HARVEY AND GALEN rn i HI IT /. TD f\,T} ■< rnro VT ~ _.vLaX- V jd^AjN U iA _ ^ jN FGSt 1; \QH JOSEPH PRANK PAYNE, M.D. This is a reproduction of a book from the McGill University Library collection. Title: Harvey and Galen : the Harveian oration delivered before the Royal College of Physicians, October 19, 1896 Author: Payne, Joseph Frank, 1840-1910 Publisher, year: London : H. Frowde, 1897 The pages were digitized as they were. The original book may have contained pages with poor print. Marks, notations, and other marginalia present in the original volume may also appear. For wider or heavier books, a slight curvature to the text on the inside of pages may be noticeable. ISBN of reproduction: 978-1-926810-71-3 This reproduction is intended for personal use only, and may not be reproduced, re- published, or re-distributed commercially. For further information on permission regarding the use of this reproduction contact McGill University Library. McGill University Library www.mcgill.ca/library HARVEY AND GALEN ‘Z'tyt 35art?etan ©rafton DELIVERED BEFORE THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS OCTOBER ip, i8p6 BY JOSEPH FRANK PAYNE, M.D. Oxon. FELLOW AND CENSOR OF THE COLLEGE PHYSICIAN TO ST. THOMAS’S HOSPITAL; LATE FELLOW OF MAGDALEN COLLEGE, OXFORD London HENRY FROWDE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE AMEN CORNER, E.C. 1897 gafjit fasten f)in bag aflgu 0rIud)tige! 3$r fud)t Bci i$m bergebeng 0lat^j ; 3n bem SBcrgangnert Icbt bag ^u^tige, 33eren?igt fid) in fdjbner Sfyxt. Goethe. OXFORD : HORACE HART PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY THE HARVEIAN ORATION ON THE RELATION OF HARVEY TO HIS PREDECESSORS AND ESPECIALLY TO GALEN Mr. President, Fellows, and Guests, Before entering on the immediate subject of this oration, I am reminded that the President who entrusted me with this honourable duty is no longer among us. It was Sir Russell Reynolds who, with all fyis graceful courtesy, offered me the post of Harveian orator, and it was to him that I looked forward to submitting the result of my endeavour to prove worthy of his choice ; but it was not to be. As this is not the first public occasion on which the College has met since we lost our late President, this is not the opportunity to commemorate formally or at any length his great public services. In Sir Russell Reynolds we knew one who, by hereditary disposition and by his own personal qualities, was, as a cultivated and scientific physician, a representative Fellow of our College. During his tenure of office he was the loyal and kindly friend of all of us, and among the distinguished Presidents of the College of Physicians his name will not be forgotten. And to you, Sir, who occupy the chair of Reynolds, I will only venture in your presence to say that you occupy the same place in our loyalty and affection ; and that I, in this position, hold myself fortunate that I have to submit my attempt towards the commemoration of Harvey to no less kind and competent a judge. The task of composing the Harveian Oration, founded 240 years ago, becomes every year more difficult. A % 4 HARVEY AND GALEN The objects to which Harvey himself desired the lecturer on the foundation to direct his discourse, namely, to com- memorate the benefactors of the College, to exhort our Fellows and Members to search out the secrets of Nature by way of experiment, and to continue in mutual love and affection among ourselves, will never grow old. Let us never allow them to be forgotten. The list of benefactors of our College has been enlarged during the past year by one name, of which I must now speak. Captain Edward Wilmot Williams, as the repre- sentative of our late venerable Fellow, Dr. Bisset Hawkins, has generously made over to our College the sum of one thousand pounds for the purpose of perpetuating the memory of Dr. Bisset Hawkins in connexion with the College. Nor must I omit to add that it was through the good offices and wise counsel of our friend Dr. Theodore Williams that this valuable benefaction accrued to the College. To him therefore, as well as to the generous donor, our best thanks are and will be always due, and have indeed already received formal expression in a vote of the College. The precise method in which the intentions of the donor are to be carried out is still under considera- tion. The second Harveian injunction, to study Nature by way of experiment, is, I hope, not forgotten at the present day, and I feel that the breath of a Harveian orator can add little to the great forces which sustain the restless energy of modern science. But I have hoped that by bringing before you the strictly experimental researches of a great man of past times, whose services to science are not always duly acknowledged, I may by his brilliant example add some new force to the noble exhortation of Harvey. The third injunction, to live in harmony among our- selves, needs, I hope, few words. For the harmony of our College is, and promises to continue, so unbroken that we need not emphasize, while we take to heart, the lesson which Harvey’s gentle nature desired to teach us. THE EVOLUTION OF SCIENCE 5 It has