(25) See Knox: Great Artists
and Great Anatomists, London, 1862, and Mathias
Duval in Les Manuserits de Leonard de Vince: De
l’Anatomie, Feuillets A, Edouard Rouveyre,
Paris, 1898. For a good account of Leonardo
da Vinci see Merejkovsky’s novel, The Forerunner,
London, 1902, also New York, Putnam.
HARVEY
Let us return to Padua about the year 1600.
Vesalius, who made the school the most famous anatomical
centre in Europe, was succeeded by Fallopius, one
of the best-known names in anatomy, at whose death
an unsuccessful attempt was made to get Vesalius back.
He was succeeded in 1565 by a remarkable man, Fabricius
(who usually bears the added name of Aquapendente,
from the town of his birth), a worthy follower of
Vesalius. In 1594, in the thirtieth year of his
professoriate, he built at his own expense a new anatomical
amphitheatre, which still exists in the university
buildings. It is a small, high-pitched room with
six standing-rows for auditors rising abruptly one
above the other. The arena is not much more than
large enough for the dissecting table which, by a
lift, could be brought up from a preparing room below.
The study of anatomy at Padua must have declined since
the days of Vesalius if this tiny amphitheatre held
all its students; none the less, it is probably the
oldest existing anatomical lecture room, and for us
it has a very special significance.
Early in his anatomical studies Fabricius had demonstrated
the valves in the veins. I show you here two
figures, the first, as far as I know, in which these
structures are depicted. It does not concern us
who first discovered them; they had doubtless been
seen before, but Fabricius first recognized them as
general structures in the venous system, and he called
them little doors—“ostiola.”
The quadrangle of the university building at Padua
is surrounded by beautiful arcades, the walls and
ceilings of which are everywhere covered with the
stemmata, or shields, of former students, many of them
brilliantly painted. Standing in the arcade on
the side of the “quad” opposite the entrance,
if one looks on the ceiling immediately above the
capital of the second column to the left there is seen
the stemma which appears as tailpiece to this chapter,
put up by a young Englishman, William Harvey, who
had been a student at Padua for four years. He
belonged to the “Natio Anglica,” of which
he was Conciliarius, and took his degree in 1602.
Doubtless he had repeatedly seen Fabricius demonstrate
the valves of the veins, and he may indeed, as a senior
student, have helped in making the very dissections
from which the drawings were taken for Fabricius’
work, “De Venarum Osteolis,” 1603.
If one may judge from the character of the teacher’s
work the sort of instruction the student receives,
Harvey must have had splendid training in anatomy.
While he was at Padua, the great work of Fabricius,
“De Visione, Voce et Auditu” (1600) was
published, then the “Tractatus de Oculo Visusque
Organo” (1601), and in the last year of his residence
Fabricius must have been busy with his studies on the
valves of the veins and with his embryology, which
appeared in 1604. Late in life, Harvey told Boyle
that it was the position of the valves of the veins
that induced him to think of a circulation.
