William Harvey's Anatomy Book and Literary Culture

Ora et labora: the Benedictine motto unfurls on the banderole of the title-page of William Harvey’s masterful Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus (1628). This monastic motto, ‘‘Pray and work’’, seems an odd advertisement for an anatomy book. Harvey submitted his manuscript for publication to William Fitzer in Frankfurt, who commissioned it to one of the eight printers licensed by the Frankfurter Rat, ‘‘mediocre craftsmen’’ all. The sorry product was a limited edition marred by typographical errors, usually blamed on Harvey’s notoriously bad handwriting, an ‘‘atrocious, crabbed hand’’, which necessitated the later printing of errata. De motu cordis et sanguinis has been judged ‘‘a rather badly produced book’’, with most extant copies on thin paper in ordinary type. It has been supposed that to compensate for the brevity of the seemingly unimportant book its publisher provided ‘‘a handsome title-page’’. But its title-page is homely in comparison with Fitzer’s lavish title-pages for Harvey’s colleague Robert Fludd, whose Pulsus, the second part of his Medicina catholica, was the first printed agreement with Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood. Or, consider the impressive volume from Fitzer for Harvey’s rival André Du Laurens, Opera omnia anatomica et medica, which Harvey cites a year later in his own modest book. This large volume features Du Laurens’s engraved portrait in a medallion flanked by two écorchés. In physical comparison, Harvey’s book recalls the biblical example of David and Goliath or the Renaissance topic of ‘‘the fly to the elephant’’. Whether Fitzer’s authors designed or commissioned their title-pages is unrecorded, but they seem individual to each book. The element on Harvey’s title-page that may have been his publisher’s choice is the shield. Fitzer had published in the previous year Proscenium vitae humanae, an emblem book with twenty-eight engravings of armorial shields by Virgil Solis, which his predecessor in the printing business, Johann Theodor de Bry, had used.