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Harvey, by Hercules! The Hero of the Blood’s Circulation

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Cultural Anatomies of the Heart in Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and Harvey

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Abstract

This study exposes William Harvey’s professional issues and personal ambitions to promote an understanding of his historic role as the deliberator and discoverer of the heart’s circulation of the blood. Harvey brilliantly and subversively assumed the persona of the mythological Hercules to embody his own anatomical labor to understand the heart and the blood flow. He sought to usurp the epithet for immortality, “a second Hercules,” by reforming humanist dependence on ancient texts as authoritative medicine. Harvey’s deliberations and demonstrations dammed Galen’s porous septum in the heart that allowed the blood flow. He alternatively channeled the blood in a powerful supply from the heart through the arteries and veins. Harvey intended that circulation to flush the Augean stable of medicine by anatomical observation and practice.

This chapter was originally published in Medical History 57 (2013): 6–27.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    William Harvey, Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus, facsimile rpt. of Frankfurt: William Fitzer, 1628 (Birmingham, Ala.: Classics of Medicine Library, 1978), p. 18. Translations of Harvey’s texts are mine, except as noted.

  2. 2.

    See Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, “William Harvey’s Anatomy Book and Literary Culture,” Medical History 52 (2008): 73–90; “Reprising Terence’s Plot: William Harvey’s Soliloquy to the College of Physicians,” ibid., pp. 365–86; “Harvey in the Sluice: From Hydraulic Engineering to Human Physiology,” History and Technology 24 (2008): 1–23.

  3. 3.

    Donald Proctor, “William Harvey (1578–1657): Blood Circulates,” in idem, ed., A History of Breathing Physiology (New York: Marvel Dekker, 1995), p. 69.

  4. 4.

    Anonymous (trans.), The Anatomical Exercises of Dr. William Harvey “De motu cordis” 1628: “De circulatione sanguinis” 1652: The First English Text of 1653, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Nonesuch, 1928), rpt. in part two of Harvey, De motu cordis et sanguinis, p. 13; Michael Ryan, trans., “The Anatomical Exercitations of William Harvey M.D.,” London Medical and Surgical Journal 1 (1832): 591; Robert Willis, trans., The Works of William Harvey, M. D. (London: Sydenham Society, 1847), p. 17; Chauncey D. Leake, trans., Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1931), p. 21; Kenneth J. Franklin, trans., Movement of the Heart and Blood in Animals (Oxford: Blackwell Scientific for the Royal College of Physicians of London, 1957), p. 19; Gweneth Whitteridge, trans., An Anatomical Disputation Concerning the Movement of the Heart and Blood in Living Creatures by William Harvey (Oxford: Blackwell Scientific, 1978), p. 20; Emerson T. McMullen, trans., William Harvey’s ‘De motu cordis’: A New Translation and Latin Edition (Bethesda, Md.: Academica, 2005), p. 115.

  5. 5.

    Alexander Bowie (London: George Bell and Sons, 1889), p. 18. Cf. An Anatomical Dissertation upon the Movement of the Heart and Blood in Animals Being a Statement of the Discovery of the Circulation of the Blood; Facsimile Reprint of Frankfurt 1628 with a Translation and Memoir (Canterbury: G. Moreton, 1894), p. 17. Although no translator is credited, the memoir is signed “B,” likely for Bowie. Cf. only “pores” for “porosities.”

  6. 6.

    Kenneth J. Franklin, “On Translating Harvey,” Journal of the History of Medicine 12 (1957): 17–18.

  7. 7.

    For George, see Robert Graves, “Lars porsena,” or the Future of Swearing and Improper Language, 2nd ed. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Treubner, 1936), pp. 8–9; Ashley Montagu, The Anatomy of Swearing (New York: Macmillan, 1967), p. 117.

  8. 8.

    Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 1.4.7, 2.5.4, 2.16.12, 6.1.43, 6.3.74, 10.2.3, 12.1.7, 12.6.4. For his supremacy in the English curriculum, see Thomas W. Baldwin, William Shakespeare’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), 2:197–238.

  9. 9.

    “Cathedrals of the New Foundation, 1541,” in Arthur F. Leach, Educational Charters and Documents, 598 to 1909 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), p. 468.

  10. 10.

    Charleton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), s.v. “Hercules.”

  11. 11.

    “hercle,” “mehercle,” in Lexicon Terentianum, ed. Patrick McGlynn, 2 vols. (London: Blackie and Son, 1963), 1:231–32, 454–55. See also Frank W. Nicholson, “The Use of hercle (mehercule), edepol (pol), Ecastor by Platus and Terence,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 4 (1893). Harvey, De motu cordis et sanguinis, p. 21.

  12. 12.

    Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982); George W. Pigman III, “Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 33 (1980): 1–32; Jo Ann Della Neva, “Reflecting Lesser Lights: The Imitation of Minor Writers in the Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1989): 449–79.

