'O seditious Citizen of the Physicall Common-Wealth!': Harvey's Royalism and His Autopsy of Old Parr

Abstract

Buried at the end of the sixty-eighth chapter of De Generatione Animalium (1651) is an easily missed lament from the erstwhile royal physician William Harvey (1578–1657). Begging his readers' pardon, he pauses amidst his Bildungsroman of the chick embryo to 'sigh' that in his absence from London, as he attended Charles I in exile in Oxford, Puritan soldiers have ransacked his living-quarters inside Whitehall. 'Some rapacious hands ... not only by Parliament's permission, but by its command' have destroyed not merely his household goods, but as he stresses, what is 'the heavier cause of my lament,' the records of his researches on the procreation of insects. Their loss, he asserts, shall damage 'the commonwealth of learning.' What is surprising about Harvey's aside is not its appearance in a scientific paper, but its almost neutral affective tone. Apart from shrinking whole soldiers to a metonym—'rapacious hands'—he otherwise swallows his anger.