned from surviving sources. My account of Harvey’s public dissection has, for example, been recreated from his manuscript lecture notes, his published works, eyewitness reports of contemporary dissections, various sixteenth- and seventeenth-century manuals for anatomists, and the letters he exchanged with members of his audiences and with other anatomists. In my depiction of this, and all the other set piece scenes in the book, I have invented nothing; every detail is derived from primary evidence.

One final point. While this book contains various accounts of experiments on living animals, it is by no means intended as a general and personal endorsement of the practice of animal vivisection.