  13. 13.

    See, e.g., Charles Trinkaus, The Poet as Philosopher: Petrarch and the Formation of Renaissance Consciousness (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 9, 23–24; Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 1–9, 256–57.

  14. 14.

    John Aubrey, “Account of William Harvey,” Appendix I in Geoffrey Keynes, The Life of William Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), pp. 434, 435. Cited by Franklin, “Translating Harvey,” pp. 17–18.

  15. 15.

    Frances A. Shirley, Swearing and Perjury in Shakespeare’s Plays (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1979), p. 12.

  16. 16.

    Montagu, Anatomy of Swearing, pp. 31–32.

  17. 17.

    Plautus, Mercator line 411.

  18. 18.

    Shirley, Swearing and Perjury, p. 2; Geoffrey Hughes, Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths, and Profanity in English (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 104. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra III.vii.67. For that play as Herculean, see Eugene M. Waith, The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare, and Dryden (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962), pp. 113–41. For pagan oaths in Shakespeare’s classical plays, see Shirley, Swearing and Perjury, pp. 126–33. For Shakespeare’s use of Hercules, see Adrian Poole, review of Charles Martindale and A. B. Taylor, eds., Shakespeare and the Classics, in The Times Literary Supplement, 29 July 2005, p. 10.

  19. 19.

    Harvey, De motu cordis et sanguinis, p. 6; trans., anonymous, p. 11; trans., Ryan, p. 591; trans., Willis, p. 16; trans., Bowie, p. 16; trans., Leake, p. 18; trans., Franklin, p. 17; trans., Whitteridge, p. 18; trans., McMullen, p. 113.

  20. 20.

    Roger French, William Harvey’s Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 99.

  21. 21.

    Shirley, Swearing and Perjury, p. xi.

  22. 22.

    William Kerrigan, Shakespeare’s Promises (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 28–40.

  23. 23.

    See J. R. Tanner, Tudor Constitutional Documents, a.d. 1485–1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), p. 134.

  24. 24.

    Mark H. Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition, 1558–1642: An Essay on Changing Relations between the English Universities and English Society (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), pp. 171–72, 194, cf. 51.

  25. 25.

    See George N. Clark, A History of the Royal College of Physicians of London, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon for the Royal College of Physicians, 1964), pp. 191–92.

  26. 26.

    James I, The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles H. McIlwain (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1918), pp. 73–74. See also Lori Anne Ferrell, Government by Polemic: James I, the King’s Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Conformity, 1603–1625 (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 22–23, 133–36; Michael C. Questier, Conversion, Politics, and Religion in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 106–7.

  27. 27.

    Keynes, Life of Harvey, p. 137.

  28. 28.

    Ex. 20:7 (AV).

  29. 29.

    See in general Montagu, Anatomy of Swearing, pp. 107–72; Hughes, Swearing, pp. 55–125. See in particular Shirley, Swearing and Perjury, pp. xii, xiii, 4–5, 7–10, and passim; Kerrigan, Shakespeare’s Promises; Montagu, Anatomy of Swearing, pp. 138–53, 157, 159, 163–64; Hughes, Swearing, pp. 103, 105, 108; Alvin B. Kernan, Shakespeare, the King’s Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603–1613 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 14–16.

  30. 30.

    Harvey, De motu cordis et sanguinis, pp. 3–4.

  31. 31.

    See Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century: 1600–1660, 2nd ed. rev. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), pp. 27–28.

  32. 32.

    Edward Hyde, History of the Rebellion, ed. W. Dunn Macray, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1888), 4:489, cited by Julian Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism 1625–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), p. 82.

  33. 33.

    Davies, ibid., pp. 82, 275–87. For religion, see also pp. 5–45, 275–402; Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 280–82; L. J. Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 59–98.

  34. 34.

    For the appointment, see Keynes, Life of Harvey, p. 279.

  35. 35.

    Montagu, Anatomy of Swearing, pp. 166–67, cf. 118; Shirley, Swearing and Perjury, p. 9. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd unabridged ed., s.v. “troth.”

  36. 36.

    Harvey, De motu cordis et sanguinis, pp. 5–9.

  37. 37.

    See Clark, History of Royal College, pp. 93, 188–90. For Harvey as a censor, see p. 293; Charles Webster, “William Harvey and the Crisis of Medicine in Jacobean England,” in Jerome J. Bylebyl, ed., William Harvey and His Age: The Professional and Social Context of the Discovery of the Circulation (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 7–8.

  38. 38.

    Keynes, Life of Harvey, pp. 63, 65.

  39. 39.

