William Harvey on Anatomy - Am MIT spezialisierte KI-Forschung

William Harvey on Anatomy
and Experience

Benjamin Goldberg
University of South Florida

The goal of this essay is to explore the meaning of experience in William
Harvey’s work. I begin by expanding on Andrew Cunningham’s argument
(2002, 2003) that for Harvey, anatomy was an experience-based science
of ﬁnal causes. Observation and reason are united through experience (Erfahrung-
entia) for Harvey, das ist, by the repeated exercise of these capacities. Daher
through the training and use of these abilities, Harvey thinks he can learn the
ﬁnal causes of living things and their parts. Harvey thinks that anatomy is the
skill (facultas) by which one is able to make justiﬁed inferences to these causes.
Endlich, such inferences are based on a large set of rationally organized ana-
tomical observations (historia), not upon direct, singular observations alone.

Einführung

1.
The goal of this essay is to explore the meaning of experience in William
Harvey’s natural philosophy. I begin with Cunningham’s argument (2002,
2003) Das, for Harvey, anatomy was an experience-based science of ﬁnal
causes. But how could one experience ﬁnal causes? I answer this by ﬁrst
articulating Harvey’s conception of anatomy (sections 2–3), before turning
to his understanding of experience (sections 4–5).

The Meaning of Anatomy

2.
What did anatomia mean in the early seventeenth century? Consulting dic-
tionaries, the texts of anatomists, and following Cunningham, we can assert
that anatomists conceived of their work as both a manual art and a rational

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©2016 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

doi:10.1162/POSC_a_00208

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Harvey on Anatomy and Experience

science.1 Medicine had long proved problematic, failing to ﬁt into disciplin-
ary schemes of knowledge, as Nancy Siraisi has argued:

Scientia for physicians trained in Aristotelian logic and epistemology
implied certain knowledge, based on accepted principles, arrived at
by syllogistic demonstrations, and enunciating universally valid
truths. Ars involved the orderly and rational transmission of
Wissen, but did not necessarily yield certitude about general
truths. Evidently, the multifarious and unsystematic particulars of
practical or operative medicine were difﬁcult to ﬁt into the deﬁnition
of scientia, and even in some respect into that of ars. Auf dem anderen
Hand, the theoretical part of the university medical curriculum, In
which disputation about physiology was a principal component…
and which overlapped on subject matter with Aristotelian natural
philosophy, appeared to have a better claim to scientia in the
Aristotelian sense. Infolge, scholastic writers often ended up by
asserting that medicine was somehow both scientia and ars, but that
theoretical medicine (and hence physiology) partook of the nature
of scientia more fully than did the rest of medicine. (1990, P. 219)

From the start of the seventeenth century and lasting quite late into the
Zeitraum,2 deﬁnitions of anatomy thus divided into a manual art of cutting and
observing and a rational/scientiﬁc knowledge of causes. Harvey links cutting
and observing to scientiﬁc knowledge, an innovation that must understood
against the background of a tradition that denied such an epistemological link.
This issue is complicated because many anatomists emphasized that, als
Cynthia Klestinec has noted, “In the realm of anatomical inquiry, Erfahrung
joined reason to constitute (according to Galen, Mondino, Berengario da Carpi,
Niccolò Massa and many others) the approved anatomical method” (2010,
P. 33). While Klestinec is entirely correct, anatomists articulated this claim
in varying ways. For some writers, both reason and experience were important,
but only the rational side of medicine amounted to scientia—the art of anatomy
did not lead to knowledge of causes. In der Tat, it has been noted by Siraisi (1994,
S. 57, 60, 65) that Vesalius’ preface to the Fabrica is an attempt to argue that
anatomy achieves scientiﬁc knowledge (see also Siraisi 1990, P. 220).

Pedagogy reﬂected this understanding, emphasizing both manual art and
theoretical knowledge. Though one individual might be trained in both, Die
products of each aspect were separated, public dissections the result of the one,

1. See Laurentius 1600. This seems in line with dictionary deﬁnitions of anatomia in
early modern dictionaries. Sehen, zum Beispiel, Thomas Elyot 1538, John Rider 1589, Francis
Holy-Oke 1640. Ich bin, Natürlich, artiﬁcially limiting the scope of anatomy here; for an
excellent and more thorough account see: Shotwell 2013; see also Cunningham 1975.

