Part 21

Before telling the story of Harvey's life and work let us study for a few moments the general condition of affairs in Europe, in order that we may better understand the men whose influence surrounded him, as well as the spirit of the times and men's habits of thought.

Among the monarchs reigning in various parts of Europe during Harvey's time there were, for instance, in that part of the Empire of the West which was called Germany, Rudolph II, Matthias and Ferdinand. In Sweden reigned King Sigismund, Charles IX, the great monarch Gustavus Adolphus, and Queen Christine. In Prussia the throne had been occupied by Joachim, George William and Frederick William, as electors, this being before the days of the Prussian kings. In Russia the Czars Boris Godunow, Michael Theodore and Alexis had occupied the throne.

France had but recently passed through the inhuman butchery of the massacre of St. Bartholomew and its accompanying persecution of the Huguenots, under Charles IX, who expressed the hope that not a single Huguenot would be left alive to reproach him with the deed, but who died himself soon after the massacre, which is said to have caused him bitter remorse. Charles had been succeeded by his brother Henry III, a weak, fickle and vicious monarch, whose weakness caused him to be embroiled in civil strife, which was only concluded by his own assassination at the hands of a Dominican friar. Then came Henry IV, he of Navarre, afterwards surnamed The Great, who fought the famous battle of Ivry in 1590, and who reigned for twenty-one years, the greatest and most popular sovereign who ever occupied the throne of France. Notwithstanding his noble qualities he did not succeed in preserving his court from many of the contaminations of the age, and in his reign it is said that no less than 4,000 French gentlemen were killed in duels, chiefly arising out of quarrels about women. He was succeeded by Louis XIII, who was still on the throne when Harvey died.

In Harvey's own country James I was occupying the throne when Harvey appeared upon the scene. He was that royal pedant whom the Duke of Sully pronounced "the wisest fool in Europe." After his death, and when Charles I ascended the throne during his twenty-fifth year, in 1625, Harvey was preparing to publish his great work. It was this Charles I who retained as a favorite the worthless scoundrel Buckingham, whose misconduct in Spain prevented the proposed marriage of the king with the Spanish Infanta and brought about the Civil War. It was because of the cost of this war, and of the king's disputes with Parliament regarding the matter, that England was rent between the conflicts of the Cavaliers and the Roundheads, two of the consequences of this intestine strife being the execution of the Earl of Strafford and of Archbishop Laud. The troubles thus engendered finally cost the life of the king himself, who was beheaded in 1649. Harvey even lived to see the first half of the short tenure of office of Cromwell as the Great Protector, and was perhaps fortunate in dying before began the reign of that odious profligate Charles II.

It is worth while to enquire for a moment what was doing on this side of the ocean at this period which we have now under consideration. In 1607 Virginia was settled by the English, in 1614 New York, by the Dutch, in 1620 Massachusetts and, three years later, New Hampshire, by the English Puritans; in 1624 New Jersey, by the Dutch, in 1627 Delaware by Swedes and Finns, in 1630 Maine, by the English, in 1634 Maryland, by Irish Catholics, in 1635 Connecticut, by English Puritans. Thus it will be seen that the active period of Harvey's life was synchronous with the beginnings of our colonial activities. Very little knowledge of what was going on in the then world of science was brought to this country at this period of its existence, however, and it was many years before in these colonies there were any exhibitions of scientific interest save in extremely scattered and sporadic cases.

Among Harvey's literary associates were a number of celebrated English poets, for example,--Marlowe (1593), Spenser (1598), Beaumont (1615), Shakespeare (1615), Herbert (1635), Ben Jonson (1637), Massinger (1639). Lord Bacon died a year or two after the appearance of Harvey's book, while Baron Napier, the inventor of logarithms, had passed away. His contemporaries in Italy, where he had studied, included Tasso (1595) and Galileo (1645). Rubens had died in 1640, Michael Angelo in 1564 and Titian in 1576. In France, Calvin, the practical murderer of Servetus, had passed away in 1564, Beza died in 1605, Descartes in 1650, Pascal in 1662 and Gassendi in 1655. Portugal had produced but one great figure in the 16th century, namely Camoens, who died in 1579. In Spain, Loyola, the ascetic and fanatic founder of the Jesuits, had joined the great majority in 1556; but Cervantes did not die until 1616, Lope de Vega in 1635, Velasquez in 1660 and Calderon in 1667.