    “The Oath,” in Hippocrates, trans. W. H. S. Jones, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1923), 1:299. For the swearing, see Heinrich von Staden, “‘In a Pure and Holy Way’: Personal and Professional Conduct in the Hippocratic Oath?,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 51 (1996): 409; Charles Lichthenthaeler, Der Eid des Hippokrates: Ursprung und Bedeutung (Cologne: Deutscher Ärzte, 1984), pp. 41–48; Leon Edelstein, The Hippocratic “Oath”: Text, Translation, and Interpretation (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1943), p. 50; Steven H. Miles, The Hippocratic “Oath” and the Ethics of Medicine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 14, 159–64. For Renaissance texts and translations, see Thomas Rütten, “François Tissard and His 1508 Edition of the Hippocratic Oath,” in Hippocrates in Context, ed. Philip J. van der Eijk (Leiden: Brill, 2005), pp. 465–91; Thomas Rütten, “Receptions of the Hippocratic Oath in the Renaissance: The Prohibition of Abortion as a Case Study in Reception,” trans. Leonie von Reppert-Bismark, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 51 (1996): 456–68.

  40. 40.

    Clark, History of Royal College, pp. 101, 177, 221, 222, 93, 94, 231, 213.

  41. 41.

    Annals of the Royal College of Physicians, 1518–1915, 48 vols. (London: The College, 1518–1915), 2:179a. For the Statuta vetera, see Clark, History of Royal College, pp. 172–81.

  42. 42.

    See Keynes, Life of Harvey, pp. 53–54.

  43. 43.

    “The Refoundation of Canterbury Cathedral and Grammar School, 1541,” in Educational Charters and Documents, p. 464.

  44. 44.

    William Harvey, The Anatomical Lectures of William Harvey: “Prelectiones anatomie universalis,” “De musculis,” ed. Gweneth Whitteridge (Edinburgh: E. & S. Livingstone for the Royal College of Physicians, London, 1964), p. 310. Translations mine. For bodily oaths, see also Montagu, Anatomy of Swearing, pp. 63, 118; Shirley, Swearing and Perjury, p. 20. For the Ciceronian curse “On their own heads be it!,” see Erasmus, De copia verborum ac rerum, ed. Betty I. Knott, in Opera omnia (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1971–), 1–6:416 (hereafter Amsterdam); trans. Knott, The Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974–), 24:494 (hearafter Collected Works of Erasmus). Cf. Matt. 5:36.

  45. 45.

    Henry Peacham, The Complete Gentleman, The Truth of Our Times, and The Art of Living, ed. Virgil B. Heltzel (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1962), pp. 158–59.

  46. 46.

    Montague, Anatomy of Swearing, pp. 59–61.

  47. 47.

    G. Lake, “Calvinism and the English Church, 1570–1635,” Past and Present 114 (1987): 34.

  48. 48.

    John Calvin, Institutio religionis christianae, in Opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. Eduard Reuss, Eduard Cunitz, and Johann Wilhelm Baum, 59 vols. in 26 (Brunswick: C. A. Schwetschke, 1863–1900), 2:col. 286.

  49. 49.

    Harvey, De motu cordis et sanguinis, p. 21.

  50. 50.

    See Clark, History of Royal College, pp. 177, 181, 293, 190.

  51. 51.

    Calvin, Institutio religionis christianae, cols. 287, 284.

  52. 52.

    For the terms, see Montagu, Anatomy of Swearing, p. 105.

  53. 53.

    “Oath,” in Hippocrates, p. 300; trans., p. 301. See Sanford V. Larkey, “The Hippocratic Oath in Elizabethan England,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 4 (1936): 215, 217, 219. See also Miles, Hippocratic “Oath,” pp. 163–64.

  54. 54.

    Aristotle, Rhetorica 3.14.6 1415a.

  55. 55.

    Galen, De facultatibus naturalibus, in Opera, ed. Karl Gottlob Kuhn, 22 vols. in 20 (Leipzig: Cnobloch, 1821–31), 2:202. For attraction, see Thomas S. Hall, “Euripus; or, the Ebb and Flow of the Blood,” Journal of the History of Biology 8 (1975): 324–31. Cf. the oath “per Iovem” about the failure of anatomists to dissect humans. Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (Basel: I. Oporini, 1543), p. 3r.

  56. 56.

    Harvey, De motu cordis et sanguinis, p. 16.

  57. 57.

    Ibid., pp. 42, 59. Cf. Harvey, Prelectiones anatomie universalis, p. 2, citing Virgil, Eclogiae 3.60. See also Erasmus, De ratione studii, ed. Jean-Claude Margolin, in Opera omnia (Amsterdam), I-2:139–42.

  58. 58.

    Celsus, De medicina prooem. 66.

  59. 59.

    Cicero, Orator 157.

  60. 60.

    Celsus, De medicina, p. 66; first trans. mine; second, trans. W. G. Spencer, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971–79), 1:35.

  61. 61.

    G. Karl Galinsky, The Herakles Theme: The Adaptations of the Hero in Literature from Homer to the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972).

