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.

  • Robert Charles Jenkins
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.

    11/24 page 11
    He is a,sserted to have taiight, tliougli tliis does not appear in liis works, that men were generated like vermin, from pntrelied matter (Zcdler, Universal Lexicon). How we niiif?t bear in mind that the Ferii^jatetic Qitcstions of Cesalpini were first publislied in 1571 ; his work De Flantis in 1583. The world, however, did not find out during the fifty years which intervened between these dates and Harvey’s publications, tliat the discovery of tlie circulation had been made in any sense. In strange contrast to this profound ignorance Avas the burst of indignation which proceeded from the medical world directly the work of Harvey was published, accusing him of disloyalty to Galen, and all antiquity, in which Cesalpini would be included. Yet Dr. Ceradini ventures to affirm that Harvey (the least likely of any of his cotemporaries to read a merely pliilosophical work of great complexity), had only the merit of disentombing the doctrine from Cesalpini’s voluminous pages. The great Italian physician continued lecturing at Pisa and Ptome till his death, in 1603, only thirteen years before Harvey taught it in his public lectures. Was it possible that he could suppress all mention of it from his two chairs, or fail to communicate it to some of his many hearers ? or that they again would not have vindicated for the schools of Pisa and Pome an honour whicli, in the then divided state of Italy, would have been almost as deeply grudged to Padua, as it would have been to a heretical Englishman ? Dr. Ceradini’s work and his injurious inscription Avould have been much earlier anticipated had his theory indeed been true. Dr. Willis forcibly remarks that ‘Ghe foremost grounds of Harvey’s claims to rank as a discoverer are very commonly over- looked—we always associate his name and fame Avith the development of the ultimate fact of the circulation of the blood. But Harvey, as a step to this conclusion, first demon- strated the heart as the means by which the circulation was effected, and he further sheAved that there Avas but one kind of blood common to both the arteries and the veins. . . The motion of the heart has even prec.edence in the title of his immortal work.’^ This combination is most important and sig- nificant. We are too apt to fancy that Ave detect a plagiarism when there is the mere casual resemblance of a single feature. What Mendelssohn once observed to me in regard to musical plagiarism is equally true in regard to those coincidences of scientific thought Avhich have been so often observed in the his- tory of great discoveries. Such casual resemblances, iioAvever close they might seem, he regarded as nothing,the true plagiarism being that Avhich imitates the plan and structure of a Avork or argu-
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3