A - Harvey and Descartes

Summary

Why may not the thoughts, opinions and manners now prevalent, many years hence return again after a long period of neglect?

—William Harvey,De Generatione Animalium.

THEME AND BACKGROUND OF THE INVESTIGATION

William Harvey (1568–1657) and René Descartes (1596–1650) can be equally well seen as pioneers of modern medicine.

At first, this statement may meet opposition. The great physiologist and discoverer of the circulation of the blood on the one hand, the self-taught medical amateur on the other—how could they be of comparable significance for the development of medicine? Harvey has always assumed a place of honor in the history of medicine, and modern physiology recognizes him as its forebear. Descartes, on the other hand, is referred to chiefly as a precursor of the iatrophysicists, whose exaggerated and oversimplified mechanism is routinely greeted with a condescending smile. In any event, Descartes has been granted recognition at most in the more restricted domain of neurology or physiology, say, for his doctrine of reflexes or of the passions. Otherwise, his physiology has usually been subject to the verdict already enunciated by Claude Bernard: “a phantasy physiology, almost entirely invented.”

Yet Harvey's position as the hero of modern medical science does suffer from a certain weakness, for, as his historiographers have to admit, his view of the world and of man was heavily influenced by Aristotle and even took a vitalistic form; and against all attempts to attribute this side of Harvey as far as possible to his late work, that is, to the De Generatione Animalium (1651), W. Pagel has shown how heavily even the discovery of the circulation rested on Aristotelian natural philosophy and methodology as well as on the speculative heritage of the Renaissance. Thus there arises what at first sight appears to be a paradoxical consequence: one of the most important foundations of modern physiology is profoundly indebted to what are, from today's perspective, “pre-scientific” presuppositions and ideas.6 However, it will be a primary goal of the following investigation to demonstrate with evidence drawn from his chief works that not only Harvey's fundamental perspective, but also his interpretation of the process of circulation itself is of a thoroughly vitalistic nature, and thus deviates in essential features from today's conception.