  62. 62.

    Waith, Herculean Hero. Around the turn of the seventeenth century “The Birth of Hercules” was performed at Cambridge. G. C. Moore Smith, College Plays Performed in the University of Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), p. 65.

  63. 63.

    Galinsky, Herakles Theme, pp. 35, 128, 129, 131–47. See also pp. 138–39.

  64. 64.

    Ibid., p. 35. See also Marc-René Jung, Hercule dans la littérature française du XVIe siècle: De l’Hercule courtois à l’Hercule baroque (Geneva: Droz, 1966), pp. 159–69, 174–77; Ulrich Huttner, Die politische Rolle der Heraklesgestalt im griechischen Herrschertum (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1997).

  65. 65.

    Stephen Orgel, “The Example of Hercules,” in Mythographie der frühen Neuzeit: ihre Anwendung in den Künsten, ed. Walther Killy (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1984), pp. 25, 27.

  66. 66.

    Jerry W. Williamson, The Myth of the Conqueror, Prince Henry Stuart: A Study in Seventeenth Century Personation (New York: AMS, 1978), pp. 1–4, 6, 7, 33, 75–76.

  67. 67.

    Robert Wilcher, The Writing of Royalism, 1628–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 11, 13.

  68. 68.

    Harvey, De motu cordis et sanguinis, pp. 3–4.

  69. 69.

    Andrew Lacey, “The Office for King Charles the Martyr in the Book of Common Prayer, 1662–1685,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53 (2002): 510–14, 523–24.

  70. 70.

    Vergil, Aeneid 6.110–11.

  71. 71.

    See Waith, Herculean Hero, p. 11.

  72. 72.

    Galinsky, Herakles Theme, p. 6.

  73. 73.

    Rolf Soellner, “The Madness of Hercules and the Elizabethans,” Comparative Literature 10 (1958): 309–24. Pseudo-Aristotle, Problemata 30.1 953a.

  74. 74.

    Erasmus, De copia, pp. 216, 60, 152, 180, 236; trans., pp. 591, 331, 481, 538, 611. See also the eloquent Gallic Hercules, ibid., pp. 206, 216; and Peacham, Complete Gentleman, p. 18. For the curriculum, see Leach, Educational Charters and Documents, p. 468.

  75. 75.

    Horace, Odes 3.3.9–12; trans. C. E. Bennett, The Odes and Epodes, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1927), p. 179.

  76. 76.

    Erasmus, De ratione studii, ed. Jean-Claude Margolin, in Opera omnia (Amsterdam), I-2:126; trans. Brian McGregor, in Collected Works of Erasmus, 24:676. De ratione studii, p. 131.

  77. 77.

    See Carl Bridenbaugh, Vexed and Troubled Englishmen: 1590–1642 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 43.

  78. 78.

    Erika Rummel, “The Reception of Erasmus’ Adages in Sixteenth-Century England,” Renaissance and Reformation 30 (1994): 19–25.

  79. 79.

    Baldwin, William Shakespeare, 2:749.

  80. 80.

    Harvey, De motu cordis et sanguinis, pp. 21, 59.

  81. 81.

    Erasmus, “Herculi labores,” in Adagia, eds. M. L. van Poll-van de Lisdonk et al., in Opera omnia (Amsterdam), 2–5:24, 26, 28, 39. See also Galinsky, Herakles Theme, pp. 139–41.

  82. 82.

    George Chapman, Chapman’s Homer: The “Iliad,” the “Odyssey” and the Lesser Homerica, ed. Allardyce Nicoll, 2 vols. (New York: Pantheon for the Bolligen Foundation, 1956), 2:8, lines 203, 210.

  83. 83.

    See Galinsky, Herakles Theme, pp. 2–3, 102.

  84. 84.

    Vivian Nutton, Ancient Medicine, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 51, 282, 280, 286, 35.

  85. 85.

    Marcus Aurelius, in Marcus Cornelius Fronto, Epistulae, ed. Michel J. van den Hout, 2 vols. (Pisa: Giardini, 1989), 1:27; cf. pp. 41, 75.

  86. 86.

    Lawrence J. Bliquez, Roman Surgical Instruments and Other Minor Objects in the National Archeological Museum of Naples (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1994), pp. 99–106.

  87. 87.

    Jody R. Pinault, Hippocratic Lives and Legends (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), pp. 7–10, 25, 35–60, 41, 126, 145, 147. See also François Ratief and Louise Cilliers, “The Epidemic of Athens, 430–426 B.C.,” South African Medical Journal 88 (1998): 50–53.

  88. 88.

    See Charles F. Mullett, The Bubonic Plague and England: An Essay in the History of Preventative Medicine (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1956), pp. 55, 64, 90, 125, 160, 164; Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 231–32.

  89. 89.

    See Webster, “William Harvey,” p. 3; Clark, History of Royal College, pp. 254–55.

