Some recently discovered letters of William Harvey, with other miscellanea / by S. Weir Mitchell ; with a bibliography of Harvey's works by Charles Perry Fisher.

  • William Harvey
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Some recently discovered letters of William Harvey, with other miscellanea / by S. Weir Mitchell ; with a bibliography of Harvey's works by Charles Perry Fisher. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    he dined with Dr. Ent at the English College.^ He was in London at the close of 1636. These letters seem to show that the great physician, was certainly treated with small consideration. The orders for extreme precaution against the reasonably dreaded plague came evidently from Venice, and Lord Feilding seems to have been unable to effect his friend's release. I have not been able to find anywhere accurate informa- tion in regard to the Lazaretto customs of the seventeenth century. Harvey's complaint of the lodging in base— or is it bare?—fields, of want of shelter and decent bedding are quite pitiable. His suspicion that fear of plague did not explain his detention might have seemed just, for the plague was sometimes used as an excuse to detain persons who were suspected for political reasons. Arundel's little doctor so often thus described, was said by Aubrey to be a choleric man, and certainly he shows no serene temper under the detention and barbarous usadg. There is something of childlike petulance in the letter of August 16, where he is so outraged that he declines any favors from the Podesta. The mood of anger and sense of insult shows in the many repetitions of his successive letters. The style of these epistles betrays such impatience as made him heedless of how he said his say, provided he said it with emphasis. Moreover, his apology for this scribling on the grass in the field may have been needed since, according to Ent, and as his lecture notes prove, he wrote a villanous script. 1 D'Arcy Power, p. 115. [40]