LITMIR.BIZ

       Knightrider Street, South of St Paul’s Cathedral (‘Poles church’), as shown on late 16th century ‘Agas’ map of London.

      He presumably turned up at the College unarmed, and, being a stickler for decorum, dressed respectfully (but not fashionably – he disliked fashion, considering it a ‘redundant covering, a fantastic arrangement’).²⁶ He was the only candidate to be interviewed that day, leaving plenty of time for a rigorous examination. There were four parts, usually conducted over three or four separate sessions, all based on the works of Galen. They covered physiology, pathology (the symptoms, ‘signs’ and causes of disease), methods of treatment, and ‘materia medica’ (pharmacy). Examinees were then given three questions chosen at random by the President, and asked to cite passages in the works of Galen that answered them. The entire proceedings were conducted orally in Latin.²⁷

      Being his first appearance, Harvey was probably examined on physiology and, thanks to his time at Padua, was likely to have acquitted himself well. It would be nearly a year before he was next examined, perhaps to give him a chance to gain some practical experience and bone up on the seventeen Galenic treatises on the College’s reading list. He faced the Censors three times in 1604: on 2 April, 11 May, and finally on 7 August, when he was elected a candidate. This meant he was free to practise and, after four years, would become a full Fellow.

      Harvey climbed London’s monumental medical hierarchy with the deftness of a steeplejack. Four months after becoming a candidate, he married Elizabeth, the daughter of a former College Censor and royal physician, Dr Lancelot Browne. Very little is known about Elizabeth, not even the year of her death, which was some time between 1645 and 1652. She apparently bore no children, and contemporaries who wrote about Harvey do not even mention her. Thomas Fuller, in his Worthies of England, published five years after Harvey’s death, described him as ‘living a Batchelor’.²⁸ Harvey never wrote about Elizabeth, except in connection with her pet parrot. He evidently spent hours resentfully scrutinizing the creature, ‘which was long her delight’, noting how it had ‘grown so familiar that he was permitted to walk at liberty through the whole house’.

      Where he missed his Mistress, he would search her out, and when he had found her, he would court her with cheerful congratulation. If she had called him, he would make answer, and flying to her, he would grasp her garments with his claws and bill, till by degrees he had scaled her shoulder … Many times he was sportive and wanton, he would sit in her lap, where he loved to have her scratch his head, and stroke his back, and then testify his contentment, by kind mutterings and shaking of his wings.

      The flirtations finally ceased when the bird ‘which had lived many years, grew sick, and being much oppressed by many convulsive motions, did at length deposit his much lamented spirit in his Mistress’s bosom, where he had so often sported’. Harvey exacted his revenge on the pampered pet by performing a prompt dissection. Perhaps because of its adoring relationship with his wife, he had assumed it to be a cock, so was surprised to discover a nearly fully formed egg in its ‘womb’.²⁹

      Elizabeth’s influential father wasted no time in trying to advance his new son-in-law’s career. In 1605, he heard that the post of physician at the Tower of London was about to come vacant and wrote at least twice on Harvey’s behalf to the King’s secretary of state, Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury, once in haste from an apothecary’s shop in Fenchurch Street, where he was presumably ordering up prescriptions. The application failed, but by 1609, his son-in-law was sufficiently well placed with the royal household to receive a letter of recommendation from the King proposing Harvey for the post of hospital physician at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in Spitalfields. St Bart’s (as it was and still is known) was one of only two general hospitals in London that survived the Reformation, the other being St Thomas’s in Southwark (Bethlehem Hospital, or ‘Bedlam’, north of Bishopsgate, was a lunatic asylum). Its role was to offer hospitality, including free medical care, to London’s poor ‘in their extremes and sickness’. This was an immense task at a time when London’s population was ravaged by some of the highest mortality rates in the country, and swelled by influxes of migrants. St Bart’s had around two hundred beds, cared for by a ‘hospitaler’ (a cleric, who also acted as gatekeeper), a matron, twelve nursing sisters, and three full-time surgeons. The physician’s job was to visit the hospital at least one day a week, usually a Monday, when a crowd of patients would await him in the cloister, ready to be assessed and treated when necessary. In return, he was provided with lodgings, a salary of £25 a year (approximately four times the annual living costs of a tradesman such as a miller or blacksmith) plus 40s. for the all-important livery of office.³⁰

      Harvey was offered the job in October 1609. At around the same time he was admitted as a full Fellow of the College of Physicians, confirmed with the publication in the College Annals of the list of Fellows according to ‘seniority and position’, which placed him twenty-third.³¹

      As well as providing a regular salary, the position at St Bart’s proved fruitful in introducing new clients, as influential courtiers often found it convenient to call upon the hospital’s medical staff when they were ill. In early 1612, the most powerful politician of them all, Robert Cecil, was laid low ‘by reason of the weakness of his body’, a reference to a deformity described unflatteringly by one enemy as a ‘wry neck, a crooked back and a splay foot’. According to the courtier John Chamberlain, ‘a whole college of physicians’ eagerly crowded around Cecil’s sick-bed, Sir Theodore de Mayerne, James I’s personal physician, being ‘very confident’ of success, ‘though he failed as often in judgement as any of the rest’. Treatment was hampered by a disagreement over diagnosis, which within a fortnight changed ‘twice or thrice, for first it was held the scorbut [scurvy], then the dropsy, and now it hath got another Greek name that I have forgotten’. Harvey and his surgeon, Joseph Fenton, were then summoned from St Bart’s and were deemed to have done ‘most good’ in treating the condition, Fenton particularly, though neither managed a cure, as Cecil died two months later – probably of the disease originally diagnosed, scurvy.³²

      In 1613, Harvey took a further step towards the summit of his profession by offering himself for election as a Censor, one of the key positions in the College hierarchy. He attended his first session on 19 October and made an immediate impact. He and his three colleagues, Mark Ridley, Thomas Davies, and Richard Andrews, examined the case of one Edward Clarke, who had given ‘some mercury pills to a certain man named Becket, which caused his throat to become inflamed and even spitting ensued’. Dr Ridley, a veteran Fellow and serving his sixth term as a Censor, demanded a fine of £8, much higher than usual (apothecaries and other medical tradesmen were typically fined around forty shillings; fines of £5 or more were usually reserved for foreign physicians who set up practice in London without a licence). The distinguished scholarly physician Dr Davies, less active in College affairs and serving his third term as a Censor, objected that this was too severe a punishment for a first offence. Then Harvey, uninhibited by his lack of experience, intervened. He backed Ridley, arguing that such ‘ill practice’ demanded an exemplary punishment. However, he conceded Clarke’s fine should be ‘remitted’, reduced, on account of his ‘submission’ to the College, though he should be imprisoned if he failed to pay it. In November, Harvey further demonstrated his zest for discipline and standards by apparently insisting that an applicant for a licence to practise be examined three times on the same day.

      And so the meetings continued, week after week, considering case after case, imposing fine upon fine. In December, a Mr Clapham, an apothecary of Fenchurch Street, was brought before the Censors, charged with, among other things, selling an unauthorized medicine ‘for the stone’. Kidney stones were one of the most common complaints physicians had to deal with, and many doctors, including Harvey, had their own secret and lucrative remedies for treating them. Mr Clapham omitted to mention that he sold his

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