always been the tradition, with which one would not willingly break, that Harvey himself and his great dis- covery should be specially commemorated on this occasion. A long series of eminent men have so ably treated of the discovery of the circulation, and its consequences, that it would be difficult to add anything to what they have given us. But still I find that the genesis of Harvey’s idea, and more especially its historical connexion with the labours of the great men of antiquity who laid the foundations of anatomy and physiology, have not received the same degree of attention. Antecedents, however, no less than consequences, have to be taken into account in giving its true value to any scientific discovery. It is generally admitted, though perhaps not always borne in mind, that no kind of knowledge has ever sprung into being without an antecedent, but is inseparably con- nected with what was known before. In this respect science is only like all other kinds of natural phenomena. The present aspect of the world, geologists tell us, is a necessary consequence of previous conditions and changes. The present races of animals and plants are the descendants of a long series whose origin we cannot trace. Modern civilization is the outcome of the efforts of man in all past ages to construct a social fabric. So even our modern science, which we sometimes speak of as though it were altogether a new thing, is only the final resultant of all the endeavours of men in past times to penetrate the secrets of nature. When we look back upon those strivings they often seem perverse and contradictory ; men at certain periods seem to have gone backward rather than forward ; we are struck less by the few grains of truth than by the great mass of what we call errors. But let us speak gently of these errors and call them rather imperfect truths, for, in science at least, the truth of to-day is error to-morrow. They are parts of a continuous evolution, in which the so-called truth and the so-called error are inseparably mingled. Again, it seems to be sometimes thought that great original thinkers and discoverers make an exception to this 6 HARVEY AND GALEN law of continuous evolution. We imagine that such men as Aristotle, Galileo* Harvey, and Newton were indepen- dent of their predecessors, that, in fact, their great work was to demolish the errors — that is, to destroy the work — of those predecessors and to start afresh. But in reality no man, even the greatest, was ever thus independent. The investigator is indebted to those who went before him, not only for the instruments of research which they per- fected, but for the conclusions which they arrived at. These conclusions* whether he admits or rejects them, serve for his help and guidance. It is easy to see how a discoverer profits by the ascertained discoveries of his forerunners. It is not so easily seen that the so-called errors of those men are also of great value to him. How many false solutions of a problem are required before the true solution is arrived at ! HoW many are, indeed, neces- sary elements in this final solution ! I know that there are various kinds of errors, and that* while some are stepping-stones, others are stumbling-blocks ; but still there is much truth in the general proposition that error is a stage in the development of truth. A certain novelist has sketched the character of a philosopher who devoted his life to writing the History of Human Error. Were such a work ever honestly written it would be the History of Human Progress. I ask your indulgence for entering on these abstract topics, because they will be found to bear immediately upon my subject, which is The Relation of Harvey to his Predecessors , and especially to Galen. It will be found, I think, that after tracing the services of Harvey’s own generation and that immediately preceding it in providing him with the indispensable methods and instruments of research we are led back to Aristotle and Galen as the real predecessors of Harvey in his work concerning the heart. It was by the labours of the great school of Greek anatomists, of whom Galen was the final representative (not forgetting their successors in the six- teenth century), that the problem, though unsolved, was put in such a shape that the genius of Harvey was enabled LIN ACRE AND CAIUS 7 to solve it. Harvey’s debt to Aristotle was warmly ac- knowledged by himself, and has been frequently insisted upon, so that it is less necessary to enlarge upon that theme. But his relations to Galen and the Greek anatomists Harvey himself, for reasons which I shall presently state, was unavoidably led to put forward less prominently, and in modern times they have been greatly undervalued, or even misunderstood. It is therefore to Galen and Greek anatomy in general that I propose chiefly to confine myself. We need not fear that the result will be to lessen our admiration for Harvey or for his momentous discovery. The very contrary will be the case. One sometimes wishes history could be written back- wards ; — that we could show how the state of affairs to-day is the consequence of that which existed yesterday or the year