In Germany some great figures had but recently disappeared. Paracelsus died in 1541, Copernicus in 1543, Luther in 1546, Hans Holbein in 1554, and Melancthon in 1560. Mercator, who introduced a new method of cartography, died in 1594, Tycho Brahe in 1601, Keppler in 1631, Van Dyck in 1641, Grotius, the great scholar, in 1645, Rembrandt in 1668 and Spinoza in 1677.

In philosophy, scepticism was the prevailing doctrine in the time of Harvey. It had been founded a hundred years previously by Montaigne, and continued by Charron, the chaplain of Queen Margaret of Navarre, who died in 1603, and who declared all religion to be opposed to human reason;--a remarkable attitude for a chaplain to assume. Opposed to the scepticism of Harvey's day was the mystic, Cabalistic or supernatural philosophy especially represented by Böhme, a peasant shoemaker, uneducated and yet wonderfully gifted. He had been the philosophical colleague of that great Meistersinger, Hans Sachs. Later philosophers and thinkers, yet belonging to Harvey's time, were Pascal, the great Jansenist, who discovered the variations of atmospheric pressure at different levels, and Malebranche, who figures prominently in the history of philosophy.

Descartes, who died in 1650, held the pineal gland to be the seat of the soul. He was the discoverer of the laws of refraction of light and furnished the explanation for the rainbow. He attained greatest eminence in mathematics, physics and philosophy, and was one of the inventors of modern algebra. One of his greatest opponents was that noble Jew, Spinoza, whose colleagues had expelled him from the Sanhedrim to the sound of the trombone.

The Italian Dominican Campanella, who died in 1639, considered the foundation of knowledge to be supernatural revelation and its perception by the senses. In spite of these views he came before The Inquisition on a charge of heresy and of cooperation with the Turks, was tortured by the rack, and imprisoned for thirty years.

The mystic or Cabalistic notions of Harvey's day have just been mentioned. Under them we may recognize many degenerate products and amalgamations of the real doctrines of Paracelsus. The doctrines of the Rosicrucians, as well as of Zoroaster and the Cabala, were revived and made to do strange work. There was, for instance, that Sir Kenelm Digby, who died in 1605, a King's chamberlain, who posed among the English as a so-called Rosicrucian. It was he who suggested the famous "sympathetic powder," which was to be applied to the weapon by which a wound had been inflicted, after which the weapon was anointed and dressed two or three times a day, while the wound itself was carefully bound up with dressings and left alone for a week. This was perhaps much the better course, but it will show what strange notions prevailed in those days.

What it meant to run counter to ecclesiastical policy and theological dogma appears not only in such tragedies as terminated the lives of Bruno and many other martyrs to science, but in such facts as these; for instance, when in 1624, just when Harvey was preparing to publish his work, some young chemists in Paris, seeing the benefit of the experimental method, broke away from Aristotle and the canons of theological reasoning, the faculty of theology appealed to the Parliament of Paris, which latter prohibited all such researches, under the severest penalties.

This was the time too when such exhibitions as the following were altogether too frequent;--One Quaresimo, of Lodi, came out with a ponderous work entitled "A Historical, Theological and Moral Explanation of the Holy Land," in which he devoted great space to the question of The Dead Sea and the salt pillar supposed to represent Lot's wife, dividing a long chapter upon the subject into three parts, dealing with the method and the locality of this transformation and the question of the existence at that time of her saline remains. Thus, with his peculiar powers of reasoning, he was able to decide the exact point where the saline change took place, and finally showed that the statue was still in existence.

