Edward Dolnick - The Seeds of Life

I N CENTURIES TO COME THESE FIELDS AND WOODLANDS WILL shrink to tiny patches of green in a vast city. Londoners and tourists will feed ducks and swans here, and pose for giggling pictures. But today there are no crowds, no sightseers, no drifting sounds from the world outside. We are in an English royal park, the property of King Charles I. The king and his physician, William Harvey, are hunting deer. It is rutting season.

Neither Harvey nor the king has heard of a locked room mystery, where a body is found in impossible circumstances. Perhaps a dead man is discovered in a study locked from the inside, with a knife plunged into his back. Neither man has imagined such a thing. They are about to.

Harvey is a small man with raven-black hair and dark, darting eyes. Ambitious, impatient, and, as a friend put it, he radiates intensity. He is destined to soar into the medical pantheon for proving that the heart is a pump that sends the blood circulating around the body through an intricate network of arteries and veins.

Charles is slender, handsome, solemn, utterly convinced that God has set him above other mortals and that the king can do no wrong. He is destined to die at the hands of the English people, his head chopped off by a masked executioner and then held aloft by the hair while the crowd whoops in glee and gasps in shock at what it has done.

H ARVEY HAD PUBLISHED HIS ACCOUNT OF THE HEART IN 1628, A few years before the hunting excursion. The world denounced him. It was believed by the vulgar that Harvey complained, and all the physicians were against his opinion. For a man as combative as Harvey, that disdain served more as a spur than a rebuke. Harvey remained all his life a staunch seeing is believing man. Let others prattle on.

For uncounted ages, the heart had been the seat of the soul and the home of the emotions and insights that set humankind above other creatures. (When we talk today about a kind heart or a cold heart or speak of learning a poem by heart, of bygone beliefs.) What the sun was to the sky or the lion to the jungle, the heart was to the body. Now Harvey had demonstrated that this noble organ was in truth a wet and slimy machine.

The world would come around to Harveys view, though not for another two decades. In the end, the admiration would be universal. One dazzled follower would celebrate Harvey in verse: the Art / Of all the Wheels and Clock-work of the Heart.

At the time of his hunting venture with the king, that fame still lies ahead. Harvey is embattled, not acclaimed. But he knows what he has accomplished, even if the medical world has yet to catch on. With the riddle of the heart solved, Harvey has turned his attention to the greatest mystery of all. Since humankinds earliest days, men and women have wondered how new life comes into the world. How does sex lead to babies? Harvey intends to find out. He will learn, precisely, how mating creates life.

to hunt almost every week. Harvey has managed to enlist his king as his ally.

The kings huntsmen bring down a doe. Harvey, the most renowned anatomist of the age (and one of the last great anatomists to rely on what he can see with his naked eye), pushes close. Now he will show the king, who of curiosity, the secrets of conception and pregnancy. Together, they will gaze on a deer embryo in its earliest days. They are about to seewhat has never been revealed to anyone beforea small, round, glistening globule like an egg without a shell.

Harvey thrusts his knife into the does belly and cuts her open. Steam from the hot body rises into the chilly air. Harvey peers inside the animals womb, first avidly and then perplexedly. The king looks over his physicians shoulder. They see nothing!