before, and so on. The practical difficulties of such a method would probably be too great, but in the present case I should like to trace the circumstances which in- fluenced Harvey through the two generations preceding his own, more especially as that will give me the oppor- tunity of obeying the Harveian precept by commemorating two great benefactors of our College — Thomas Linacre, our honoured founder, and John Caius. We shall see that there was a real link of connexion between these three gene- rations of English physicians. The relation of Harvey’s work to that of his predecessors may not be immediately obvious ; but nevertheless he owed much to them, and to the schools which they represent In fact their labours were an essential preliminary to his own great discovery. Harvey, as we all know, was a student first at Cambridge, in the great college which owed its second foundation to Caius. He never knew Caius, who died five years before Harvey was bom, but he worked under the posthumous influence of that eminent physician, and the example of a man so distinguished, and standing in such a relation to the young scholar, must have had weight in determining the aspirations and the course of study of the greatest alumnus of his college. Beyond the fact that Harvey followed 8 HARVEY AND GALEN Caius’s example in studying in the schools of Italy, I will only now draw attention to two of Caius’s intellectual characteristics. He was an enthusiastic student of Greek medicine, and more especially of Galen, spending much time in revising and publishing some of his writings. Besides, or rather in consequence of, this bent he was keenly interested in anatomy, and founded a lectureship in his own college to promote its study. I need hardly point out how directly these facts bear upon Harvey’s career as a student. Caius stood as to time much in the same relation to Linacre as Harvey did to himself, being about four years old when Linacre died, but in spirit the earlier pair were much more intimately connected. Caius cannot have known the older physician, but he made him in most respects the model of his life, and was in the truest sense his intellectual heir. Indeed, it was in a filial spirit that he repaired the neglect of others by erecting a monument to Linacre in St. Paul’s Cathedral with its well-known affec- tionate inscription. We are led back, then, to Linacre, our founder, as in a sense the intellectual grandfather of Harvey, and we ask, What share had he in moulding the mind and influencing the life of the most famous of his progeny? How far did he contribute to lay the foundation on which Harvey’s great work was built ? The answer is that, though neither Linacre nor Caius, even through their writings, may have had any direct influence on Harvey, they represent not only the two preceding generations of English physicians, but also represent two successive stages in a great intel- lectual movement which was the indispensable preliminary to Harvey’s work, and of which his great discovery may be called the culmination. This was the movement generally called the Renaissance, or the revival of learning, but which, for our present purpose, might be more closely defined as the ‘ revival of Greek thought.’ Every one knows that the most important factor in the revival of learning (so far as it took place in the fifteenth century, though doubtless it began much earlier) was, beside the invention of printing, THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING 9 the revival of Greek learning and the study of Greek writers in the original. This was largely influenced by the migration of Greek scholars to Italy after the fall of Constantinople, bringing with them the ‘ brown Greek manuscripts ’ which it was thought worth a journey to Italy to read and transcribe. From this arose a new Science, along with a new Literature, and, as some think, a new Theology. Mr. Goldwin Smith has finely said that at this time ‘Greece rose from the dead, the New Testament in her hand.’ He might have added that in the other hand was the Book of Science. It is right to give prominence to the name of Linacre because among the Hellenists or scholars concerned in the Greek revival he occupied a high and honourable place. Not less was he known as a humanist, being an elegant Latin scholar, and as such ac- quired a reputation which lasted far into the next century. On his public services as the founder of our College it is needless to dwell, except as a passing tribute of grateful remembrance ; but a few facts from his life will help us to understand his position. Linacre was born about 1460, seven years after the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks, and a few years after the first book was issued from a European printing-press — cardinal dates, as we know, in the history of learning. After studying at Oxford he set the example, followed by Caius and Harvey, of travel- ling to Italy to bring home the treasures of the new learn- ing. The records of his Italian journey show the romantic interest with which such a journey at that time might be invested. He carried introductions to the greatest scholars, such