2. E.g., Glisson 1645 is almost identical to Laurentius 1600.

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learned tomes of physiological knowledge the result of the other. Thus it
has often been noted that anatomies in Renaissance universities were some-
times performed entirely without dissections, and consisted entirely in lectur-
ing from texts (Cunningham 1975; Siraisi 1994). Harvey, Dann, must be seen
against the background of these conceptions of anatomy. In der Tat, Harvey him-
self must be seen as an agent in part responsible for the early modern shift to
emphasize empirical methods, especially in the English context (Frank 1980).
The strict division between art and reason in the writings and practice
of anatomy began to change during the late ﬁfteenth and early sixteenth
centuries, in the wake of new translations (and works) of Galen and
Aristotle along with active efforts on the part of the humanists to reclaim
the projects and knowledge of the ancients.3 This was nowhere more true
than at certain universities in Italy, especially at Harvey’s training ground
of Padua, and at its rival Bologna. Gabriele de Zerbi writing in the late
ﬁfteenth century, zum Beispiel, emphasized the immediacy of the knowl-
edge that anatomy generated by the senses. Roger French (1994, P. 88)
has noted that, “Zerbi is well prepared, at least at the theoretical level,
to express the dominance of perception over reason in anatomy.” Though
Zerbi is a “practical” anatomist, this should be taken in the sense of him
reading from a text while another performed the actual cutting (French
1994, P. 89). So while at least in theory, or rhetoric, the humanist era
witnessed the increasing importance of the observational aspect of anatomy
and its integration with the rational, by the time of Vesalius (1515–
D. 1564), one ﬁnds this distinction, and the institutional and epistemolog-
ical separation between them, to be pervasive. In der Tat, if one takes Vesalius’
criticisms of anatomists at face value (discussed below), dissection by
means of lecturing had become the primary means of learning anatomy;
actual dissection was rarely understood as a means of active investigation.
Thus anatomy up to Vesalius (Und, by and large, for some time afterwards)
was primarily about texts; dissections were performed in service to them.
With the publication in 1543 of Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica, Wir
ﬁnd a powerful exhortation to begin performing actual anatomies. Vesalius
viewed ﬁrsthand experience of such events as allowing correction and
improvement upon Galen, an idea that becomes a core part of the education
of physicians (Cunningham 1975, P. 4). Vesalius took physicians to task for
ignoring anatomy, welche, er argumentiert, sollte sein, “…a chief part of natural
philosophy…as it embraces the historia4 of man, and it ought to be the most

3. And, Natürlich, there are a variety of other intellectual, cultural, sozial, and economic

factors that are relevant.

4. This is a difﬁcult concept to render into English, and thus I leave it untranslated in
order to ﬂag it. It means, in the anatomical context at least, something like a non-causal,

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secure foundation of the whole art of medicine and by law the introduction
to its organization…” (Vesalius 1543, a3).5 By arguing that regular perfor-
mances of anatomies were part of natural philosophy, Vesalius had begun a
process that would break down the long held distinctions between the
artistic and rational sides of anatomy.

Vesalius was attempting not only to revive the practice of human dis-
section, Außerdem, he wanted to establish it as the most fundamental
aspect of medical training, and as a means of testing and discovering.
When noting that the physicians declared the bones, muscles, nerves, veins,
arteries, and other parts beyond their purview, to be left to the surgeons,
Vesalius directly attacked the division of labor between the artisans (Die
surgeons) and the scientists (the physicians and philosophers):

….when the entire practice of cutting was entrusted to the barbers,
not only did the physician’s knowledge of the viscera fade away, Aber
the practice of dissecting also perished completely, and this, von
course, because they [the physicians] would not attempt it, while
those to whom this skill of the hands was entrusted were too
unlearned to understand the writings of the Professors of Dissection.
It is quite inappropriate that such men should preserve for us that
most difﬁcult art…And that deplorable dismemberment of the
parts of healing ought not be introduced into our Schools, Das
detestable ritual whereby the one performs the cutting up of the
human body, and the other describes the historia of the parts. Diese
letztere, on high in their chairs, croak with egregious pride like
jackdaws, about things which they have never done but which they
commit to memory from the books of others, or which they expound
to us from written descriptions. And the former are so unskilled in
languages that they cannot explain to the spectators what they have
dissected, but hack things up for display following the instructions of
a physician who has never set his hand to the dissection of a body, but has
the arrogance to play the sailor from a manual. (Vesalius 1543, a3)

Those with book learning, though they (at best) understood the causes of
the parts and their descriptions from books, had no acquaintance with the
things themselves. So not only are these jackdaws so inexperienced as to
not know a vein from an artery, but they could never learn how much in
error their book learning truly was. Aber, andererseits, the unlettered
surgeons had no true knowledge of the body, its parts, and their functions.

observationally based, and carefully organized account of the parts of the body. I discuss historia in
more detail below.

5. All translations are my own, except where noted.

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Their own limited experience allowed them to cut the body up, but with
no grace and with no true understanding of its proper organization: Sie
were but butchers who hack away at the body with no respect to its natural
divisions, without being able to explain anything of what they were doing.
Anatomy could only become natural philosophy through uniﬁcation,
wherein the cutters and the readers, the artists and the scientists, war
understood not as separate parts of anatomical practice, but as fundamen-
tally and necessarily integrated in the pursuit of anatomical scientia.

