ty for saying that Harvey had
more than suspected his great truth for twenty-five years before he
dared print it. He realized that it would surely meet with opposition
and would make serious unpleasantness between him and his friends. He
was not deceived in anticipation. Many of his friends fell away from
him, and according to tradition, he lost more than half of his
consulting practice, because physicians could not and would not
believe that a man who evolved such a strange idea as the constant
movement of the blood all over the body, from heart to surface and
back, could possibly be in his right mind, and, above all, be a
suitable person to consult with in difficult cases.

Harvey's case is a lively picture of what happened to Vesalius the
century before in Italy, which we have already discussed at length in
the chapter on the Golden Age of Anatomy. President White insists that
this persecution was due to ecclesiastical opposition to dissection,
but of this there is not a trace to be found. Dissection was carried
on with perfect freedom at all of the Italian universities, though
they were all under ecclesiastical influence, and in none was there
more freedom than in the Papal University of Rome, at the {399} very
time when Vesalius was doing his work in Northern Italy. At this time,
too, Bologna was famous for its work in anatomy. Berengar of Carpi did
a very large number of dissections, though Bologna was at the moment a
Papal city and the University was directly under the Popes.

It is clear, then, that the opposition to Vesalius arose entirely from
the conservatism of fellow scientists in medicine, who thought that
what had been taught for many hundreds of years in the universities,
and had been accepted by men quite as good as Vesalius or any of their
generation for over a thousand years, must surely be nearer absolute
truth than what this young investigator wished them to accept. It is
scarcely to be wondered that they resented, as men always do, what
must have seemed the intrusive rashness of this young medical student,
who was not yet thirty when he began to claim the right to teach his
teachers, and who wanted to tell them that the medical world had all
been wrong not only for many years, but for many centuries, and that
he had been born to set them right. This is, after all, the attitude
of mind which naturally develops in these cases, and it is no wonder
that the old men use whatever means they have in thei