they had long been preserved at Burley-on-the-Hill , the seat of the Earl of Winchelsea , one of whose ancestors married a niece of Harvey . it has , however , since been shown that they were much more likely to have been the property of Sir John Finch , who was once a Professor of anatomy at Pisa , and seems to have had for an anatomical pupil one Marchetti , who made tables of veins , nerves , and arteries , five times more exact than are described in any author . John Evelyn in his diary also refers to some tables which Sir Charles Scarburgh had seen and was anxious that Evelyn should present to the College . he only agreed to lend them for a short time for Scarburgh &apos;s use in his lectures , and ultimately presented them to the royal society . Evelyn had purchased these tables at Padua in 1646 and had had them transported to England . they were then the first of that kind ever seene in our country , &amp; for ought I know in the world , though afterwards there were others . the fact that Scarburgh succeeded Harvey as Lumleian lecturer in 1656 and refers to these tables as unique makes it unlikely that Harvey had used anything of the kind ; otherwise his friend Scarburgh would surely have seen them and would not then have regarded Evelyn &apos;s as unique . from 1616 to 1628 there were no objections at the College of physicians to Harvey &apos;s new ideas except on the part of Dr James Primrose ( whose date of decease is given by Munk as 1659 , and who accepted Galen as authoritative , one of his arguments being that in the olden days patients were healed without the knowledge of the circulation , and that therefore this doctrine , even if true , would be useless . Lint , 1926 ) . Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616 , while on 3 February 1618 Harvey was appointed physician to King James 1 , and on 7 May of that year was described in pharmacopoeia Londinensis , on the committee dealing with which he had been serving , as medicus regius juratus ; in February 1620 he served with Sir Theodore de Mayerne ( 1573-1654/5 ) and William Clement on a committee to watch the surgeons , and in March 1625 he and his brother , John , were admitted members of Gray &apos;s Inn . in that month he attended King James 1 in the latter &apos;s last illness which , in the accusation of the Duke of Buckingham by the House of Commons in the following year , was said to have been connected with a plaster and a posset , administered in transcendent presumption by the Duke . on Harvey &apos;s evidence , however , there was nothing harmful in the posset , though he did not advise the plaster because he did not know its ingredients . he was in this year elected censor of the College for the second time . in the following year he was offered an official residence in the precincts of Bart &apos;s , where many notable people lived , but refused it and received instead an increase in annual salary from &amp;pound;25 to &amp;pound;33 6 s 8 d . in 1627 he served on a committee , appointed by the College of physicians at the request of the Privy council , to report on some alum works in St Botolph &apos;s , Aldgate , which the committee condemned as a nuisance . in November Harvey became an elect of the College vice Gwynne , deceased , after Mayerne had refused because he was too constantly employed at Court . the former &apos;s de motu locali animalium , 1627 , written in his own hand , had formed ff 69-118 of the British Museum manuscript Sloane 486 , and appears to be a previously unpublished notebook in which he jotted down his thoughts with a view , eventually , to publishing a book on animal movement . it was added to at intervals without being finally drafted , and it is this incomplete synopsis which was in 1959 published by the Cambridge University press after it had been edited , translated and introduced by Dr Gweneth Whitteridge , archivist to St Bartholomew &apos;s Hospital , for the royal College of physicians . it appears that Harvey planned a treatise on the movement of muscles even while he was preparing de motu cordis et sanguinis . de motu locali animalium is the work mentioned in chapter 17 of the former &apos;s essay of 1628 , and it shows , even if it contains no new experimental observations , that Harvey &apos;s understanding of muscle and of muscular contraction was sounder than that of his predecessors and even of some of his successors . in 1628 , the year in which he turned fifty , he was elected treasurer of the College of physicians and also published his first book , entitled , exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis . it seems reasonable to suggest that William Fitzer , the English publisher of the book in Frankfurt , had been suggested by Harvey &apos;s friend , Robert Fludd , or Robertus de Fluctibus ( 1574-1637 ) , second son of Queen Elizabeth &apos;s one-time treasurer of war , and the MS which he received has been described as the most important medical work ever written , for it contained Harvey &apos;s new concept of the heart &apos;s movement and function and of the blood &apos;s passage round the body ; this he had confirmed in the presence of the President ( Dr Argent ) and fellows of the College of physicians for more than nine years past by numerous ocular demonstrations , and had freed from the objections of learned and skilful anatomists . in so doing he had surely shown the world the truth that is more beautiful than the evening and the morning stars , and had raised himself effectively from the ground and placed his head among the stars , as he had planned to do in his days at Padua . it is fitting before reading the libellus aureus to cast one &apos;s mind back over the efforts of the great men of the past in physiology , and to realize what a supreme act of courage it must have been on the fifty-year-old Harvey &apos;s part to challenge concepts established over so many generations . one can understand how much his colleagues at the College must have helped by their agreement with the ocular demonstrations of those things for the reasonable acceptance of