We see these themes again in the work of Vesalius’ pupil, Harvey’s
Doktorgrossvater, Fallopius, in his Expositio de Ossibus (1584). In a chapter on
the meaning of anatomy, Fallopius writes that,

Anatomy is the art, indeed a habit of the mind [ars, vel habitus animi],
where by means of the most noble theory, das ist, by contemplation,
we can divide all the parts, internal and external, even the smallest…and
I add to the deﬁnition one last little part, in order that the parts are
well and rightly known, they must be learned by sensation since in
anatomy nothing comes to be secured except by what is clear by means
of sensation [ut quae sensu sunt cognoscenda recte pateant quia in anatome nihil
nisi quod sensu patent, percipiendum venit]. (Fallopius 1584, P. 521)

Notice that, in a quite traditional way, Fallopius first emphasized the
rational, scientific aspect of anatomy. It is by this mental habit that one
could divide the body down to its smallest parts and understand them,
anatomia sine sanguine. But importantly, at the very end of this deﬁnition,
he adds that one must have learned about the parts from sensation—without this
aspect of anatomical practice, nothing could be truly known. Fallopius does
not exactly say that this secure knowledge is knowledge of causes, nor that
sensation is the method by which one ﬁnds causes: this is not yet a full
rapprochement between the twin aspects of anatomy. But Fallopius does
represent an important step in the post-Vesalian landscape.

Turning to Fallopius’ student, and Harvey’s teacher, Fabricius, one sees
much more explicitly a connection between anatomical skill and ﬁnding causes.
Note that Fabricius does not, so far as I can tell, discuss anatomy in any sys-
tematic way, and thus there are no speciﬁc deﬁnitions of anatomia to compare.6
But one can understand something of his conception of the process by how he
uses dissection [dissectio], the literal translation into Latin of the Greek anatome:
This disputation of ours will be tripartite. For ﬁrst we will make
clear the fabric and structure of the entire eye. Then we will examine
the action of the eye, that is vision itself. Endlich, we will contemplate

6. For an excellent account of Fabricius’ pedagogy, see Klestinec 2011.

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Harvey on Anatomy and Experience

the usefulness of both the whole eye and the individual parts of this
same eye. And all of these things we will hunt through dissection.
For dissection (if one judges correctly) has this use, to make visible
those things that belong to the eyes, that is structure and historia; Zu
lead to knowledge of the action and faculty; and ﬁnally to uncover
and reveal the usefulness of the eye [Dissectio enim (si quis recte aestimet)
eum habet usum, ut tum ea, quae oculis insunt, hoc est structuram & historiam,
manifestet: tum in actionis facultatisque notitiam deducat: tum denique
oculi utilitates aperiat atque declaret]. (Fabricius 1687, P. 187, trans.
Peter Distelzweig)

It is here that one finds the roots of Harvey’s own conception of anatomy,
one that does not separate the two aspects. Fabricius understood anatomy
as an activity where one’s senses lead to an acquiring/gaining of knowledge
of theoretical, causal aspects of the body: its actions, Verwendet, and utilities
(upon which more below). It is in this way that the mental, das ist,
Wissen (notitia) is literally deduced (deducat) from those things that
have been made manifest to the senses (manifestet). In Fabricius, one does
not see any deep methodological or epistemological distinction between
the scientiﬁc and artistic aspects of anatomy. In der Tat, Fabricius called
out Vesalius speciﬁcally for stopping at collecting historia and failing to
establish the causes of parts (Fabricius 1600, P. ii verso).

Turning to Harvey, his deﬁnition is found in the very ﬁrst part of his lecture
notes, the Prelectiones anatomie universalis. Consider the Latin: “Anatomia est facultas
quae occulari inspectione et sectione partium usus et actiones” (Harvey 1616 [1964]),
P. 4).7 Gweneth Whitteridge translates facultas as “branch of learning," manche-
thing along the lines of the modern understanding of anatomy as a speciﬁc
body of knowledge. But consider, zum Beispiel, Francis Holyoke’s (1640) dic-
tionary deﬁnition of facultas: “Power to doe or speak, verlassen, licence, feaxe,
promptnesse, eloquence.”8 A facultas is a power that something or someone
has to perform some particular action. From the last part, one might surmise
that facultas has the connotation not just of an ability to do something, Aber
an ability to do something well, in a highly skilled manner, even eloquently.
I would thus translate Harvey’s deﬁnition quite differently: “Anatomy is
a skilled ability that teaches the uses and actions of the parts by ocular inspection
and dissection.” Harvey’s anatomia is an active ability with a speciﬁc goal:
knowledge of uses and actions.

7. I cite from Whitteridge’s 1964 edition of the Prelectiones for ease of reference, but my
translations come directly the manuscript, Sloane MS 230a for which, sehen: Harvey, William.
1616–1626. Manuscript of the Prelectiones. In: The British Library, Sloane MS230a. Henceforth,
I cite this work of Harvey’s as Harvey 1616.

8. This is in line with other early modern dictionaries, and is meant only to be suggestive.

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The Goals of Anatomy

3.
As Cunningham has argued, it is quite obvious from a study of Harvey’s
Prelectiones that the goal of anatomy is knowledge of the ﬁnal causes of the
parts of animals. But what does this look like?

