C - William Harvey: The Vital Aspect of the Circulation

Summary

The history of Harvey's reception deserves an investigation on its own: seldom has a person in the history of medicine received such diverse and contradictory appraisals as has the discoverer of the circulation of the blood (even that title has not gone unchallenged!).

Harvey has often been seen primarily as an empiricist and bracketed with his contemporary, Francis Bacon (1561–1626). Thus Erna Lesky advocates the view that Harvey, in common with Bacon, turned against reliance in authority and scholastic Aristotelianism; he is said to have followed Bacon's epistemological principles in his account of the circulation and thereby to have “clearly demonstrated their fruitfulness.” Especially in the nineteenth century, but also in the twentieth, Harvey has repeatedly been claimed for the mechanical and quantifying view of nature. “The thought appears thoroughly modern,” says E. Ackerknecht, for example, in his history of medicine, “that Harvey isolated his phenomenon. He concerns himself only with the mechanical operations of the circulation… . Harvey's point of view was mechanistic and corresponded to the dominant attitude of his time. He analyzed man and beast as machines.” Similarly, we read in A. Castiglioni's history of medicine: ”… (Harvey) understood that the return of the blood to the heart by means of the veins was a mathematically demonstrable fact… . It is this way of considering the circulation from a mechanical and dynamical point of view that constitutes the truly inspired part of his work… .” The historian of biology, T. Ballauf, also comes to the conclusion: “The ancient theory was qualitative; Harvey's theory springs from quantitative considerations… . The essence of life in beast and man is thus comprised in a mechanism of circulation.”

In recent decades, on the other hand, there has been a growing tendency to do justice also to the “obscure” side of Harvey and to understand him as a critical Aristotelian as, for example, in G. Plochmann6 or in Pagel. H. Driesch had already seen in Harvey the first post-Aristotelian vitalist.7 Pagel accepts this estimate,8 and C. Webster also comes to the conclusion that ”… Harvey regarded reference to teleological and vitalistic principles as necessary for the solution of crucial problems in biology.”9 However, this side of Harvey was also, and continued to be, the object of harsh criticism—going as far as the reproach of “medieval mysticism.”