Harvey and his claims as a discoverer : a lecture, delivered at Folkestone on the three-hundredth anniversary of his birth (April 1st, 1578) / by Robert C. Jenkins.

  • Jenkins, Robert C. (Robert Charles), 1815-1896.
Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Harvey and his claims as a discoverer : a lecture, delivered at Folkestone on the three-hundredth anniversary of his birth (April 1st, 1578) / by Robert C. Jenkins. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    AS A HARVEY, AND HIS CLAIMS DISCOVERER. In a well-known passage of tlie Areopagitica of JMilton, the great poet describes the virgin form of Truth, perfect in the day of her first entrance into the world, as “ hewn into a tlioiisand pieces and scattered to the four winds”. From that time”, he continues, ‘‘ ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb still as they could find them”; and he ends with the suggestive words AVe have not found them all”. These words, applicable as they are to all truth, are singularly applicable to the history of that great science from which the metaphor is itself derived. In the study of the human frame and its organic laws we have had from the earliest times many sad and anxious searchers after truth,—men wdio, contending against many pre- judices and under great disadvantages, have ever kept in view the ultimate triumph of truth,—men, who, when they durst appear, feared not to stake their name and reputation, and even their life itself, on the fortunes of some great and rejected truth, the acquisition of years of ill-requited labour and of deep and lonely thought. One of the earliest of the precursors of Harvey in the great school of Padua, and in the study of the functions of the heart, Petrus Aponensis, after pursuing his anxious search till his eightieth year—the very age at which the life of Harvey ended so peaceably—was cited before the Tribunal of the In- quisition on a charge of practising magic, and died while the process was'yet pending: his sentence being pronounced after death, and the burning of his effigy indicating sufficiently the terrible punishment which Yvould have overtaken him had he lived to become, in its most painful sense, a martyr to medical truth. But great as are the claims upon our admiration of those early seekers who recovered the least fragment of truth out of the gripe of custom, or saved it from the suppression of prejudice, we must not place them on a level with those higher minds, which have from first principles, and independently of the assistance of any earlier explorer, solved the deepest and A 2