We must ﬁrst elaborate the basic model of life employed by Harvey, A
Renaissance hybrid of Aristotelian cum Galenic theories and methods. Animal
bodies are organized and maintained by their souls, as per Aristotle’s De
anima and as deployed in the animal books and the Parva naturalia, and they
are to be investigated through dissection, as per Galen’s De placitis Hippocratis
et Platonis and De usu partium and many other works.9 Animals were thought
to be unities of matter and form: soul the form, body its instrument. Each part
had its particular duty, each connected and arranged with others so that they
might work together harmoniously for the good of the body: it was a
teleological unity that tied body to soul. So when Harvey (1616, P. 11) notiert
Das, “…there is no part that in some manner is not fashioned as an instru-
ment,” he was elaborating exactly this conception of soul and body. Das
instrumentality was central to how he understood anatomy, for it reﬂected
a conception of organic bodies as systems of interrelated and harmonious
teleological relations: each and every part of the body is for the sake of some
Funktion. This is Aristotle’s ﬁnal cause, hou heneka, noting that Harvey often
uses the much more literal Latin translation of that phrase, alicuius gratia,
instead of the Scholastics’ causa ﬁnalis.10

These Aristotelian causes were elaborated through Galenic terminology.
In Galen’s system, an action (energeia, actio) was some movement performed
by the part, whereas a use (chreia, usus) War, according to R. J. Hankinson
“…what some activity, the normal functioning of the part in question, Ist
für, what, in the overall economy of the animal it seeks to accomplish; Und
hence it serves to explain, teleologically, the existence of the activity in
question” (2002, P. 48). Both use and action were teleological explana-
tionen: a part’s action explained what the part was for the sake of in a
minimal way, z.B., the muscles were for the sake of contracting, teeth
for grinding, usw., while at the same time describing an active motion.
The use of a part was the purpose to which an instrument of the soul
was put, a biological necessity, and instruments should be well suited to
their tasks. This second aspect of use, ﬁttedness, became associated in early
modernity with another term (at least occasionally11): Utility (utilitas).

9. Tatsächlich, anatomy belongs to those sciences that investigate what is “common to body
and soul.” See: King 2006; For the editions Harvey used, sehen: Galen 1549 and Aristotle
1552.

10. Harvey 1616, P. 22. “Quoniam ﬁnis Anatome est scire vel cognoscere partes et scire

per causas et hae in omnibus animalibus cuius gratia et propter quid….”
11. Early moderns are rarely consistent or clear with terminology.

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We turn now to look at how Harvey deployed this terminology in some
depth, terminology that surprisingly has heretofore never been analyzed.12
We begin with actio: “Action [Ist] active movement of which the accom-
plishment is called function, [oder] in matter [is called] work” (Harvey
161, P. 22). The notion was simple, but helps us get a sense of the kinds
of knowledge that anatomy must furnish about the parts through obser-
vation (and often necessitating vivisection). Actions served some end, Und
when describing them as actiones, Harvey tended to avoid functional language
at the organismic level, not mentioning the overall biological goal or function
that is accomplished by the action. Also, Zum Beispiel, “The action [of the
kidneys] is to draw away and convey out of the veins into the bladder the
serous excrement…” (Harvey 1616, P. 158). Here Harvey merely described
the speciﬁc motions of the kidney, whatever materials were involved in those
motions, and the connection between these motions and other parts.

To describe aspects of the larger functional system Harvey turned to usus
and utilitates. Harvey devised some additional terminology not found in
other authors to my knowledge, distinguishing uses/intermediate utilities
from what he called ﬁnal utilities. Utility was tied, not to mere action,
but to acting well or acting by necessity. Uses and intermediate utilities were
closely tied to action—an action is what a part does, a use is what that
action is for. Why might Harvey have equated use and intermediate utility?
One reason was that the line between a use and a utility was not always
clear, especially since a utility often, in some sense, contained the use—a utility
was about the pairing the action of a part to its use. Das ist, a utility was
not just about the goal that an action serves, but also about how the action
accomplished that use in an optimal way, about how the ﬁttedness of means
to ends allowed the part to serve the good.

What was this good? Harvey described this as the set of ﬁnal utilities,
including being for existence and necessity (Harvey 1616, P. 24). Whereas a
use/intermediate utility explained the purpose of the action of a part or how
that action is accomplished by the part, a ﬁnal utility explained the necessity
of that use, its very existence, and how the part existed optimally and nec-
essarily. An example will help: “The use of the kidneys is to mitigate the
pungency of the urine and to assist concoction” (Harvey 1616, P. 168). Also
the use here was a speciﬁc biological end, nämlich, assisting concoction and
mitigating pungency, and this was the reason for the action of the kidneys
noted above, involving all its motions, Materialien, and connections to other
Teile. Endlich, at least one of the utilities of the kidneys was quite different
than either its action or use: “Another utility of the kidneys is similar to
that of all the other viscera, nämlich, that they may be a support for the

12. Though do see French 1994; and for Fabricius see: Distelzweig 2014.

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veins lest they be compressed” (Harvey 1616, P. 160). The kidneys were in
service to the optimization of the organization of the whole body, Herstellung
sure that the veins are not compressed, ensuring their proper functioning,
and the well-being of the whole organism.

