The Herbalist: Nicholas Culpeper and the Fight for Medical Freedom. Benjamin Woolley

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      Galen was very pleased with this theory, and considered it definitive. ‘I have done as much for medicine as Trajan did for the Roman Empire, when he built bridges and roads through Italy,’ he wrote. ‘It is I, and I alone, who have revealed the true path of medicine. It must be admitted that Hippocrates already staked out this path … he prepared the way, but I have made it passable.’¹⁷

      Galen underestimated his influence. His ideas survived not only Trajan’s Rome, but the sacking of the great Library of Alexandria, the birth and spread of Christianity and Islam, the Black Death, the invention of printing, and the Reformation – a millennium and a half of history – with barely any adjustment. As late as 1665, one medical reformer was complaining that ‘an Extreme Affection to Antiquity [has] kept Physic, till of late years as well as other Sciences, low, at a stay and very heartless, without any notable Growth or Advancement’. Galenism held sway over the College of Physicians from the day it was founded. Everyone who wanted to practise medicine in London had to conform to its principles. This was still the case on 4 May 1603 when the twenty-five-year-old William Harvey presented himself to the Censors of the College of Physicians to apply for a licence to practise.¹⁸

      Little did the Censors appreciate what the young man who sat before them would do for their profession. William Harvey went on to become a colossus of the medical world, hailed as one of the world’s greatest anatomists and England’s first true scientist. Sir Geoffrey Keynes, author of the definitive 1967 biography of Harvey, was so overcome with admiration for his subject, he concluded that ‘even if we wished to do so, it would be difficult, from the evidence in our possession, to find any serious flaw in Harvey’s character’. One contemporary wrote that his ‘Sharpness of Wit and brightness of mind, as a light darted from Heaven, has illuminated the whole learned world’.¹⁹

      Harvey was born on 1 April 1578 to Joan, ‘a Godly harmless Woman … a careful tender-hearted Mother’, and Thomas Harvey, mayor of Folkestone in Kent, a rich landowner with properties not far from Isfield.²⁰ After attending King’s School in Canterbury, he was sent to Gonville and Caius College Cambridge, where its benefactor Dr Caius was Master. Caius had made medicine a core part of his college’s curriculum, securing a royal charter allowing two bodies of criminals executed in Cambridge to be used for anatomical demonstrations. Harvey’s own education benefited from this arrangement as he later recalled seeing ‘a frightened person hanged on a ladder’ at Cambridge, and presumably witnessed the subsequent dissection.²¹ The variety of medicine taught was, of course, devoutly Galenic. Caius had studied at Padua with Andreas Vesalius, the father of modern anatomy, whose discoveries based on human dissections had challenged many of Galen’s, which had relied upon animals. Despite this, when Vesalius later suggested to Caius that an obsolete passage should be dropped from a collection of Galen’s writings Caius was editing, Caius refused on the grounds it would be too dangerous to tamper with such an ancient work.

      In 1600, Harvey himself went to Padua and studied anatomy under one of Vesalius’ successors, Hieronymus Fabricius. Fabricius had designed the first modern anatomy theatre, a wooden structure set up in the university’s precincts, which featured a stone pit surrounded by five concentric oval terraces. Harvey gazed from those terraces and into that blood-spattered pit on many anatomical, and in particular venereal, marvels that he would later memorably recall in his lectures, including syphilitic ulcers that had gnawed into the stomach of a prostitute, a boy whose genitals had been bitten off by a dog, and a man without a penis who was apparently still capable of sex.²²

      Harvey СКАЧАТЬ