The advance of medicine / by Lord Moynihan.

  • Moynihan, Berkeley Moynihan, Baron, 1865-1936.
Date:
1932
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The advance of medicine / by Lord Moynihan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    12/68 (page 10)
    William Harvey to Padua, with the result that through his discovery of the circulation of the blood, physiology received a new birth, and the scientific foundation of medicine was for ever truly and firmly laid. Harvey, a true Aristotelian, said of himself that he ‘felt it in some sort criminal to call in question doctrines that had descended through a long succession of ages and carried the authority of the ancients; but he appealed unto Nature that bowed to no antiquity, and was of still higher authority than the ancients’. Many had trembled on the very brink of dis¬ covery of the circulation of the blood, and it is hard to understand how the secret eluded them; it does not require Cuvier to tell us that we are often on the edge of discovery without realizing it. A pupil of Vesalius, Realdus Columbus, in 1559 had by inductive reasoning suggested the movement of the blood: but to ingenious speculation the minds of men had long been hardened. It was plain demonstration and undeniable truth for which they sought. They were weary of poetic metaphor in medicine and recalled the re¬ proach of Aristotle to Plato. Harvey’s dis¬ covery was finally due to his application of the experimental method of Archimedes and Galen to a problem of which many of the factors were already known. In his own words, the circu-