  90. 90.

    Prefaces to the First Editions of the Greek and Roman Classics and of the Sacred Scriptures, ed. Beriah Botfield (London: H. G. Bohn, 1861), pp. 362, 364–65. Cf. Georg Agricola “with Hercules blessing.” For dextro Hercule, see Erasmus, Adagia, in Opera omnia (Amsterdam), 2–1:186. See Jonathan Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, 1485–1603 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 80–85. See also Nikolaus Mani, “Die griechische editio princeps des Galenos (1525), ihre Enstehung und ihre Wikung,” Gesnerus 13 (1956): 29–52; Paul Potter, “The editiones principes of Galen and Hippocrates and Their Relation,” in Text and Tradition: Studies in Ancient Medicine and Its Transmission Presented to Jutta Kollesch, eds. Klaus-Dieterich Fischer et al. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998), pp. 243–61. For the single detailed record of Linacre’s medical practice, see Erasmus, Epistolae, eds. P. S. Allen et al., 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906–58), 6:46–47; trans. Alexander Dalzell, Collected Works of Erasmus, 11:68. See also Francis Madison, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Linacre Studies: Essays on the Life and Work of Thomas Linacre, c. 1460–1524, ed. idem et al. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), pp. xv–vi.

  91. 91.

    John A. Gee, The Life and Works of Thomas Lupset: With a Critical Text of the Original Treatises and the Letters (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1928), pp. 59–63, 117–18.

  92. 92.

    Charles D. O’Malley, English Medical Humanists: Thomas Linacre and John Caius (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1965), pp. 18–19.

  93. 93.

    Erasmus (trans.), Galen, Exhortatio ad bonas artes praesertim medicinam, De optimo docendi genere, Et qualem oporteat esse medicum, ed. Jan Hendrik Wasink, in Opera omnia (Amsterdam), 1–1:629–69.

  94. 94.

    See also Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Humanist Movement,” in idem, Renaissance Thought and Its Sources, ed. Michael Mooney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), pp. 21–32. For the term “medical humanism,” see recently Nancy G. Siraisi, History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), pp. 4, 261–62.

  95. 95.

    Erasmus, trans., Galen, pp. 631–35.

  96. 96.

    Erasmus, Adagia, in Opera omnia (Amsterdam), 2–5:29; trans. Margaret Mann Phillips et al., Collected Works of Erasmus, 34:172.

  97. 97.

    Harvey, De motu cordis et sanguinis, p. 20.

  98. 98.

    Boyle, “Harvey’s Anatomy Book and Literary Culture”; “Reprising Terence’s Plot”; “Harvey in the Sluice.”

  99. 99.

    Charles Singer, “Some Vesalian Problems,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 17 (1945): 426. See also pp. 427–29, 437–38. Johann Guinther von Andernach, Institutionum anatomicarum secundum Galeni sententiam ad candidatos medicinae libri quatuor (Basel: Balthasar Lasium and Thomas Platter, 1536), p. 46. Translation mine. For Massa’s influence on Harvey, see French, Harvey’s Natural Philosophy, pp. 22–26.

  100. 100.

    C. D. O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964), pp. 90–94, 46, without reference to mehercule.

  101. 101.

    Andreas Vesalius, Anatomicarum Gabrielis Falloppii observationum examen, in Opera omnia anatomica et chirguria, ed. Hermann Baerhaave et al., 2 vols. (Leiden: J. du Vivie and J. and H. Verbeek, 1725), 2:794.

  102. 102.

    Harvey, De motu cordis et sanguinis, pp. 20–21.

  103. 103.

    For invention, see Boyle, “Reprising Terence’s Plot,” and especially its definition on p. 371.

  104. 104.

    Ibid., p. 21.

  105. 105.

    Apollodorus, 2.5.5; Theocritus, Idylls 25; Pausanias, Descriptio Graeciae 5.1.10. For Theocritus, see Graham Zanker, “Pictorial Description as a Supplement for Narrative: Augeas’ Stable in Heracles Leontophonos,” American Journal of Philology 117 (1996): 411–23; Ivan M. Linforth, “Theocritus XXV,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 78 (1947): 77–87. See also Pierre Brulé, “Héraclès et Augé: À propos d’origines rituelles du mythe,” in IIe recontre Héraclénne: Héraclès: Les femmes et le féminin, eds. Colette Jourdain-Annequin et al. (Brussels: Institut historique belge de Rome, 1996), pp. 35–49. For the origin of the artistic cycle of his labors, see Bernard Ashmole and Nicholas Yalouris, Olympia: The Sculptures of the Temple of Zeus (London: Phaidon, 1967), pp. 23, 29, pls. 202–11; Frank Brommer, Heracles: The Twelve Labors of the Hero in Ancient Art and Literature, trans. and enlarged, Shirley J. Schwarz (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1979), p. 30.

