An examination of the differences between the two editions confirms that the need for a reissue had little or nothing to do with printing mistakes or the publisher. The second edition is a substantially different work, containing over a third more recipes. And far from eliminating errors, it introduced several of its own. The real reason for the reissue appears to have been an editorial dispute within the College over the contents. The bulk of the recipes it contained were Galenicals – medicines based on Galen’s writings and drawn from ancient Greek, Roman, and Arabic pharmacopoeias, most dating back to the early centuries ad. However, ten pages of novel ‘chemical’ medicines were also included. Some of the traditionalists in the College probably objected to this and tried to have them removed, in the process provoking a review of the book’s entire contents. When the College, in a metaphorical frenzy, accused the printer of snatching away the manuscript ‘as a blaze flares up from a fire and in a greedy famine deprives the stomach of its still unprepared food’, it was using him to draw the heat from disputes within its own profession.40
Harvey’s involvement in the drafting of the dispensatory is undocumented. However, he is listed as one of its authors, bearing the title Medicus Regis juratus, which shows that by 1618, aged forty, he had become a member of King James’s medical retinue, placing him near the peak of his profession. However, posterity would remember him not for his dazzling rise, nor for his contribution to the botched Pharmacopoeia, but for another achievement made over this period.
In 1615, Harvey was appointed the College’s Lumleian Lecturer in Anatomy, succeeding his fellow Censor Dr Thomas Davies, who had held the post since 1607. The lectureship had been founded in 1582 by Lord Lumley to advance England’s ‘knowledge of physic’.41 Attendance for College Fellows was mandatory, twice a week for an hour through the year, though they came reluctantly, the College at one stage being forced to more than double the fine for nonattendance to 2s. 6d.
Harvey was well qualified for the post. Unlike many of his colleagues, he was an enthusiastic and unflinching anatomist. At various stages in his career he performed or witnessed dissections of cats, deer, chickens, guinea-pigs, seals, snakes, moles, rats, frogs, fish, pigeons, an ostrich, his wife’s parrot, a pet monkey, a human foetus, his father, and his sister. It has been estimated that he cut up 128 species of animal as well as numerous humans. His autopsies revealed the size of his father’s ‘huge’ colon, his sister’s ‘large’ spleen (which weighed five pounds), and the condition of the genitalia of a man who was claimed to have died at the age of a hundred and fifty-two, which, as Harvey reported to the King, was entirely consistent with a prosecution for fornication the subject had received after turning a hundred.42
Harvey looked upon anything that moved as potential material, complaining during a journey to the Continent in 1630 that he ‘could scarce see a dog, crow, kite, raven or any bird, or anything to anatomise, only some few miserable people’.43 London in the early seventeenth century would provide a richer source of specimens, both human and animal. The aviary in St James’s Park had ostriches and parrots; merchants arrived from the East Indies with monkeys and snakes; and the streets were packed with a ready supply of feral dogs and cats. He and his colleagues also had access to a supply of human specimens taken from the scaffolds at Tyburn and Newgate, the traditional places of execution. Examining bodies freshly taken down, and noting how they were soaked in urine, he opened them up while the noose was still tight, in the hope of examining the organs before the final signs of life were extinguished.44
Harvey’s Lumleian lectures began in December 1616, and they were masterpieces. His lecture notes have, unlike most of his other papers, survived, proudly introduced by a title-page upon which he inscribed in red ink, in Latin, ‘Lectures on the Whole of Anatomy by me William Harvey, Doctor of London, Professor of Anatomy and Surgery, Anno Domini 1616, aged 37’. Presumably to guard against casual perusal, the notes that follow are written in the barely legible scrawl for which future generations of physicians were notorious. Though the bulk are in Latin (not very good Latin), they are peppered with fascinating case studies and bawdy asides, all in the vulgar tongue. He poked fun at ‘saints’ – Puritans like William Attersoll – for their calloused knees, the stigmata of their overearnest piety.45 He told the story of Sir William Rigdon, whose stomach filled with yellow bile, as a result of which he died hiccoughing. He noted that ‘in [men with] effeminate constitution the breasts [may be enlarged]; and in some milk’, citing as an example Sir Robert Shurley (c.1518–1628), envoy to the Shah of Persia and a kinsman of William Attersoll’s patron. Commenting on the anatomy of the penis, he noted that Lord Carey, presumably another aristocratic client, had a ‘pretty bauble, a whale’, and that a man who lived ‘behind Covent Garden’ to the west of the City had one ‘bigger than his belly … as if for a buffalo’.46 He observed how ‘fecund’ the penis is in ‘giving birth to so many names for itself: twenty in Greek, sixteen in Latin. He dwelt on the nature of sexual urges, estimating that a healthy man can achieve up to eight copulations a night, though ‘some lusty Laurence will crack … 12 times’. ‘Few pass 3 in one night,’ he added, more realistically.47 He also asserted that males ‘woo, allure, make love; female[s] yield, condescend, suffer – the contrary preposterous’. There were not, of course, any women in Harvey’s audience to challenge these assertions.48
The lectures were broken into three ‘courses’ performed ‘according to the [hour]glass’, in other words to a strict schedule: ‘1st lower venter [belly], nasty yet recompensed by admirable variety. 2nd the parlour [thorax or chest]. 3rd divine Banquet of the brain.’49 The first course was completed in December 1616, the second in January 1618, the third, the ‘divine Banquet of the brain’, in February 1619. The exact date of the lectures depended on the availability of specimens and the weather, which had to be cold enough to prevent the body from decomposing before the dissection was complete.50 Harvey reckoned that in the right conditions he had three days to complete a lecture before the body would start to ‘annoy’.51
The proceedings would have been conducted with ceremony and decorum. Harvey was no foppish ‘gallant’ and disliked fancy clothes – ‘the best fashion to leap, to run, to do anything [is] strip [ped] to ye skin,’ he would tell his audience during the section on the epidermis.52 Nevertheless, he would have felt obliged to wear a purple gown and silk cap, the College livery for such occasions. He also carried a magnificent whalebone probe tipped with silver, which he used to point out parts of the body.
His lectures would begin with a few philosophical observations. Harvey adopted the strictly scholastic view of anatomy, that it was first philosophical (concerned with revealing universal truths about nature and the cosmos), then medical (demonstrating medical theory), and finally mechanical (showing how the body worked). When it came to the philosophy, Harvey’s authority was Aristotle, his intellectual hero. Aristotle taught that knowledge was derived from observation and experimentation. He also taught that the cosmos had an order and unity. Every physical entity, including every organ of the body, had its place and purpose in this greater scheme, which he called nature. ‘The body as a whole and its several parts individually have definite operations for which they are made,’ he wrote in On the Parts of Animals.53 Time and again in his lectures,