“Mechanics” and Mechanism in William Harvey’s Anatomy: Varieties and Limits

Abstract

English anatomist William Harvey (1578–1657), and especially his De motu cordis (1628), played a prominent role in the rise of mechanical and experimental approaches to natural philosophy in the seventeenth century. Famously, he compares the expansion of the arteries to the inflation of a glove or the expansion of a bladder; the motion of the heart to that of interlocking gears and the firing mechanism of a gun; and the heart to a pump. Less well known, in unpublished notes he compares the digestive organs to chemical apparatus and devotes an entire section to the artificium mechanicum of the muscles. It is perhaps surprising, then, that Harvey’s was a self-consciously Aristotelian and Galenic approach to anatomy. He understood the goal of anatomy to be final causal Aristotelian scientia of the parts of animals articulated using the Galenic notions of the “actions” and “uses” of the parts. Furthermore, he was critical of Descartes’ mechanistic theory of the heart and, more generally, of the corpuscularianism associated with (e.g.) Descartes, Gassendi, and Boyle. He even criticizes his one-time teacher Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente (who was no mechanical philosopher!) for being overly influenced by the “petty reasoning of mechanics.” In this chapter, I explore the complex and varied uses of mechanics/mechanical in Harvey’s works. I argue that, despite the apparent diversity, Harvey’s attitude toward mechanism is consistent, stable, and creative, reflecting the seventeenth-century semantic ambiguities of “mechanics” and the “mechanical,” as well as his own Galeno-Aristotelian understanding of anatomy.