The system here was one with a variety of teleological levels. All the
processes of the body were teleological: even the most basic material com-
ponents of the body, the uniform parts, were for the sake of the construction
of the non-uniform ones. But this was a shallower sort of teleological
orientation; the use of a part was, in a sense, “more teleological” than
the action of a part. Use wasn’t just teleological in that the part was for
its action, but it furthermore served some biologically necessary purpose
within the context of the organic whole of the body. And beyond use,
further down the teleological continuum, was utility, which was about the
ﬁttedness of organs to those purposes. Between these levels were borderline
Fälle, where one might equally call some end a use or a utility, or a use an
Aktion. We might arrange a teleological hierarchy:

Utilitas ﬁnalis → Usus/Utilitas media → Actio → Structure and matter of
the parts (Uniform Parts →Non-uniform Parts)

Notice that
(final causal)
this hierarchy was arranged by order of
explanation, each higher level accounting for the lower levels: final utilities
explained uses, Aktionen, or parts, uses explained actions, or parts, Aktionen
explained parts, Und, finally, the non-uniform parts were explained by the
uniform parts.

4. Experience and Reason in Anatomy
From the previous sections, it should be clear that Harvey links cutting
and observing with gaining knowledge of ﬁnal causes. But how could
one observe a ﬁnal cause? Tatsächlich, the previous section should go some
way in showing how observations leading to knowledge of ﬁnal causes
(actions and uses) are not so mysterious, based as they must be on the
organization and constitution of animal bodies. To completely answer this
question, I show how for Harvey, observation and reason are united
through the development of facultas, through the skill of anatomy, welche
allowed inferences to causes based on large sets of anatomical observations,
not singular observations by themselves.

We must not assume that Harvey means by experientia what we mean by
Erfahrung. In the Renaissance, the term had a variety of meanings, signify-
ing, unter anderem, certain kinds of alchemical recipes. Peter Dear
(2006, S. 112–13) has argued that Renaissance philosophers conceptual-
ized experientia as an everyday, ordinary perceptual experience, containing
truths of the sort that anyone could recognize. Though Dear argued that it

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this was the sense of experience relevant for Harvey and other physicians,
this is the wrong way to look at it. Weiter, pace Andrew Wear (1983),
experience for Harvey was not pure empiricism, but rather a skill devel-
oped through the repeated and combined use of observation and reason.
To show this, I refer to a marginal note Harvey made in his copy of his
friend Theodore Goulston’s (1640) edition of Galen, the Opuscula varia.
Vivian Nutton (1988, S. 116–17), discussing these marginal notes,
writes that Harvey writes something on almost every page, demonstrating
his deep familiarity (Und, often, disagreement) with Galen, and that Harvey’s
notes have an especial concern with Galen’s views on epistemology and proof.
Insbesondere, one note provides a deep insight into how Harvey conceived of
Erfahrung. In Galen’s De sectis, Nutton (1988, S. 116–17) notes that, “…
when the Rationalist argued for his superiority over the Empiricist because
he was used to investigating the symptoms and causes that controlled the
body’s health and illness, Harvey commented on the speciousness of the
division by emphasizing that ‘investigative reasoning makes a doctor by experience.’”
This rejection of the split between these seemingly rival medical methodol-
ogies alerts us to an important and foundational unity in Harvey’s epistemol-
Ogy: investigative reason and observation work together to provide experience,
which allows for judgments about causes.

Harvey thus followed Galen in conceiving of experience as technical ana-
tomical experience. In De placitis Hippocratis et Platonis, Galen went to great
lengths to establish that this was the most relevant kind of experience
for deciding issues of body and soul. Far from being something shared by
all human beings, experientia was the result of long training and specialized
ability—one has to work hard to develop a facultas.13 So when experience
provides knowledge of ﬁnal causes, it does not mean that one directly perceives
things in the same way that one sees that blood is red. It is rather that many
observations and active reasoning into these observations can lead to knowledge
of the sorts of causes discussed in the previous section.

This facultas provided a kind of wisdom, a deep acquaintance with animal
bodies, granting reasoned judgment to the experienced anatomist. Heute
we might recognize it as a kind of pattern recognition, like the ability of
an expert clinical diagnostician to determine, from observations and bio-
assays, what is wrong with a patient. This sort of acquaintance must be per-
sonal acquaintance, founded upon what early moderns physicians called

13. This might undermine Roger French’s contention that Harvey ﬁts into the English
epistemological tradition of gentlemanly testimony described by Steven Shapin, obwohl
Harvey does make remarks which might ﬁt into Shapin’s theory. See French 1994, Shapin
1994, and Shapin and Schaffer 1985.

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autopsia—repeated observations and reasoned investigation into matters
anatomical, done oneself and not learned through hearsay.

