Keynes on William Harvey*

So far it would seem we have had many lives, but not the Life of William Harvey. An ideal Life should be based on all the documentary, literary and other evidence that can possibly be sought out at the time and should be shown to be thus based. There should be no criticism nor any attempts at whitewashing or worshipping the hero in the light of contemporary standards, but there should be a deep understanding of his motives and of what he stood for. He should thus emerge as the child of his time and yet as a figure in its own right-a secular phenomenon without predecessors and followers. Last but not least, the narrative should give pleasure if not thrill to the reader. A tall order-but, then, we are dealing here with a great medical biography. Indeed it goes far in meeting the demands of our schedule. It is the result of a life-long study of uniquely rich material, patiently and assiduously collected over the decades and including items from the 'stacks and parcels' in which the library of Sir d'Arcy Power was dispersed in 1942. Indeed Sir Geoffrey looks upon his own work as the continuation of early attempts at reconstruction of Harvey's personality by his friend and predecessor at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, in 1897. Nothing, however, can be compared in depth and width ofscope with the work under notice. In fact it is the crowning ofthree of his preceding works, each a classic in itself: the Harvey Bibliography of 1928 (second ed. 1953), the Portraiture (1949) and the Personality of William Harvey (1949 and continued in 1958). Three features stand out immediately: (1) the space allotted to documents old and new which take up the story most effectively, (2) the multitude of new documents and facts and (3) the sure judgement in appreciating Harvey, the naturalist and man of research and discovery, and Harvey, the practitioner and eminent dramatis persona in the seventeenth-century English scene. A few examples may be given: Many will remember the startling and tantalizing hints to the discovery of Public Records material throwing new light on medical practice in Jacobean days and especially on that of Harvey (C. J. Sisson, 'Elizabethan life in public records', The Listener, 1951, 45, 998). The full story here emerges from a complete transcript prepared for the author and followed by his carefully balanced judgement. Medical practice was tough in those days. It had to rely on secret nostrums when and where the reckless competition of apothecaries and quacks called for this. Their use was not beneath a Harvey, nor was a lawsuit against the heirs of a patient for one outstanding quarterly payment. Judged by modem standards this is most regrettable since the 'secret' remedy should from the beginning have been doomed to utter failure in the face of a large stone of the bladder (finally removed by surgery, soon followed by death). However, Harvey would appear to have been inveigled into this by Christopher Brooke, a lawyer friend and his litigious wife. This incidentally shows how the 'threads' in Harvey's story connect and add up to a full picture. The circumstantial evidence assembled by F. N. L. Poynter (J.Hist.Med., 1960, 15, 233) to the effect that Harvey must have been well acquainted with John Donne is further strengthened by the background to Harvey's lawsuit as unravelled