Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 134, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 June 1911 — ONE GREAT ENGLISH DOCTOR [ARTICLE]

ONE GREAT ENGLISH DOCTOR

Some Hitherto Unrecorded Facte About Discoverer of the Circulation of the Blood. It has been said that Shakespeare, Newton, who discovered and proved the attraction of gravitation, and Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, are the three greatest Englishmen. Dr. 8. Weir Mitchell, in a recently delivered lecture, presented many new and interesting facts in the life of Harvey, whose private life is almost as little known as that of Shakespeare. Harvey was bom on April 1, 333 years ago. It was many years after Harvey conceived the idea of the orderly circulation of the blood before he permitted his observations to be printed. He lectured to his students on this subject as early as 1619, but it was not until 1628 that his work' on the circulation of the blood, a quarto of 72 pages, in Latin, was published at Frankfort. There were antivtvisectionlstß In that day, and his experiments, conducted on living dogs and in a day long preceding anaesthetics probably did not go uurebuked. He was loyal to bis royal master and patient, Charles 1., .and for that reason did not escape the vindictiveness of the Cromwellians. They ransacked his house and .destroyed many of his manuscripts that represented years of labor. Doctor Mitchell said that Harvey, while traveling in .Italy, had forgotten to bring with him a certificate stating that he had not been-in a plague-infested town. "Failure to produce the certificate was the cause of his enforced quarantine for three weeks, in an open field, on a litter of straw. One can picture the plight of the gouty Englishman, the physician of kings and the ward of princes, appealing In vain for release from a cruel quarantine imposed by a panic-strick-en community,” Doctor Mitchell read extracts from Harvey’s letters, written in Italy at that time, which show that when thorough angry Harvey wrote abominable English, and that the pangs of sciatica Were not conducive to that elegance of literary style which Harvey showed on other occasions.