Experience was thus like a tutor. In his Exercitationes de generatione
animalium (1651, P. 270), Harvey discussed the order of the appearance
of the parts during development according to earlier writers, pointing
out their mistakes: “…truly, experience teaches [experientia docet] Das
things are far otherwise than this, for it can be seen that the bones are
made last of all.” The way knowledge is gained here might be understood
in the same way that one gains knowledge from a book:

Because I do not think it possible to reach the truth from other men’s
opinions, whether they be given out on bare authority or even
conﬁrmed by probable arguments, without the help of diligent
Erfahrung [diligens…experientia]; and by the help of clear observations
[perspicuis observationibus] I will expound from the book of Nature
[ex naturae libro… declarabimus] what the material of the foetus is and
how from thence it is formed. (Harvey 1651, P. 202)

Nature’s book can be read, provided that one can have clear observations
(noting that Harvey here distinguishes observations from experience). In
order to get clear observations, one must learn how to perform anatomies
and how to see and feel during them. Vesalius argued for something similar,
writing that those physicians who were unlearned Empirics, though they
can cut open bodies and browse around, do not truly understand what
they see.14

Once one’s eyes, hands, and mind have been trained to work together one
might master the evidence of anatomy, in the same way that one could
understand the evidence provided by earlier authors only if one learned
how to read their works, and read them critically. It is a prerequisite for
scientiﬁc knowledge, as Harvey writes in his De circulatione sanguinis:
How hard and difﬁcult it would be to teach those having no
Erfahrung, In der Tat, they have no experience or sensible acquaintance
in anything; and how foolish and unteachable, how inexperienced,
are these listeners to true knowledge: they clearly show the judgments
of the blind about colors, and of the deaf about harmonies [Quam
arduum & difﬁcile sit, nullam experientiam habentes, vel in quibus,
experientiam aut sensibilem cognitionem non habent, docere: & quam inepti,
& indociles, inexpertique Auditores sint, ad veram scientiam; caeci de coloribus,
surdi de consonantiis judicia plane ostendunt]. (Harvey 1649, S. 99–100)

14. The famous passage quoted above.

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Those who had no experience were unsuitable for true scientia because their
judgments about nature—its colors and harmonies—were of the same
order of the judgments of the blind about geometry—neither actually sees
the phenomena in the relevant sense of trained observing, and thus neither
can make judgments.

So experience is a source of knowledge and skill—skills both manual
and cognitive. Das ist, lack of experience is a serious deﬁcit because expe-
rience teaches two things: not just facts (things like the material nature of
the parts, their size, shape, Bewegung, disposition, und so weiter), but also
teaches, im Laufe der Zeit, the abilities needed to properly collect and use these
facts to make warranted judgments about bodies and their causes (Dinge
like how to cut bodies, how to keep and organize observations, how to
manipulate them experimentally, und so weiter). Thus one might translate
experientia as expertise.15 Harvey followed the way of the anatomists, als
Andrew Wear named it, but his is not the “purely observational epistemol-
ogy” that Wear (1983) and others since have claimed: it involves more
than mere observation, it demands investigative reasoning and a great deal
of practice in the pursuit of facultas. Only then can experience produce
Wissen. Thus from art ﬂows science: from cutting and observing we
can judge the causes of the parts.

Wichtig, the anatomist must not just observe things, but must observe
them in a particular way in order to facilitate these judgments. Experience
must be rationally organized into historiae.

5. Anatomical Histories
These histories, emphasized especially in the Renaissance Paduan Aristotelian
tradition, are the inductive basis for inferences to causes (Pomata 2005).
Aristotle understood historiae as the organization of facts about animals and
their natures by the use of multiple differences. In the context of Harvey’s
De generatione animalium, James Lennox has detailed the way in which Harvey
follows Aristotle in treating, zum Beispiel, ﬁrst the parts of the egg, ﬁrst its
shell, then its other parts, and then the differences in shape, Größe, and number
among hens’ eggs and in other sorts of birds (Lennox 2006, P. 36). In der Tat,
Harvey’s De generatione, Lennox argued, was explicitly organized according
to the strictures of Aristotelian historia (Lennox 2006, P. 34). These historiae
are deeply Aristotelian insofar as they include not just observations simpliciter,
but rather observations carefully organized in order to make inferences.

Though it has not been noticed to my knowledge, in the Prelectiones,
Harvey discussed what one should pay attention to when anatomizing,

15. This is similar to the conception of experience found in early modern law, especially

in Britain. See Sargent 1989.

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in order to make inferences to actions and uses and to develop facultas.
Historiae are the ways in which the anatomist becomes familiar with the
subject—an expert. Turning to the list of differences Harvey insists must
be observed in historiam anatomicam, he starts by writing that,

WH in each organic part [es gibt] ﬁve things [which must
be considered]:

1. Position
2. Shape
3. Quantity
4. Motion
5. Division (Harvey 1616, P. 20)

The basic idea is that by collecting detailed observations organized into
these categories, one can then make judgments about the causes of those
Teile. Weiter, noting the pedagogical purpose of Harvey’s lectures, Die
collecting of detailed historiae, organized in this way, must be understood
as a basic part of developing facultas: learning to observe these aspects of
the parts of the body was to the skill of anatomy what learning to read
different letters of words was to the skill of reading. Once the forms of
letters have been learned, one might then see whole words and eventually
whole sentences; when one has well-learned the shapes, motions, usw., von
the parts, one could then begin to see what they do, how they do it, Und,
with some luck and much skill, why they do it. As Lennox noted in
Aristotle, “…historia will make apparent the ‘about whiches’ (the explananda)
and the ‘from whiches’ (the explanans) of our scientiﬁc explanations” (Lennox
2001, P. 18). Only after one has fully characterized the natural object being
studied, that it exists, its motions, its range and variation in various kinds
and sub-kinds, can one move on to attempt to determine why that object
exists as it does and where it does.