  106. 106.

    Nigel J. Spivey, Songs on Bronze: The Greek Myths Made Real (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005), p. 55.

  107. 107.

    Coluccio Salutati, De laboris Herculis, ed. B. L. Ullman, 2 vols. in 1 (Zurich: In aedibus Thesauri mundi, 1951), pp. 365–67.

  108. 108.

    Jung, Hercule, p. 120. For a Hercules-Christ comparison in 1629, see John Milton’s “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” cited by Galinsky, Herakles Theme, p. 205.

  109. 109.

    Erasmus, “Augeae stabulum repurgare,” in Adagia, in Opera omnia, ed. Jean Leclerq, 11 vols. (Leiden, 1703–6), 2:530; trans., Collected Works of Erasmus, 33:201.

  110. 110.

    Leone Allacci, Animadversiones in antiquitatum etruscarum fragmenta ab Inghiramo edita (Paris: S. Cramoisy, 1640), pp. 1, 22, cited by Ingrid D. Rowland, The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 74, 75.

  111. 111.

    Erasmus, Epistolae, 2:101. Erasmus, Antibarbari, ed. Kasimierz Kumaniecki, in Opera omnia (Amsterdam), 1–1:74–75, 59–60, 62–63; trans. Margaret Mann Phillips, Collected Works of Erasmus, 23:49, 25, 36–7.

  112. 112.

    Jacobus Sylvius, Vesani cujusdam calumniarum in Hippocratis Galenique rem anatomicam depulsio (Paris, 1551), fols. 4r, 28r, cited by O’Malley, Vesalius, pp. 248, 250, without reference to my argument. For Vesalius’s impiety, see French, Harvey’s Natural Philosophy, pp. 36–38. For Vesalius’s praise of Sylvius, see his De fabrica, fol. 3r.

  113. 113.

    Harvey, De motu cordis et sanguinis, p. 18.

  114. 114.

    C. R. S. Harris, The Heart and the Vascular System in Ancient Greek Medicine: From Alcmaeon to Galen (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), pp. 305, 313–14, 322, 333, 334; Walter Pagel, William Harvey’s Biological Ideas: Selected Aspects and Historical Background (Basel: S. Karger, 1967), pp. 129–30, 134, 156–69.

  115. 115.

    Harvey, De motu cordis et sanguinis, p. 12 for Matteo Realdo Columbo, De re anatomica (Venice: N. Bevilaqua, 1559).

  116. 116.

    Miguel Servet, Restitutio christianismi (Vienne, 1553).

  117. 117.

    Celsus, De medicina 4.1.4; trans. 1:357. Cf. 7.4.2. See also Jacques André, La vocabulaire latin de l’anatomie (Paris: Belles lettres, 1991), p. 139.

  118. 118.

    Columella, Res rustica 4.1.

  119. 119.

    Vergil, Eclogae 3.60, cited by Harvey, Prelectiones anatomie universalis, p. 2.

  120. 120.

    Vergil, Eclogae 1.34.

  121. 121.

    Harvey, De motu cordis et sanguinis, pp. 18, 32.

  122. 122.

    For contemporary English travelogues, see Thomas Coryat, Coryat’s Crudites, 2 vols. (Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons for the University, 1905), 1:270; Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary, 3 vols. (Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1907), 1:150. See also Vicenzo Dotto’s map, Pianta di Padova, in Angelo Portenari, Della felicità di Padova (Padua: Tozzi, 1623). For Harvey and Paduan waterways, see also Boyle, “Harvey in the Sluice.”

  123. 123.

    Moryson, Itinerary, p. 152.

  124. 124.

    Harvey, De motu cordis et sanguinis, pp. 32, 41.

  125. 125.

    See, e.g., French, Harvey’s Natural Philosophy, pp. 90–93, 106, 372; Pagel, Harvey’s Biological Ideas, pp. 24–25, 73–79; idem, “William Harvey Revisited (I) and (II),” History of Science 9 (1970): 1; Don G. Bates, “Harvey’s Account of His ‘Discovery,’” Medical History 36 (1992): 361–78, with copia as “large amount,” p. 363.

  126. 126.

    Harvey, De motu cordis et sanguinis, pp. 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 52, 53, 54, 63, 72. For quantitas, see p. 44.

  127. 127.

    Leach, Educational Documents and Charters, p. 468.

  128. 128.

    Erasmus, De copia, pp. 34, 26, 34, 28, 26, 35–38, 280; trans., pp. 303, 295, 303, 298, 295, 658.

  129. 129.

    Harvey, De motu cordis et sanguinis, p. 41.

  130. 130.

    Ibid., pp. 5, 58.

  131. 131.

    Wolfgang Höfer, Hercules medicus; sive, locorum communum liber (Venice: Jacobus Kürner, 1657), frontispiece and preface.

