< Page:The Harveian oration, 1873.djvu
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fret if his own age, in his own estimation, do him scanty justice. Posterity ordinarily — I do not say always — rectifies these false judgments; it has done so, at all events, in the cases of the men so grotesquely grouped together by Pecquet . Haller, for example, writing in 1774 (Bibliotheca Ana- tomica, i. p. 30 1 ), speaks of Riolanus as ' vir asper et in nuperos suosque coaevos immitis ac nemini parcens, nimis avidus suarum laudum praeco, et se ipso fatente anatomi- corum princeps.' The duty of attacking and abolishing such a man may, or indeed must have been, a disagreeable one to his contem- poraries. They appear to have shirked it : it was their duty to have faced it, notwith- standing it might have been disagreeable. Harvey used for these experiments a somewhat rough injecting apparatus, ' quem- admodum in clysteribus injiciendis fieri c See also, I would add, Gregorius Horst, the father of Harvey's correspondent of the same name, in his Opera Medica, i. p. 83 (1661), where Riolanus is spoken of as 1 anatomicorum hujus saeculi fere primum ;' and consult Bartholinus himself, who, in his work De Lacteis Dubia (1654), refers to 'multis Riolani observationibus quibus rem anatomicam immortali nominis celebritate auxit.'

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