Take division, which deals with the division of the matter of the body
into different parts of various kinds, and which provides an interesting
example of how the collection of historiae can relate to questions about
action and use. Harvey states that from division arise “…consideration of
substance, sanguineous, ﬂeshy, sinewy, membranous or skinny. And from
diese [we consider] the temperament, Stärke, power, sensation, color
and generation [of the part]” (Harvey 1616, P. 20). One considers not just
the material nature of the part, but also the relation of these material
matters to its power, strength and other qualities, and in concert with
understanding the motions and other differences of the part, a picture of
the uses and actions of that part can be pieced together. So Harvey notes
that the liver and spleen are, “Divided into coat, vessels, veins, arteries

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and nerves, parenchyma, blood and spirits” (Harvey 1616, P. 140). Diese
organic parts are made up of other sorts of parts, and continue to be divisi-
ble; zum Beispiel, the substance of the coat of the liver is made of exceedingly
ﬁne members. Here knowledge of these divisions afforded Harvey an argu-
ment against those Galenic physicians16 who maintain that blood is con-
tained in the liver, which can be disproved,

…from the fabric and course of the veins, for the portal vein having
gone here into the liver is divided into branches, and these into other
branches always within the central sphere of the liver…For this
reason, many anatomists like WH have made diligent search for
an anastomosis and have found none. (Harvey 1616, P. 140)

Galenists believed that there must be anastomoses inside the liver so that
the vena cava and portal vein communicate, Und, as such, the liver would
be considered as the origin of the veins. Daher, through his collection of
historia anatomica about the divisions and material nature of the liver,
Harvey was able to identify this Galenic position as false. Thus he had
to begin to reconsider the use of the liver, which of course relates to his
work on the heart and the nature of the blood. In this way, historiae were
essential for reﬁning his causal understanding of the body and its parts.
Remember, the teleological schema noted above was arranged in order
of explanation. In terms of Harvey’s method, das ist, the order of judgment
or inference, the arrangement is reversed: one infers from less teleological
aspects of the parts to more teleological aspects. Also:

Historiae of the Parts → ([Actio → {Usus/Utilitas media →
Utilitas ﬁnalis}])

From historiae, if one determined, Zum Beispiel, that a part was warm,
that it was connected to a system of blood vessels entering the kidneys,
and that it was red, one might then infer that the use of the part was to
make the blood entering the kidneys warm, Und, given the historiae
concerning the kidneys, that its utility consisted in its ability to assist with
concoction.

6. Abschluss
As Aquinas noted, experience in matters pertaining to action produced
not only knowledge, but also habit.17 Anatomy is not just a knowing,

16. Laurentius 1600, P. 240; Bauhinus 1605, P. 288.
17. Siehe auch: Aquinas 2012, Ia-IIae, q.40, a.5, Anzeige 1, “… experientia in operabilibus non
solum causat scientiam; sed etiam causat quendam habitum, propter consuetudinem, qui
facit operationem faciliorem.”

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but a doing, a skilled ability: the repeated exercise of sensory and motive
faculties in combination with one’s reason renders the activity easier: eins
gains facultas. Experience was thus a complex and slow route to knowledge
of organic purposes, functions not inferred upon a single viewing, nor even
a dozen, but demanding instead long and active investigation. Harvey’s
epistemology, Dann, was no simple empiricism.

Noting this important fact, I want to conclude by discussing the image
of Harvey found in much current historiography, which privileges his pur-
ported invention of “observational knowledge.” As noted above, this line
of thought has been advocated by Andrew Wear (1983) and Roger French
(1994). Andererseits, Harvey must not be seen as having devised a new
sensory epistemology or as being interested in observational knowledge
instead of causal knowledge. Das ist, Natürlich, often how neoteric philos-
ophers interpreted him in his own time, but this is not Harvey’s self-
conception. Stattdessen, Harvey creatively reinterpreted the epistemological
and methodological doctrines of Aristotle, Galen, and his Paduan teachers
to suit his needs: his primary interest was, in fact, the production of ﬁnal
causal knowledge.

Roger French argues that Harvey posited a new, sensory epistemology
upon a “Principle of Limited Explanation” that Harvey supposedly devised
in the De motu cordis (1628) and later replies to his critics. Here Harvey was
supposed to have maintained that factual, observational knowledge was the
primary sort of knowledge that philosophers should be interested in,
instead of causal knowledge.18 How French intends this principle is unclear:
he calls it a principle of limited explanation, but the principle as he has
formulated it seems to be rather a rejection of explanation. For what sort of
explanation could Harvey offer in the absence of causal knowledge? Weiter,
French’s analysis is based upon misunderstandings. I do not deny, Natürlich,
that Harvey repeatedly emphasized that his discovery of the circulation was
true even in the absence of the ﬁnal cause, but this does not make for the kind
of strong principle that French asserted, as French understood this “Principle”
to indicate a general attitude with respect to determining the ﬁnal causes of
things in nature.