as Chalcondylas and Poliziano ; he heard at Florence the lectures given by these scholars to the princes of the house of Medici; and after moving among the Italian humanists, ‘himself not least, but honoured of them all/ bore off the highest laurels of Padua \ Returning to his 1 This is not a mere flourish. years after Linacre), picked up a Richard Pace, Secretary of State to tradition of Linacre’s brilliant exer- Henry VIII, who visited Italy and cise for his doctor’s degree. In his studied at Padua (probably some little book, De Fructu qui ex doctrina IO HARVEY AND GALEN native land, Linacre occupied a unique position in his pro- fession, for he was probably the only physician in England who had read the Greek medical fathers in their original tongue. Many honours and dignities, as we know, fell to his lot. He was physician to the King, to Wolsey, and to all the great prelates, while he directed the studies of Prince Arthur and the Princess Mary. But, more significant and honourable than these dignities* it is to be remembered that such men as Sir Thomas More, Colet, and even the great Erasmus, were in a sense his pupils as they were also his patients, for they profited by the store of Greek learning and scholarship which he had brought back from Italy. Late in life he exchanged medical practice for the priest- hood, and, thus enjoying comparative leisure, crowded all his important work into the last seven years of his life. The year before his death he published a translation from Galen, which he says was accomplished with difficulty in the intervals of the painful disease calculus. Almost on his deathbed he must have been correcting the proofs of his last work, an elaborate treatise on Latin composition, which was published shortly after his death \ percipitur (Basel, 1517), he intro- duces a dispute between Grammar and Rhetoric as to which could claim Linacre for her own. Rhetoric admits that he cultivated grammar in his spare hours, and says his friends wondered that he, who was born for the highest things, some- times condescended to the lowest, and disputed with some grammarian about the vocative case ; but he gained a more brilliant victory at Padua. ‘ Contendit turn ille feliciter quia vicit ; sed mallem victoriam fuisse illustriorem, et similem illi quam Patavii olim reportavit. Nam quum in gymnasio Patavino pro- fession^ artis medicae ei (ut nunc moris est) darentur insignia, publice non sine summa laude disputavit, et seniorum medicorum adversaria argumenta acutissime refellit. Turn iuvenis quidam perquam eruditus, coepit contra argumentari. Sed Aquila, Tace, inquit, O bone iuvenis ! vides ne et consyderas hunc nos seniores te longo intervallo procul a se reliquisse, et in disputando superasse ? ’ Aquila was an eminent and vener- able physician, who attained the ‘ Galenical ’ age of nearly a hundred, and, as we see, finding that he and his equals were unable to hold their ground against the learning of Linacre, rebuked the temerity of the young man who ventured to enter the lists against so formidable a dis- putant. 1 De emendata strudura Latini sermonis. London, 1524. The first pages of this work treat of the Parts of Speech , and thus supply the clue to the quotation which follows. THE IDEALIST SCHOLAR ii L inacre has left us the example of a noble life ; he was possessed from his youth till his death by the enthusiasm of learning. He was an idealist, devoted to objects which the world thought of little use. His devotion to learning even in the arid form of grammar was hit off by his friend Erasmus in a piece of good-natured banter, which, I fancy, caught the eye of a modern poet, Robert Browning, who in his fine poem, ‘The Grammarian’s Funeral,’ has given us the picture of an Idealist Scholar in a way which fits Linacre precisely, even if it was not meant for him. I think probably it did refer to him* as may be seen on referring to the original passage of Erasmus 1 : — ‘ Yes, this in him was the peculiar grace, Still before living he’d learn how to live — No end to learning. Earn the means first — God surely will contrive Use for our earning. 1 No one knew Linacre better than his cherished friend Erasmus, who, besides many warm and sincere eulogiums, has left in his Praise of Folly an anonymous sketch, evidently meant for Linacre, which, being written in Erasrtius’s favourite style of banter, has misled persons without a sense of humour into supposing it to be meant as an ill-natured satire. It must have been seen by Linacre, and was certainly not intended to disturb the harmony of the two friends. Folly is supposed to be speaking of the idle aims which men pursue, and says, ‘ One man I know, skilled in many arts ; a Grecian, Latinist, Mathematician, Philosopher, Phy- sician, and in all these supreme, now sixty years old, who for more than twenty years has tortured him- self in the study of grammar, think- ing himself fortunate if he should live long enough to define properly the eight parts of speech, which no Greek or Latin has yet satisfactorily distinguished.’ 1 Novi quendam iroAwrtxt'OTa.Tov Graecum, Latinum, Mathematicum, philosophum, medicum /cat ravra ( 3 a-