William Harvey endlessly presented his ideas throughout England and
Europe on the cardiovascular system, eventually publishing his classic
tome, De Motu Cordis, On the Motion of the Heart in 1628. One of the
most important books ever published in the scientific domain, Harvey’s
magnum opus established him as a key pioneer in understanding the
mechanical fabric of our bodies and a fellow coconspirator in René
Descartes’s clockwork universe.
Descartes and Harvey altered the intellectual outlook of the 17th
century, and together with Francis Bacon’s empirical inductive enquiry,
natural philosophy was converted into a scientific program of
investigation. Robert Boyle, one of the key figures at the founding of the
Royal Society, described the human body as a “hydraulic engine ... fram’d
and contriv’d by nature.” Harvey’s “mind was incredibly sensitive to the
intellectual and cultural spirit of his age, and his ideas were expressive of
that spirit.”^8 His investigations were the first mathematical and
physiological interpretations of the human body, and were foundational
works in the burgeoning age of experimentation. His natural heir was not
the scientists and natural philosophers who formed the Royal Society
within years of his death, but another Brit who was endlessly enamored of
nature and who came to London almost as a feral outcast and is today
interred at Westminster Abbey.
In England in 1540, the guilds of two unions were united by King Henry
VIII to establish the Company of Barber-Surgeons. After years of
acrimony, surgeons broke away in 1745 to form their own Company of
Surgeons, which would later become the Royal College of Surgeons.
Barbers and surgeons struggled for recognition, and in the mid–18th
century, both groups could offer little more than a haircut, simple abscess
drainage, or a hopeful (or hopeless) letting of the blood. Nonetheless, the
emancipation of the surgeons in 1745 did present at least one significant
challenge: they did not have their own anatomy theater, and this left them
scrambling for a venue and proper proctors.
William Hunter (1718–1783), a Scotsman and renowned physician,
obstetrician, and anatomist, grew up near Glasgow before receiving a
stellar education in Edinburgh, Leiden, Paris, and London. Shortly after
finishing his medical training at St. George’s Hospital in 1744, William
Hunter began a course in private anatomy classes, advertising, “Gentlemen