Blood

In the jaunty but therapeutically casual days of the 17th century two men often sat late over their wine cups. The one was dressed in silks and at his side a slim sword swung. The other's garb was black, but his eyes gleamed in candlelight. Sword-swinger was England's Charles I; the eyes gleamed in the head of Dr. William Harvey, no ordinary leech. Last week 100 chosen doctors from the world over gathered in London to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the royal leech's book* which first told the world that blood completes a circle through the body. The 100 doctors wore full dress and all their decorations; they were received at Buckingham Palace by England's George V.

Charles liked his leech. The man had a visible vitality which often translated itself into swift rages and quick passes with the dagger at his side. It is not recorded that Dr. Harvey's blade penetrated anything more eventful than frogs, birds and an occasional cadaver. But these things it penetrated so shrewdly that the doctor had an idea. It was not, solely, his idea, but rather an astounding improvement on the theories of his teacher, Dr. Hieronymus Fabricius of Aquapendente. This doctor lectured at the school of physic at Padua, Italy, and the inquisitively inclined can still visit the great carved room where Dr. Harvey first heard from Dr. Fabricius of the valves he had discovered in the veins. But Dr. Fabricius was foggy on one point. In common with other great medical minds of his time he believed blood oscillated back and forth in the veins and arteries. This theory the sharp eyed pupil doubted.

He pursued his doubts to certainty through the bodies of innumerable lobsters, oysters, slugs, fishes, frogs, serpents, pigs, dogs, chicks.

His theories crystallized into lectures. His distinguished friends urged him to publish, his scientific spirit urged him to accumulate more data. In 1628 a slim volume of 72 pages with two plates of diagrams came out under his name--72 pages of clear, logical, dignified exposition in which the whole existing theory of the blood was demolished. Homer, Aristotle, Plato, every village barber who had ever breathed a vein had known that the blood moved but until the hawkeyed Harvey, no one knew:

That the heart is a muscular organ squeezing the blood forth when it contracts, resting quietly when it relaxes or swells (a complete contradiction of the idea prevailing in the days of the Stuarts). That the arteries carry bright scarlet blood, which has taken up air in its passage through the lungs, to every part of the body.

That the veins carry dark impure blood back to the heart from which it is sent to the lungs, purified, brightened by a fresh supply of air.

That the brilliant red blood in the arteries is exactly the same as the dark blue blood of the veins, the difference in color being due to difference in gas content. That there is no to and fro undulation, but a constant circuit of blood from the heart, through the distant parts of the body, back to the heart.

Harvey's theories are taught in medical colleges today with the addition of one detail which was filled in four years after his death by his successor Marcello Malpighi. Harvey knew that the blood was pumped out of the heart and returned to the heart, but he could not find the tiny capillaries in which the change of direction took place. Had he been familiar with the microscope which was then being evolved, his system would have been complete.

Respectable practitioners of physic thought him brilliantly mad, philosophers thought him brilliantly sane. His friend John Aubrey wrote: "I have heard him say that after his booke of the Circulation of the Blood came out he fell mightily in his practice; 'twas believed by the vulgar that he was crackbrained, and all the physitians were against him; with much adoe at last in about 20 or 30 years time it was received in all the universities in the world."

Ardent in politics as in science, Anatomist Harvey was an intense Royalist. He was early brought into contact with royalty, having at the age of 27 married Elizabeth, daughter of Dr. Lancelot Browne, physician to Queen Elizabeth and to James I: King James was kind to him, but Charles I was his dear friend. Together they watched the growth of the chick, and the beating of the human heart in a patient whose chest had been partly eaten away by disease. When Charles became king, Harvey became king's body physician and carried out his experiments on the king's own deer. During the battle of Edgehill in the Civil War the absentminded scientist had charge of the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York. Said John Aubrey: "He told me that he withdrew with them under a hedge, and tooke out of his pocket a booke and read. But he had not read very long before a bullet of a great gun grazed on the ground near him which made him remove his station."

When the Royalist cause was defeated and Charles was taken prisoner, Harvey, an old man sick at heart, resigned his appointments, gave up his practice, renounced London, retired to learned solitude. Nevertheless, in 1651, a friend wheedled another book out of him. It was Exercitationes de generatione (The Generation of Animals). Here in 72 chapters are discussed the origin and development of animal life, summed up in the great and by now classic generalization omne vivum ex ovo (all life proceeds from the egg). In only one instance did he seem to yield to the fixed and universal idea of spontaneous generation. Worms, he thought, might possibly be produced by putrefaction, without eggs.

Six years later, at the age of 79, he died, "the palsy giving him an easy passport."

*Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et

Sanguinis.