Lord Bacon was also an older contemporary of Harvey, having been born in 1561 and dying in 1626, shortly after the appearance of Harvey's great work. His services to analytic science need no description here, but it is worth while to remember that Harvey, like many others, must have come under his influence and have profited by his teachings in logic and analysis.

At about the time when Harvey made known his discovery Bacon was publishing his views of the laws of transmission and reflection of sound. Great man as he was, with a keen foresight into the value of the recent inventions of the compass, gun-powder and printing, he nevertheless was himself so narrow, in some respects, that he placed but little value upon the discovery of Copernicus. He, however, paved the way for one in some respects still greater, namely Isaac Newton, who, however, had scarcely attained man's stature when Harvey died.

How much we owe to the two great Bacons of history one cannot indicate in this short résumé. Roger Bacon (1214-1292) seems to have been the first great thinker along truly scientific lines. He was more than a mere chemist while, as White says, more than three centuries before Francis Bacon advocated the experimental method Roger Bacon had practised it, and in many directions. He did more than anyone else in the middle ages to direct thought into fruitful paths, and only now are we finding out how nearly he reached some of the principal doctrines of modern philosophy and chemistry. Most important of all, his methods were even greater than his results, and this at a time when "theological subtilizing" was the only passport to reputation for scholarship.

It was Avicenna, the Arabian, who perhaps first announced substantially the modern theory of geology, accounting for changes in the earth's surface by suggesting a stone-making force, but the presence of fossils in the rocks had been always a thorn in the sides of the theologians. It was Leonardo da Vinci, that versatile genius in science and art, who, previous to Harvey's generation, suggested true notions as to the origin of fossils, while, in Harvey's time, Bernard Palissy, another artist, vehemently contended for their correctness. Still, even at Harvey's death, neither geology nor paleontology had come anywhere near scientific accuracy.

The Academia dei Lyncei, so-called from its seal, which bore the image of a fox, was founded in Rome in 1603. In France The Academy of Science was not founded until 1665, in Germany The Society of Naturalists and Physicians in 1652, and the British Royal Society in 1665.

In matters of general interest it may be worth while to say that in architecture the general style of The Renaissance was changed for the more substantial Barocco, while the more formal and limited style of church music had given away to musical drama, i. e., opera, albeit in very crude form. The first newspaper had appeared at Antwerp in 1605, the first German paper being published in Frankfort in 1615, and The London Weekly News making its first appearance in 1620. Tobacco, which had been brought over by Raleigh in 1560, had come into quite general use, while coffee, tea and chocolate had gained in public esteem. When coffee was first introduced in England it sold for about $28 a pound. The first coffee house appears to have been established in Constantinople, in the middle of the 16th century, while the first coffee house in London was not opened until a century later.

The barbers still retained their ascendency, and the bath keepers had scarcely lost their position next to the barbers. It was not until Harvey had reached a ripe age that the barbers were required in Germany to pass an examination, in which they had to prove not only their knowledge but the legitimacy of their birth, and the fact that they had studied for three years and had worked for three years more as apprentices.

Anatomy was studied quite generally, sometimes upon human bodies. A dissecting room had been established in Dresden in 1617, in which stuffed bears, at that time a great rarity, were preserved with other curiosities. In 1623 Rolfink, at Jena, arranged for public dissection upon the bodies of all executed malefactors, delegates being present thereat from various other institutions. It is worth while to mention that in Frankfort, for instance, during the expiration of 65 years, but seven dissections were made, and that these were always accompanied by a celebration which lasted several days. Vienna did not possess a skeleton in 1668, and Strassburg did not have one until 1671. Yet it is of interest to remember that the anatomical plates, like those often published to-day, which are meant to be lifted off in layers, existed even at this period. On the other hand, botanical gardens and chemical laboratories existed in several of the universities,--in Strassburg, for instance, in 1619,--in Oxford in 1622.

Fabricius Hildanus, the father of German surgery, or, as he has been sometimes called, the Ambroise Paré, of Germany, was also a contemporary of Harvey's. His real name was Fabry and he was born in Hilden, but he latinized his name into that form usually adopted to-day.

