The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume VIII. The Age of Dryden.
§ 13. Harvey and the Circulation of the Blood
The second man of outstanding genius in British science in the seventeenth century was Harvey, who, like Newton, worked in one of the two sciences which, in Stewart times, were, to some extent, ahead of all the others. Harvey, “the little choleric man” as Aubrey calls him, was educated at Cambridge and at Padua and was in his thirty-eighth year when, in his lectures on anatomy, he expounded his new doctrine of the circulation of the blood to the college of Physicians, although his Exercitatio on this subject did not appear till 1628. His notes for the lectures are now in the British Museum. He was physician to Charles I; and it is on record how, during the battle of Edgehill, he looked after the young princes as he sat reading a book under a hedge a little removed from the fight.
In the chain of evidence of his convincing demonstration of the circulation of the blood, one link, only to be supplied by the invention of the compound microscope, was missing. This, the discovery of the capillaries, was due to Malpighi, who was amongst the earliest anatomists to apply the compound microscope to animal tissues. Still, as Dryden has it,
Harvey was happy in two respects as regards his discovery. It was, in the main and especially in England, recognised as proven in his own lifetime, and, again, no one of credit claimed or asserted the claim of others to priority. In research, all enquirers stand on steps others have built up; but, in this, the most important of single contributions to physiology, the credit is Harvey’s and almost Harvey’s alone. His other great work, Exercitationes de Generatione Animalium is of secondary importance. It shows marvellous powers of observation and very laborious research; but, although, to a great extent, it led the way in embryology, it was shortly superseded by works of those who had the compound microscope at their command. Cowley, a man of wide culture, wrote an Ode on Harvey in which his achievement was contrasted with a failing common to scientific men of his own time, and, so far as we can see, of all time:
Harvey’s death is recorded in a characteristic seventeenth century sentence, taken from the unpublished pages of Baldwin Harvey’s Bustorum Aliquot Reliquiae: