Portraits of Dr. William Harvey

The Council of the Royal Society of Medicine determined in 1912 to form a section for the study of the History of Medicine. The section immediately became popular, and one of its first actions was to arrange for the issue of occasional fasciculi dealing with such subjects in medical history as did not lend themselves readily to discussion. Mr. William Roberts pointed out in 1903 that the iconography of medical men had not yet received adequate attention, and he published (The Athenaeum, No. 3960, Sept. 19, 1903, p. 388) an account of the portraits of Dr. William Harvey which was afterwards revised and reissued in Dr. Weir Mitchell's privately printed Some Memoranda in regard to William Harvey, M.D. (New York, 1907). This account of the portraits of William Harvey was not illustrated, but it showed that many pictures existed. The Council of the Historical Section directed their Secretaries to obtain photographs of some of the portraits and write a short account of each, whilst they invited their President to superintend the reproductions in such a manner as to enable them to be issued at a moderate cost to those who wished to know how the great master of physiology appeared to his contemporaries. The present fasciculus is the result. It proves that the undoubted and contemporary portraits of Harvey are more numerous than was expected, either because 'the honest little Doctor' liked to have his picture painted, or, as is the more likely, because he could not resist the importunity of artists whom he must often have desired to help pecuniarily. Numerous portraits of gentlemen of the seventeenth century with peaked beards and white collars also exist, and some of them are labelled with Harvey's name.