William Harvey's Soliloquy to the College of Physicians: Reprising Terence's Plot

William Harvey published his new cardiology not only from ‘‘ocular demonstrations’’ and ‘‘reasoned arguments’’ but also with literary genius. His natural philosophy has been appreciated; his cultured wit, ignored. A genius was classically every person’s natal god, the guardian spirit of innate talent who fostered invention. Roman comedy, which Harvey exploits, developed its root, gignere, ‘‘to engender’’, into semen, virility, creative energy. In Renaissance culture genius begot emulation, in Erasmus’s excellent theory an imitation beyond mimicry that surpassed the ancient masters by cultivating a native gift. So Harvey ingeniously introduces his book to his fellows in the College of Physicians, London, by reprising a familiar role. ‘‘If something should be useful and advantageous to the literary republic from my labour in this part’’, he pleads, ‘‘perhaps it might be granted that I had acted rightly, and others might see that I have not lived utterly unskilled, and as the old man says in the Comedy: ‘Nobody has ever had such a well worked-out plan of life that circumstances, age, and experience don’t introduce some new factor, teach some new lesson, so that you no longer know what you thought you knew and you reject in practice what you had reckoned to be of prime importance’’’. His appropriation of this soliloquy from Terence’s Adelphi graces his first chapter significantly. For, as Harvey understood from his humanist studies, rhetoric is not sophistical but epistemic: truthful by persuasive argument, rather than coercive logic. And the truth of his discovery about the blood’s circulation is what Harvey urges on his fellows ‘‘for the love of the truth’’. As he argues, ‘‘Certainly true philosophers, who blaze with the love of truth and wisdom, never consider