Gold, Arctic ice and geography
Frobisher's later voyages stopped being exploration and became a fruitless hunt for gold. Humphrey Gilbert then sought a northwest passage and was lost at sea in 1583 (the Persian text is garbled here). Four years later John Davis sailed through the strait that now bears his name, afterward fought the Spanish Armada, and went south with Thomas Cavendish. Davis reached the Falkland Islands and was killed by pirates near Singapore in 1605. Cavendish explored the southern parts of South America and made a third voyage around the world, dying at sea in 1592. (The book's order of these facts is confused.) Henry Hudson sailed up the river that bears his name in 1609, and on his later voyage reached Hudson Bay. There his crew, angry at the hardships and longing for home, mutinied and set him adrift in a small open boat with eight others in 1611. Nothing more was heard of them. William Baffin found the bay and island that carry his name and pressed on to latitude 77 degrees 45 minutes, which, the book says, no one reached again for 236 years. He was also the first to find longitude by observing the moon.
Richard Hakluyt thought these voyages in oaken ships more daring and dangerous than the voyages of the Iliad, and he recorded them in several volumes, the best known being The Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation. Samuel Purchas added more material in Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625), published after Hakluyt's death. Thus, through the love of gold or trade and the thirst for adventure and distant scenes, geography advanced indirectly.
English science and odd medicine
The best work in physics, chemistry and biology was done on the Continent. Still, in England Sir Kenelm Digby found that plants need oxygen for life, and Robert Fludd, a mystic and physician, proposed inoculation against smallpox 150 years before Jenner. Medical prescriptions still contained disgusting ingredients, on the belief that the more repulsive a remedy, the more effective. In 1618 the London pharmacopoeia listed such things as bile, blood, nails, a cock's comb, fur, sweat, saliva, scorpions, snake skin, and spider webs, and bleeding was the first treatment tried.
Yet the age was proud of Thomas Parr, known as Old Parr. He was presented to Charles I in 1635 at the reported age of 152, still hale and cheerful. He would not give his exact age and claimed to have joined the army in 1500, and he clearly remembered the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536. Charles asked what he had done that others had not done in so long a life, and Parr answered with a rueful joke about his later years. He had eaten almost nothing but vegetables, coarse bread and buttermilk, and rarely meat. London salons and taverns talked of him for a while, and he was feasted so often that he died a year after meeting the king. Sir William Harvey dissected his body, found no hardening of the arteries, and blamed his death on the change of air and diet.
Harvey and the circulation of the blood
Harvey was the first scientist to explain how blood circulates, and he brought the science of his age to its peak. His work has been called the greatest event in the history of medicine since Galen. Born in Folkestone in 1578, he studied at Cambridge and then at Padua under Fabricius, returned to England, practiced in London, and became physician to James I and Charles I. For years he patiently experimented on animals and corpses, especially studying circulation in wounds. He set out his main theory in 1615 but published it only in 1628, in Frankfurt, in Latin, as De Motu Cordis (on the motion of the heart and blood). It is England's first and greatest medical book.
The steps toward the discovery show the international nature of science. Galen, in the second century, had described the heart and blood as if blood passed from liver and heart into tissues, air moved from lungs to heart, arteries and veins carried two linked tides, and blood crossed from the right heart to the left through pores in the dividing wall. Around 1506 Leonardo da Vinci rejected the idea that air goes from lungs to heart. Vesalius (1543) denied the pores in that wall, and his drawings of arteries and veins, with their fine, closely placed endings, suggested that blood flows through. Fabricius showed that valves in the veins prevent venous blood from flowing back out of the heart, so Galen's theory lost ground. In 1553 Michael Servetus, and in 1558 Realdo Colombo, discovered the lesser circulation: blood passes from the right chamber through the pulmonary artery and the lungs, where it is cleansed by contact with air, and returns through the pulmonary vein to the left chamber. Andrea Cesalpino (about 1571) foresaw the full theory. Harvey's work turned it into established fact.
While Francis Bacon, his patient, praised induction, Harvey reached his brilliant result by combining induction and deduction. He estimated that each contraction expels half a fluid ounce of blood and concluded, by the book's numbers, that the heart sends 500 fluid ounces into the arteries every half hour, more than the body could hold. It seemed impossible that so much blood could be made from digested food. So the blood leaving the heart must return to it, and the only path seemed to be the veins. Simple tests, such as pressing a surface vein with a finger, showed venous blood flowing from the tissues toward the heart. In his own words, after weighing his many arguments from dissecting living animals and from reflection, he seriously asked how much blood is moved, concluded it could not be produced by digested food, and so thought the motion might be circular.
Harvey hesitated long over publication. He knew how conservative physicians were and predicted forty years before acceptance. According to Aubrey, he said that after his book appeared his practice fell off and the public thought him crazy. Not until 1660 did Malpighi prove the existence of capillaries joining arteries to veins, and until then scientists had not fully grasped Harvey's truth. The new theory illuminated almost every aspect of physiology and touched the old question of how mind and body relate. Harvey observed that every emotion, whether pain, pleasure, hope or fear, disturbs the heart; in anger the eyes blaze, in shame the cheeks fill with blood.
Harvey served Charles I almost until the unhappy end of his reign. When revolution drove the king from London, Harvey went with him, was at the battle of Edgehill, and narrowly escaped death. Meanwhile rebels plundered his London house and destroyed his papers and anatomical collections. Aubrey reports he thought mankind a great mischievous ape. (A remark of his about how some peoples treat women is left out here as an ethnic generalization.)