![]() ![]() Harvey chose the anachronism deliberately. Yet the synonym for mehercule in good Renaissance English was ‘by George’, for the dragon slayer and national saint. ‘It took me two hours to think of “damme” as a sufficiently dramatic translation of “mehercule”, but the Oxford English Dictionary then assured me that in the form “Damn me” it was in use as early as 1645, and I felt that the two hours had been well spent in getting the effect that Harvey had, to my mind, intended by his use of a particular Latin word’. The translator commissioned by the Royal College of Physicians for the tercentenary version rehearsed previous efforts, then explained his own expletive. ![]() ![]() Renditions have been ‘by my troth’, ‘in fact’, ‘in faith’, ‘damn it’, ‘damme, and ‘in God’s truth’.Ī single editorial revision told the truth, ‘by Hercules’. Most English translations have avoided its literal sense. Where they did swear – by Hercules, and by Zeus or Jove – marked the arguments Harvey swore in his ambition to alter the history of medicine from tradition to science.Īlthough the exclamation has been credited as ‘colourful prose’, Medical texts were not in the habit of swearing. The virile oath mehercule exceeded the discipline of William Harvey’s masterful Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus (1628). This cultural analysis exposes Harvey’s professional issues and personal ambitions, so to promote a fuller understanding of his historic role in medical discovery. Harvey aspired to be, like Hercules, immortal, a term which the College belatedly acknowledged. Harvey’s copia did not denote a quantitative amount but a powerful supply. His circulation of the blood also imitated Hercules’ successful dependence on the force of the water flow to flush the Augean stable. His Herculean labour was to dam the cardiac septum and divert the blood flow into a continuous channel through the arteries and veins. Harvey’s oath mehercule swore against Galen’s Dia to assert the necessity of opening an alternate route for the blood flow. He employed anatomical demonstration against Galen’s porous cardiac septum, which admitted blood across the ventricles. A knowledge of the theory and practice of Renaissance humanism discloses his identification with the Herculean labour of cleansing the Augean stable. Harvey sought to usurp the medical epithet ‘a second Hercules’ by reforming humanist dependence on ancient texts as authoritative medicine. He reprised the role in self-defence against accusations in the College of Physicians, London, of his breach of faith with medical tradition. Harvey brilliantly and subversively assumed the persona of the mythological Hercules to embody his own anatomical labour in De motu cordis et sanguinis (1628). This article continues the analyses in Medical History 52 (2008), 73–90, 365–86 of William Harvey’s self-understanding as the philosopher and discoverer of the blood’s circulation. ![]()
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