which he once again so strongly pressed . over many years a countless succession of distinguished and learned men had followed and illumined a particular line of thought , and this book of mine , he said , was the only one to oppose tradition and to assert that the blood travelled along a previously unrecognized circular pathway of its own . so he was very much afraid of a charge of over-presumptuousness had he let his book , in other respects completed some years earlier , either be published at home or go overseas for printing unless he had first put his thesis before the fellows and confirmed it by visual demonstration , replied to their doubts and objections , and received the President &apos;s vote in favour . he concluded his words to the President and fellows with a splendid passage worthy of an Elizabethan , which by birth he was : it was , however , dear colleagues , he said no intention of mine , in listings and upturnings of anatomical authors and writers , to make display by this book of my memory , studies , much reading , and a large printed tome . in the first place , because I propose to learn and to teach anatomy not from books but from dissections , not from the tenets of philosophers but from the fabric of nature . secondly , because I consider it neither fair nor worth the effort to defraud a predecessor of the honour due to him , or to provoke a contemporary . nor do I think it honourable to attack or fight those who excelled in anatomy and were my own teachers . further , I would not willingly charge with falsehood any searcher after truth , or besmirch any man with a stigma of error . but without ceasing I follow truth only , and devote all my effort and time to being able to contribute something pleasing to good men and appropriate to learned ones , and of service to literature . in an introduction to his short book of seventy-two pages , Harvey shows the relative weakness of previous accounts of the movement and function of the heart and arteries , for by reading what his predecessors have written and by noting the general trend of opinion handed on by them a man can confirm their correct statements and through anatomical dissection , manifold experiments , and persistent careful observation emend their wrong ones . at the end of his introduction he wrote that from these and very many other arguments it is clear that the statements made hitherto by earlier writers about the movement and function of the heart and arteries appear incongruous or obscure or impossible when submitted to specially careful consideration . it will therefore be very useful to look a little more deeply into the matter , to contemplate the movements of the arteries and of the heart not only in man , but also in all other animals with hearts ; moreover , by frequent experiments on animals and much use of our own eyes , to discern and investigate the truth . in chapter one he gives his strong reasons for writing , beginning by saying how difficult he found it to discover through the use of his own eyes in living animals the function and offices of the heart &apos;s movement so that he all but thought with Fracastorius , that it had been understood by God alone . at length he propounded his new view on the matter , and found it acceptable to some , to others less so . he published so that , if something accrued to the republic of letters through his work in this field , it might perhaps be acknowledged that he had done rightly ; also , that others might see that he had not lived idly ; or at least that others , given such lead and relying on more productive talents , might find an opportunity to carry out the task more accurately and to investigate more skilfully . in chapter two he gauged the nature of the heart &apos;s movements from the dissection of living animals , showing how these movements alternate with rests and are seen best in cold animals or in flagging warmer ones . at the time of its movement the heart becomes generally constricted , its walls thicken , its ventricles decrease in volume and it expels its content of blood , appearing paler in so doing in animals such as serpents , frogs , and the like . at one and the same time , therefore , occur the beat of the apex , the thickening of the heart walls , and the forcible expulsion of their contained blood by the contraction of the ventricles . going on in chapter three to the movement of the arteries , likewise gauged from the dissections of living animals , Harvey noted that contraction of the heart and the apex beat occur in systole , simultaneously with dilatation of the arteries and of the artery-like vein , and expulsion of the ventricular content . arterial pulsation disappears with cessation of ventricular contraction . during cutting or puncture of the ventricles , there is often forcible expulsion of blood from the wound . arterial diastole is thus synchronous with cardiac systole but , when movement of blood through arteries is hindered by compression , infarction or interception , the more distal arteries pulsate less because their pulse is nothing other than the impulse of the blood entering them . chapter four dealt with the nature of the movement of the ventricles and of the auricles , gauged from dissection of living animals . ( in four-chambered hearts ) there are four movements which are distinct in respect of place but not of time , the two auricles moving synchronously and then likewise the two ventricles . with everything more sluggish as the heart lies a-dying , and in fishes and in relatively cold-blooded animals , the auricular and ventricular movements become separated by an interval of inactivity so that the heart appears to respond ever more slowly to the pulsating auricles , and the order of cessation of beating is left ventricle , left auricle , right ventricle , and finally ( as Galen noticed ) right auricle . and while the heart is slowly dying , one can sometimes see it - so to speak - rouse itself and , in reply to two or three auricular beats , produce a single ventricular one slowly and reluctantly and with an effort . 