  132. 132.

    Harvey, De motu cordis et sanguinis, p. 20. This comparison is not in Aristotle’s extant works, although he cites Euripus for earthquakes and the purple murex in Meteorologia 2.8 366a; Historia animalium 5.15 547a.

  133. 133.

    Harvey, De motu cordis et sanguinis, p. 20, citing André DuLaurens, Historia anatomica humani corporis, in Opera omnia anatomica et medica (Frankfurt: William Fitzer, 1627), p. 352. If Harvey consulted this edition, it would date his sentence, and it may have motivated the submission of his own manuscript to that publisher.

  134. 134.

    Jerome J. Bylebyl, “Disputation and Description in the Renaissance Pulse Controversy,” in The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Andrew Wear et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 226–27, 241–42.

  135. 135.

    Galen, De usu partium libri XVII, ed. George Helmreich, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: A. M. Hakkert, 1968), 1:331. Cf. De methodo medendi, in Opera, 10:649, 697. George Ent’s Apologia pro circuitione sanguinis (Leiden: Peter Vander, 1687), which was dedicated to Harvey, included a formal digression on “the ebb and flow of the sea,” pp. 64–100.

  136. 136.

    Procopius, History of the Wars of Justinian 8.6.20 10; trans. H. B. Dewing, Procopius, 7 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962–71), 5:107, 103–5, 107–9.

  137. 137.

    Pliny, Naturalis historia 2.99.218–2.100.219; Strabo, Geographia 1.2.30; Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae 2.1 meter. Cf. the tidal phenomenon of the straits of Gibraltar with the Pillars of Hercules, which the hero erected as his monument. Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca 4.18.4–5; Procopius, Historia 8.6.3, 8.6.8; Thomas Heywood, The Brazen Age (London: Nicholas Okes for Samuel Rand, 1613), pp. 38, 42. See also the title page of Bacon, Instauratio magna, 1620, and A. D. Burnett, The Engraved Title-Page of Bacon’s “Instauratio magna”: An Icon and Paradigm of Science and its Wider Implications (Durham: Thomas Harriot Seminar, 1998), p. 2 fig. 1, and pp. 6–11. For Bacon and Harvey, see also Keynes, Life of Harvey, pp. 157–61, 433; French, Harvey’s Natural Philosophy, pp. 325–27. Cf. also the mouth of the Thames River, a native analogy that Harvey later explicates, inserting himself into the tradition of Aristotle’s deliberation about Euripus with that English example. Ercole V. Ferrario and F. N. L. Paynter, “William Harvey’s Debate with Casper Hofmann on the Circulation of the Blood: New Documentary Evidence,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 15 (1960): 15. Hofmann seems not to have known that the Thames is a tidal river, which regularly reverses its flow. “Caspar Hofmann to William Harvey,” Appendix I in Gweneth Whitteridge, William Harvey and the Circulation of the Blood (London: Macdonald, 1971), p. 242. For Hofmann, see French, Harvey’s Natural Philosophy, pp. 255–58.

  138. 138.

    Nathanael Carpenter, Geography Delineated Forth in Two Books, 2nd ed. (Oxford: John Lichfield and William Turner for Henry Cripps, 1625), book 2, 82.

  139. 139.

    Cited by William T. Costello, The Scholastic Curriculum at Early Seventeenth-Century Cambridge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 59.

  140. 140.

    Francesco Stelluti, “Al detto Sig. Galilei del sig. Francesco Stelluti, Accademico Linceo,” in Galileo Galilei, Le opere di Galileo Galilei, eds. Antonio Favoro et al., rpt. of Edizione Nazionale, 20 vols. (Florence: S. A. G. Barbèra, 1929–39), 6:209; The Controversy on the Comets of 1618, trans. Stillman Drake et al. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), p. 159.

  141. 141.

    Erasmus, De copia, p. 104; translation mine. Erasmus, Parabolae, ed. Betty I. Knott, in Opera omnia (Amsterdam), 1–5:272. Erasmus, “Euripus homo,” in Adagia (Amsterdam), 2–2:382–85; trans., Collected Works of Erasmus, 32:215–16.

  142. 142.

    Seneca, Hercules Oetaeus lines 774–841. For the heart and blood, see lines 1220–23; for the pillars of Hercules, line 1240.

  143. 143.

    Erasmus, De conscribendis epistolis, ed. Jean-Claude Margolin, in Opera omnia (Amsterdam), 1–2:337; trans. Charles Fantazzi, Collected Works of Erasmus, 24:88.

  144. 144.

    Heywood, Brazen Age, pp. 34–42, with citation p. 39. See also Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra IV.xii.43–47.

  145. 145.

    Harvey, De motu cordis et sanguinis, p. 20.

  146. 146.