French linked this so-called principle with Harvey’s distinction, in his
letters to Riolan, between knowledge of facts (hoti) and knowledge of
causes (dioti). This is the Aristotelian division between the results of historia
and the results of causal investigation. Harvey (1649, P. 76) wrote that,
“With regard to a fact, we should ask ﬁrst ‘that it is’ before ‘why it is’ [Quod

18. This is discussed in a number of places in French 1994, S. 277, 301, 313, 317,
346, 350, 362. The story is complicated, Jedoch, by the fact that French does at certain
points acknowledge Harvey’s interest in ﬁnding causes.

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sit, ante quam Propter quid, inquirendum].”19 French takes this to indicate that
Harvey “…is calling on an approved technique of experimental demonstra-
tion, from sense and experience, not from ﬁrst principles” (French 1994,
P. 278). But this misunderstands demonstration, for experience just is the
source of ﬁrst principles for demonstration, In der Tat, following Aristotle,
experience is the source of both art and science! Harvey was simply arguing
Das, with Aristotle, one must make room for a demonstration that something
is as a preliminary to any demonstration of why it is.

But to think the former is paramount to science is mistaken, for it is
clear that to Harvey it is but necessary preamble. There is a passage from
his letters to Riolan that is often used to establish Harvey’s “purely obser-
vational knowledge:”

The example of Astronomy is not to be followed here, bei dem die
causes and why such a thing is [propter quid] come to be investigated
only from the appearances and that such a thing is [ipso quod sit]. Aber
for anybody searching for the cause of the Eclipse, one should be
placed above the Moon, where one might discern the cause by
sensation, and not by reasoning concerning appearances […causam
perquirens, supra lunam si steretur, ubi sensu causam discerneret, nicht
ratiocinio sensibilium]… (Harvey 1649, P. 81)

Two points can be made against this. Erste, as the larger context makes
clear, the subject here is not discovery or method in general, Aber
confirmation and demonstration in particular: knowledge gained by means
of the senses is the best kind of evidence. But this does not mean that
reasoning plays no role, nor does it mean that simple observation leads to
knowledge of causes. Zweite, what I have translated as “reasoning about
appearances” is often read as “reasoning about sensibles,” but, wieder, aus
the context it is clear that he is referring back to astronomy where true, hoch
close observations of the moon are not possible. The parallel in anatomy
would be to discern the nature of, sagen, the eyes only by what could be
sensed from the outside without dissection. So this passage does not, In
fact, mean that Harvey thinks one can directly observe causes, only that such
knowledge is best gained and conﬁrmed through sensory observations.

French follows the work of Wear (1983), who argued that Harvey’s method

of obtaining observational knowledge was consistent across his career:
…Harvey perceived the circulation as an observable fact and not as a
theory…Harvey came to view observation as a form of knowledge in

19. Harvey 1649, P. 76. French translates “propter quid” as “an account of what it is”
but this obscures the fact that the account is meant to be causal, das ist, an answer to a why
question.

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its own right (perhaps the epistemological discovery of the
seventeenth century) by contrast to the Aristotelian position that
knowledge of causes was the only knowledge. (Wear 1983, P. 224)
But this misunderstands Harvey’s position: by admitting the importance of
Überwachung, he was not demoting causal knowledge, he was pointing out
that observation is what leads to knowledge of causes! Natürlich, not any kind of
observation leads to knowledge: it is only experienced observation that does so,
only the perceptions of the expert anatomist, performed across animals, Verhältnis-
nally organized into historiae, can be counted upon for causal knowledge.

I end by putting Harvey’s conception of experience in some Aristotelian-
Platonic perspective. One way to frame the difference between observa-
tional (better, historisch) knowledge and causal or scientiﬁc knowledge is
analogous to the difference between inductive knowledge and understanding.
Miles Burnyeat has argued that, for Aristotle, understanding is about the or-
ganization of things already known: “Inductive knowledge is already knowl-
edge, but it is not understanding. For understanding we need greater
familiarity and expertise” (Burnyeat 1981, S. 131, 137). Thus scientiﬁc
demonstration is a way of systematizing causal explanations. Burnyeat’s
description of Aristotle’s natural philosophy matches exactly Harvey’s
conception of the experienced anatomist whose expertise allows him to not just
observe, but judge and truly understand the causes of his observations, erlauben-
ing for demonstration. Harvey, following in this tradition, may have been an
inspiration for a new observational epistemology, but Harvey’s methods were
based upon his interpretation of Aristotelian and Galenic science.

Harvey thought that knowing necessitates doing: investigative reasoning,
Harvey scribbled in the margins of his copy of Galen’s De sectis, makes a
doctor by experience. It is the constant pursuit of physiological knowledge,
the repeated investigation of animal bodies, that allowed the anatomist to
develop expertise, a familiarity with cutting through blood and bone in an
attempt to ﬁgure out what’s there and what it’s doing. What is needed is
not mere observation, but continual observation by one deeply acquainted
with the subject matter. Observation and reason are united by experience
for Harvey, and it is through the training and use of these abilities that he
thought one could come to know the ends of nature, the purposes of living
things and their parts.

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