Translator’s Foreword

Summary

History is always more complicated than it looks at first sight. In this book, Thomas Fuchs illustrates that thesis with remarkable clarity. Let me anticipate, with some commentary of my own, the major moves of the story he has to tell. As the title indicates, he is first comparing the views of Harvey and Descartes about the heart and blood, and then tracing the way those opposing views—both accepting the circulation, but differing on the motion of the heart— were received, revised, rejected, or renewed in succeeding generations by medical writers in various parts of Europe.

First then, against the background of the collapse of Galenism, Fuchs examines Harvey's approach to cardiac and circulatory physiology, not only through the text of the De Motu Cordis, but through a consideration of all his surviving works, especially the essays on generation and also the recently published, but not much discussed, treatise on the local motion of animals. As the discoverer of the circulation, Harvey is rightly celebrated as the founder of modern physiology. But is he a “modern” thinker? Yes, he does use quantitative arguments at one point in the De Motu Cordis. But, if he is rejecting Galenic doctrines, he is doing so through a return to Aristotle—and what could be less modern than that? But that “fact”, too, is complicated. His teachers in Padua before him, and Harvey himself, were Aristotelians in that they knew well, admired, and to some extent accepted the insights offered by Aristotle's biological writings. Taking Aristotle—as, indeed, Georges Cuvier was to do two centuries later—as the founder of comparative anatomy, they were happy to follow in the footsteps of a great biologist. It should be noted, however, that that does not mean Harvey was an “Aristotelian” in the sense in which seventeenth century scholastics were followers of “the Philosopher.” On the European continent, at least, university students had to be trained in the elements of Aristotelian philosophy before they proceeded to the higher discipline of medicine, law, or theology. They were taught through recent commentaries on the works of Aristotle, filtered through centuries of debate and revision— and usually not on the biological works. They had to learn to think, and write, in terms of substance, form, and matter as their basic concepts, relying on notions like substantial form, real qualities, and the like.