The Harveian Oration Delivered before the Royal College of Physicians
Authors: G. Rolleston
Journal: BMJ (1873)

A man whose lot it is to live away from London may well feel some diffidence in accepting an invitation to lecture before a metropolitan -audience; and, sir, when you honoured me by requesting me to deliver this year's Harveian Oration, I felt and expressed this natural hesita- tion.I wish to record that you pointed out to me that my function in Oxford was to pursue and lecture publicly upon the very subjects with which Harvey occupied himself; and I suggested to myself that what could with any propriety form the substance of a course of lectures in the one place, could, mutatis mutandis, furnish materials for an address in the other.I felt besides that, as the President of the College of Physicians is, by virtue of his office, one of the five electors to the Linacre Professorship, the Linacre Professor might seem scarcely j usti- fied in declining an invitation to appear before the learned body to which in part he owed his position; and, though I mention it last, I felt first of all that a wish expressed to me, not so much by the official whom I am now addressing, as by the individual who now more than twenty years ago introduced me to Harvey's hospital, and has persistently befriended me ever since, was a wish which I ought not lightly to disregard.If now, sir, I follow an example which you have often set me, and, without needless preface or further personal allusions, address myself at once to the business before me, I shall thereby pay you the best of all compliments, by showing you that your teaching has not been wholly thrown away upon your former pupil.The time allotted to me I propose to occupy, firstly, in expounding with all possible brevity certain advances recently made in our know- ledge of the anatomy and physiology of the circulatory organs; and, secondly, in giving the as yet unrecorded history of one of the many attempts to rob Harvey of his rightful rank in the noble army of dis- ,coverers, which were made in the latter half of the seventeenth century.Some of the last, if not the very last, of the many fruitful experi- ments which Harvey performed in the way of interrogating Nature as to the circulation, were experiments in the way of injection.If the writer of a work which appeared but some forty-three years ago- Guthrie, Oar the Diseases and Injuries of Arteries-had taken the pains to repeat those experiments which Harvey performed more than two hundred and twenty years ago, and when in his seventy-fourth year, we should not have had the following statement at page 8 of his book: " I have conceived that the arteries contain air in an uncombined state, which may assist in keeping them distended, and in facilitating the circulation; but I have not been able to prove it."The fact that Harvey performed experiments in the way of injection may be un- known to many persons who are too well informed to conceive that the arteries may or can, compatibly with the carrying on of any circula- tion, contain air in an uncombined state; for these experiments are not to be found recorded either in the treatise De Motii Cordis or in either of the two letters to Riolanus, which two compositions were, in the older editions of Harvey's works, printed as three parts of a single treatise, under the names of Exercitatio Anatomica Prinma, Seezinda, and Tertia, and were, till the appearance of the College of Physicians' edition in 1766, the only published, as they are still the best known, records of Harvey's work and labour upon the circulation of the blood.