(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.