The reception of De motu cordis
Commentary
Astonishing as it may seem, Harvey’s discovery was originally rejected by the medical establishment at home and abroad. Essentially, it was open to two objections from his Galenic and Aristotelian contemporaries.
The first objection was theoretical and involved his radical departure from what, in the Aristotelian tradition, constitutes an acceptable philosophical explanation. ‘Medical philosophers like [the Altdorf professor] Caspar Hofmann [1572-1648] asserted that circulation had no purpose, no Aristotelian final cause: it was therefore incapable of proper demonstration in a philosophical sense. Hofmann concluded that Harvey was not a philosopher, but a mere accountant, totting up quantities (of blood leaving the heart); philosophers, with Aristotle, thought that mathematics could not uncover essences.’
The second objection was practical. ‘Educated medical practitioners’, such as Harvey's countryman James Primrose (d. 1659) and the distinguished French anatomist and personal physician to Marie de' Medici, Jean Riolan (1577/80-1657), ‘were satisfied that Galenic physiology worked well in practice.’ But ‘if the blood circulated, the basis of [established] practice would be destroyed as the humours of the body would be mixed together and could not be changed or evacuated separately, and there would be no basis for the letting of blood.’
‘Harvey understood these objections. Although an Aristotelian, he could not give a final cause of circulation and was driven to say that it had to be enough to show that a thing is, despite being unable to say what it is for. He had no convincing answer to the charge of destroying the basis of medical practice. Harvey's doctrine, because radical, was isolated; opponents such as Primrose could use all the authority and arguments of Galenic physiology and its vehicle, an Aristotelian natural philosophy, that reached and explained all the phenomena of the physical world.’
Quoting R. French, ‘Harvey, William (1578–1657), physician and discoverer of the circulation of the blood’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (23 Sept. 2004).
Images
Left: Portrait of Jean Riolan, line engraving by M. Lasne after D. Dumontier, 1626. Source: Wellcome Collection 16i: https://wellcomecollection.org/works/uqw3mhjd.
Right: Portrait of Caspar Hofmann in Bibliotheca chalcographica, illustrium virtute atque eruditione in tota Europa, clarissimorum virorum ... / Collectore Jano Jacobo Boissardo, ves[unt], sculptore Jan: Theod: de Bry (Frankfurt am Main, [1650?]-1664). Source: Wellcome Collection: https://wellcomecollection.org/works/gcpqm6nf.