I have just been reading Thomas Wright’s splendid book, Circulation, about William Harvey’s revolutionary idea, an example of a paradigm shift if ever there was one. (I have also just been reading Kuhn, for the first time I think. Although was first published when I was an undergraduate & we certainly heard all about it, I think I would have thought it necessary to be able to appreciate fully the scientific examples he quotes – far too daunting for me at that stage.)
Setting Harvey’s anatomical work firmly within the intellectual & political ferments of the time, Wright shows him clearly learning to see scientific problems in terms of other, practical, concrete examples, & to formulate descriptions of his new scientific law (or what Kuhn called a law-sketch) in language which would be familiar to any educated reader.
Circulation, as a word & an idea, was very much in the air – for example in relation to the problem of making it possible for wheeled traffic to move unhindered through the streets of London, or in describing the toing & froing of goods (& money) between the capital, the rest of the country & the newly expanded greater world.
And so, with his book on the circulation of the blood, Harvey had become ‘a lightning rod for the intellectual forces & language of his time … His theory seemed orderly, graceful & comprehensible … precisely because it relied so heavily on common cultural ideas & metaphors.’
This is the kind of writing – addressed, by such as Franklin in his Electricity or Darwin’s Origins, to anyone who might be interested - which Kuhn identified with the introduction of a new paradigm. Scientists who share an established model, who conduct ‘normal science,’ learn to describe the subtler & more esoteric aspects of their subject in language that can be understood only by other practitioners in the field.
London’s water supply gave Harvey one of his examples of practical circulation, not least because accusations that the College of Physicians, of which he was one of the ‘Elect’, had been stealing water from the mains, led to his being sent to appear before the Star Chamber to defend the doctors' practice, which meant that he had to learn more about the system for delivering clean water to the city’s homes & businesses.
The medieval scheme of open water courses was being replaced by a network of cisterns, fountains & conduits which were less vulnerable to pollution from the disgusting detritus freely deposited by the city’s inhabitants, both human & animal. These conduits were in fact lead pipes, but I suppose the possible risks of lead poisoning were considered nugatory when compared to those of the plague & other contagions.
Incidentally, John Donne is described on the book jacket as Harvey’s ’recalcitrant patient’, though the text itself contains no specific reference to Donne’s treatment for relapsing fever, or even any references to anything other than the fact that Donne must have been well aware of Harvey’s anatomical explorations.
