# The Harveian Oration: Delivered Before the Royal College of Physicians on June 21, 1904/Introduction

THE
HARVEIAN ORATION
1904
Mr. President and Gentlemen, The officials fellows and friends of this college assemble to-day, as we and our predecessors have assembled year by year for two-and-a-half centuries, to commemorate the services which William Harvey has rendered to mankind, and in order to keep alive in our own minds the wise counsels which he addressed to us, the memory of which he desired us ever to renew at the festival which he founded. We are to honour our great profession, to continue in mutual love and affection among ourselves, and to search and to study out the secrets of nature by way of experiment in order to prevent suffering and to ameliorate human life.
In commencing the pleasing duty which the kindness of our President has placed in my hands it is needful to comply with the desire of our founder that we commemorate the names of ​benefactors of this college. The lengthy and honourable roll was so fully dealt with by the learned orator of last year that I shall merely add to his recital the names of those who since that time have given of their substance for the advancement of medicine. Dr. Horace Dobell of Parkstone Heights, Dorset, gave the sum of £500 to encourage research into the ultimate origin, evolution, and life-history of bacilli and other pathogenic micro-organisms; Dr. George Oliver, Fellow of this College, of Harrogate, and Farnham, Surrey, has given £2,000 to found the Oliver-Sharpey lectureship or prize in memory of William Sharpey of University College, and to encourage the application of physiological knowledge for the prevention and cure of disease and for the prolongation of life; and Lady Clark has presented to us a bust of our revered and lamented former president, Sir Andrew Clark.
No student of the works of Harvey can fail to bear in mind the great loss we have sustained this year in the decease of Sir Edward Sieveking, who in his Harveian Oration drew special attention to the Prelectiones Anatomiae and in conjunction with Dr. George Johnson and other Fellows of this College arranged for the admirable autotype reproduction of Harvey's manuscript which we possess.
​Desiring to render this address as little wearisome as may be I propose to divide it into two parts: the first archaeological, dealing with Egyptian medicine, the medicine god, and the earliest inquiries known to have been made concerning the circulation and circulatory diseases-viz., those of the physicians of ancient Egypt, a department of pre-Harveian work, and perhaps the only one, which has not been dealt with in this room. Secondly, I wish to speak with great brevity on the more practical subject of the preventive treatment of certain forms of circulatory disease.
I
Egypt and the Earliest Researches on the Circulation
To all who love our venerable and beneficent profession the spectacle of our predecessors in early ages striving in darkness and difficulty to acquire that hidden knowledge to which we have partially attained is interesting and should awaken our sympathy. As was remarked by the learned Harveian Orator of 1896: 'The past is worth our study and ever more so the further we advance."
The information which archaeological research has of late afforded, though in a fitful and partial manner, as to the earliest history of medicine, and particularly in regard to that department in which our founder laboured, is not unworthy of our attention.