Scultetus was another famous surgeon of the same period.

William Gilbert, 1540-1603, had been the talented physician of Queen Elizabeth, and was among the first to study the experimental method. With the appearance of his book upon the magnet, in 1600, began the science of electricity and magnetism. He was the first to teach the fact that the earth itself was a great magnet and he distinguished between magnetic and electric reactions. Later the great Dutch anatomist, Ruysch, afforded corroboration of Harvey's views by another method, when he invented and practised those beautiful minute injections of the vascular system which made him so famous, and built up that great collection of specimens which Peter the Great bought for Russia at an expense of about $75,000.

Contemporary with Harvey also was Swammerdam, one of the most versatile men of his time, famous as naturalist, savant, physiologist, linguist and poet. It was during the fifteenth century that astronomy began to assume an importance and degree of accuracy never hitherto known. This was due very largely to the independence of thought and the researches of Copernicus, who was born in Cremona in 1477, and who studied medicine in Krakau and astronomy in Vienna. He lived to the age of 70 and was the real father of the heliocentric theory, now known as the Copernician system, which he substituted for the previous Ptolemaic theory, thus reversing the ancient idea that the sun circled about the earth. Copernicus demonstrated the phases of the moon, but his opponents claimed that if this doctrine were true Venus would exhibit the same phenomena; to which he replied that it was true, though he knew not what to say to these objections, but that God was good and would in time furnish answer to them. It was Galileo's crude telescope which, in Harvey's younger day, in 1611, furnished this answer and revealed the phases of Venus. To illustrate how the views of Copernicus were received we might add here that Martin Luther paid his compliments to him by declaring that Copernicus was a fool who wished to stand astronomy upon its head.

Copernicus was succeeded by Galileo, who was born in 1554 in Pisa, and died 1642. He may be called the creator of dynamic astronomy and mechanics, as well as one of the most brilliant exponents of experimental and inductive reasoning. He was of noble birth and was, in fact, the torch bearer of physics at the period of The Renaissance. He gave up speculation and substituted for it the habit of observation, reaping a large harvest of surprising facts, any one of which might have immortalized him. He not only established the movements of the earth on its own axis as well as around the sun, which Copernicus had shown, but he discovered the weight of the atmosphere and first calculated the law of gravity. He and his successors were governed always by that aphorism which is to-day as true as ever: "Experience is deceptive and judgment difficult."

In 1615 when he was before The Inquisition, at Rome, and when its theologians had examined statements extracted from his letters, they solemnly rendered their decision in these words: "The first proposition that the sun is the centre and does not revolve about the earth is foolish, absurd, false in theology and heretical, because expressly contrary to The Holy Scripture. The second proposition that the earth is not the centre, but revolves about the sun, is absurd, false in philosophy and, from a theological point of view, at least, opposed to the true faith." This for a pronunciamento from the infallible Church!

Galileo and Bruno have by some writers both been made to stand in an unpleasant light because of their recantation or shifting position before The Inquisition. Bruno was the greatest philosopher and sceptic of the latter part of the 16th century, and had outlined, withal somewhat vaguely, that which is now known as the nebular hypothesis. He was murdered by The Inquisition in 1600, and the views which he enunciated seem to have been buried with him, not to reappear until long after his sad fate had been consummated. He had, for instance, contended for the truths of the Copernican doctrine, but it was not until ten years after his martyrdom that Galileo proved it with his telescope. That both these great men yielded in some respects to the influences of The Inquisition and renounced some of their scientific "heresies" is largely to be excused by the fact that they were both old, broken in health from the sufferings which they had endured, as well as from their disappointments, and that they had been, under these circumstances, handed over to that Inquisition which knew no mercy. Galileo could well remember the auto da fê in the Piazza dei Fiore, in Rome, the scene of Bruno's martyrdom, as well as the tragic end of many another who had dared to have the courage of his convictions. Let us, then, not judge him harshly, but be grateful even that the enormous power of The Inquisition did not and could not suppress the truth.