THE ESSEX FIELD CLUB.
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himself and his children by skill and hard work. William Harvey was
born at Folkestone. April 1st, 1578, and died at Roehampton in Surrey
June 3rd, 1657.
William went to school at Canterbury Grammar School, and at sixteen
was entered at Caius College, Cambridge. He took his degree in arts in.
1397, and went to Fadua University for five years and studied under the
great Fabricus, one of the first of the great anatomists of the Renaissance.
Fabricus thought the blood was conveyed from the heart by the veins,
and that the arteries contained air.
Harvey, after working at Padua for five years, returned to England,
obtained his diploma as doctor of medicine in 1602 and settled in London
as a physician. In 1609 he was appointed physician to St. Bartholomew's.
Hospital. In 1615 he became Lumleian Lecturer at the College of Physicians,
and he held this post until 1656. As Lumleian Lecturer he had to deliver
a course of lectures every year. It is now certain that in his first course
of lectures, on April 17th, 18th and 19th. 1616, he expounded his original
and complete theory of the circulation of the blood with which his name
is indelibly associated. He did not. however, put these views into print
until 1628. Like Darwin, he thought over his new ideas for a long time,
and therefore did not rush into print as do so many investigators. His-
treatise, entitled "Exercitatio Anatomica de motu Cordis et Sanguinis in
Animatibus," was published at Frankfurt after his having (as he states
in the preface) for nine years more gone on demonstrating the subject
in his college lectures, illustrating it by new and additional arguments,
and freeing it from objections raised by the most skilful anatomists.
Possibly by the aid of his brother James, who held a post at Court
as servant-in-ordinary to the King, William Harvey was appointed
physician to James T, and later on to Charles I.
When the Civil War broke out he attended the King in his various
expeditions, and was present with him at the battle of Edgehill, October
23rd, 1642. Aubrey says : "During the fight the Prince of Wales and
"the Duke of York were committed to his care. He told me that he with-
"drew with them under a hedge, and tooke out of his pockett a booke,
"and read. But he had not read very long before a bullett of a great
"gun grazed on the ground near him, which made him remove his station."
He died June 3rd, 1657, and was buried in a vault at Hempstead, near
Saffron Walden, in Essex.
Now, when did William Harvey stay at Rolls ? Sir D'Arcy Power
tells me that his visits to Rolls were frequent after 1620.
He was a man of small stature. He is frequently referred to in con-
temporary writings as "Little Doctor Harvey." He was also a man of
very quick temper, and this characteristic, as I shall show later, was
present in many of the Harvey family. In matters of stature and quick
temper he was like his great medical successor, John Hunter. Some
curious details of the habits of Harvey have been handed down.
Aubrey says: "He was much and often troubled with the gout, and
"his way of cure was thus : He would sit with his legs bare, though it 
"were frost, on the leads of Cockaine House, put them into a pail of
"water till he was almost dead with cold, then betake himself to his stove,
"and so 'twas gone."