    Ibid. Cf. Girolamo Fabrici d’Aquapendente, De venarum ostiolis (Padua, 1603), facsimile rpt., ed. Kenneth J. Franklin (London: Balliére, Tindall, and Cox, 1933), p. 72.

  147. 147.

    Ibid., pp. 72, 71, 75, 78, 80–81.

  148. 148.

    Erasmus, De copia, p. 208; trans., p. 282. The source is Xenophon, Memorabilia 2.1.21–34; but also Cicero, De officiis 1.32.118. See Erwin Panofsky, Hercules am Scheidewege und andere antike Bildstoffe in der neuren Kunst (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1930); Waith, Herculean Hero, pp. 42–43; Emma Stafford, “Vice or Virtue? Herakles and the Art of Allegory,” in Herakles and Hercules: Exploring a Graeco-Roman Divinity, ed. Louis Rawlings et al. (Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2005), pp. 71–96.

  149. 149.

    Fabrici, De venarum ostiolis, pp. 75, 78, 80–81.

  150. 150.

    Seneca, Hercules Oetaeus line 1661.

  151. 151.

    Portenari, Padova, pp. 10, 11, 12.

  152. 152.

    Corrado Lattanzi, “L’attività giovanile de Bartlomeo Ammannati in Veneto,” in Bartolomeo Ammannati scultore e architteto, 1511–1592, eds. Rosselli Del Turco et al. (Florence: Associazione dimore historiche italiane, Sezione Toscana: Alinea, 1995), pp. 88–93; Michael Kiene, Bartolomeo Ammannati (Milan: Electa, 1995), pp. 34–45; Lionello Puppi, “Il ‘Colosso’ del Mantova,” in Essays Presented to Myron Gilmore, eds. Sergio Bertelli et al., 2 vols. (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978): 1:11–29; Joachim Poeschke, Michelangelo and His World: Sculpture of the Italian Renaissance, trans. Russell Stockman (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), pp. 195–206.

  153. 153.

    Erasmus, “Herculanus nodus,” in Adagia (Amsterdam), 2–2:367–8; “nodum solvere,” 2–1:28, 118–9. For the knot of virginity (hymen) on the London stage, see Ben Johnson, “Hymnaei; or, The Solemnities of Masque and Barrier at a Marriage,” in Selected Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 49, 342; William Shakespeare and George Willis, Pericles IV.ii.1146, cf. Shakespeare, The Tempest IV.i.16. See also Stephanos Panayotakis, “The Knot and the Hymen: A Reconsideration of nodus virginitatis (Hist. Apoll. 1),” Mnemosyne 53 (2000): 605, 603. See also Ann M. Nicgorski, “The Magic Knot of Herakles: The Propaganda of Alexander the Great, and Tomb II at Vegina,” in Herakes and Hercules, pp. 97–102.

  154. 154.

    C. L. Day, Quipus and Witches Knots: The Role of the Knot in Primitive and Ancient Cultures (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1967), pp. 53–57, citing Pliny, Naturalis historia 28.17.63–4. For Oribasius in translation, De laqueis, see pp. 117–18. For illustrations, see pp. 133, 138, 144.

  155. 155.

    Whitteridge, William Harvey, p. 83.

  156. 156.

    Harvey, De motu cordis et sanguinis, p. 20. Cf. DuLaurens, Historia anatomica, p. 352.

  157. 157.

    Erasmus, Declamatio in laudem artis medicae, ed. J. Domański, in Opera omnia (Amsterdam), I-4:164–66, 167, 168, 178–80, 184, 185–86; trans. Brian McGregor, Collected Works of Erasmus, 29:39, 45, 47–48, 49, 42.

  158. 158.

    Harvey, Prelectiones anatomie universalis, p. 175.

  159. 159.

    Keynes, Life of Harvey, pp. vii, 47.

  160. 160.

    Ernst R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), pp. 132–33.

  161. 161.

    Elizabeth Spieler, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 71–72.

  162. 162.

    Thomas Fuller, History of the Worthies of England (London: J. G. W. L. and W. G. for Thomas Williams, 1662), cited by H. Bayon, “William Harvey, Physician and Biologist: His Precursors, Opponents, and Successors,” Annals of Science 3 (1938): 85.

  163. 163.

    Edelstein, Hippocratic “Oath,” pp. 51–52.

  164. 164.

    Erasmus, De copia, p. 76; trans., p. 347. For cursing, see De copia, pp. 157–58.

  165. 165.

    Keynes, Life of Harvey, pp. 290, 316, 420, 397.

  166. 166.

    John Collop, “On Doctor Harvey,” in Poesis Redivia; or, Poesies Reviv’d, in The Poems of John Collop, ed. Conrad Hilberry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), p. 102.

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    Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle

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Boyle, M.O. (2018). Harvey, by Hercules! The Hero of the Blood’s Circulation. In: Cultural Anatomies of the Heart in Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and Harvey. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93653-6_5

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