The Warfare of Science

by Andrew Dickson White

ANATOMY AND MEDICINE.

I pass, now, to fields of more immediate importance to us—to anatomy and medicine.

It might be supposed that the votaries of sciences like these would be suffered to escape attack; unfortunately, they have had to stand in the thickest of the battle.

The Church, even in its earliest centuries, seems to have developed a distrust of them. Tertullian, in his "Treatise upon the Soul," stigmatizes the surgeon Herophilus as a "butcher," and evidently on account of his skill in his profession rather than on account of his want of it. St. Augustine, in his great treatise on the City of God, which remains to this day one of the treasures of the Church, speaks with some bitterness of "medical men who are called anatomists," and says that "with a cruel zeal for science they have dissected the bodies of the dead, and sometimes of sick persons, who have died under their knives, and have inhumanly pried into the secrets of the human body to learn the nature of disease and its exact seat, and how it might be cured!" [107]

But it was not until the mixture of theology and science had begun to ferment, in the thirteenth century, and the ecclesiastical power had been aroused in behalf of this sacred mixture, that the feeling against medical science broke into open war. About the beginning of that century Pope Innocent III. forbade surgical operations by priests, deacons, or subdeacons. Pope Honorius went still further, and forbade medicine to be practised by archdeacons, priests, or deacons; in 1243 the Dominican authorities banished books on medicine from their monasteries; somewhat later, Pope Boniface VIII. interdicted dissection as sacrilege. [108]

Toward the close of that great religious century came a battle which serves to show the spirit of the time.

The great physician and chemist of the day was Arnold de Villa Nova. Although he has been overrated by some modern historians as a votary of the experimental method, and under-rated by others as a votary of alchemy, the sober judgment of the most thoughtful has acknowledged him as one of the most useful forerunners of modern masters in medical and chemical science.

The missile usual in such cases was hurled at him. He was charged with sorcery and dealings with the devil. The Archbishop of Tarragona first excommunicated him and drove him from Spain; next he was driven from Paris, and took refuge at Montpellier; thence, too, he was driven, finally, every place in France was closed against him, and he became an outcast. [109]

Such seemed the fate of men in that field who gained even a glimmer of new scientific truth. Even men like Cardan, and Paracelsus, and Porta, who yielded much to popular superstitions, were at once set upon if they ventured upon any other than the path which the Church thought sound—the insufficient path of Aristotelian investigation.

We have seen that the weapons used against the astronomers were mainly the epithets "infidel" and "atheist." We have also seen that the missiles used against the chemists and physicians were the epithets "sorcerer" and "leaguer with the devil," and we have picked up on various battle-fields another effective weapon, the epithet "Mohammedan."

On the heads of the anatomists and physicians were concentrated all these missiles. The charge of atheism ripened into a proverb: "Ubi sunt tres medici, ibi sunt duo athei." Magic seemed so common a charge that many of the physicians seemed to believe it themselves. Mohammedanism and Averroism became almost synonymous with medicine, and Petrarch stigmatized Averroists as "men who deny Genesis and bark at Christ." [110]

Not to weary you with the details of earlier struggles, I will select a great benefactor of mankind and champion of scientific truth at the period of the revival of learning and the Reformation—Andreas Vesalius, the founder of the modern science of anatomy. The battle waged by this man is one of the glories of our race.

The old methods were soon exhausted by his early fervor, and he sought to advance science by truly scientific means—by patient investigation and by careful recording of results.

From the outset Vesalius proved himself a master. In the search for real knowledge he braved the most terrible dangers. Before his time the dissection of the human subject was thought akin to sacrilege. Occasionally an anatomist, like Mundinus, had given some little display with such a subject; but, for the purposes of investigation, such dissection was forbidden. [111] As we have already seen, even such men in the early Church as Tertullian and St. Augustine held anatomy in abhorrence, and Boniface VIII. interdicted dissection as sacrilege.

Through this sacred conventionalism Vesalius broke without fear. Braving ecclesiastical censure and popular fury, he studied his science by the only method that could give useful results. No peril daunted him. To secure the material for his investigations, he haunted gibbets and charnel-houses; in this search he risked alike the fires of the Inquisition and the virus of the plague. First of all men he began to place the science of human anatomy on its solid, modern foundations—on careful examination and observation of the human body. This was his first great sin, and it was soon aggravated by one considered even greater.

Perhaps the most unfortunate thing that has ever been done for Christianity is the tying it to forms of science which are doomed and gradually sinking. Just as, in the time of Roger Bacon, excellent but mistaken men devoted all their energies to binding Christianity to Aristotle; just as, in the time of Reuchlin and Erasmus, they insisted on binding Christianity to Thomas Aquinas: so, in the time of Vesalius, such men made every effort to link Christianity to Galen.

The cry has been the same in all ages; it is the same which we hear in this age for curbing scientific studies—the cry for what is called "sound learning." Whether standing for Aristotle against Bacon, or Aquinas against Erasmus, or Galen against Vesalius, or making mechanical Greek verses at Eton instead of studying the handiwork of the Almighty, or reading Euripides with translations instead of Lessing and Goethe in the original, the cry always is for "sound learning." The idea always is that these studies are safe.

At twenty-eight years of age Vesalius gave to the world his great work on human anatomy. With it ended the old and began the new. Its researches, by their thoroughness, were a triumph of science; its illustrations, by their fidelity, were a triumph of art.

To shield himself, as far as possible, in the battle which he foresaw must come, Vesalius prefaced the work by a dedication to the Emperor Charles V. In this dedicatory preface he argues for his method, and against the parrot repetitions of the mediæval text-books; he also condemns the wretched anatomical preparations and specimens made by physicians who utterly refused to advance beyond the ancient master.

The parrot-like repeaters of Galen gave battle at once. After the manner of their time, their first missiles were epithets; and, the almost infinite magazine of these having been exhausted, they began to use sharper weapons—weapons theologic.

At first the theologic weapons failed. A conference of divines having been asked to decide whether dissection of the human body is sacrilege, gave a decision in the negative. The reason is simple: Charles V. had made Vesalius his physician, and could not spare him. But, on the accession of Philip II. of Spain, the whole scene changed. That most bitter of bigots must of course detest the great innovator.

A new weapon was now forged. Vesalius was charged with dissecting living men, [112] and, either from direct persecution, as the great majority of authors assert, or from indirect influences, as the recent apologists for Philip II. allow, Vesalius became a wanderer. On a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to atone for his sin, he was shipwrecked, and in the prime of his life and strength he was lost to this world.

And yet not lost. In this century he again stands on earth; the painter Hamann has again given him to us. By the magic of Hamann's pencil, we look once more into Vesalius's cell. Its windows and doors, bolted and barred within, betoken the storm of bigotry which rages without; the crucifix, toward which he turns his eyes, symbolizes the spirit in which he labors; the corpse of the plague-stricken, over which he bends, ceases to be repulsive; his very soul seems to send forth rays from the canvas which strengthen us for the good fight in this age. [113]

He was hunted to death by men who conscientiously supposed he was injuring religion. His poor, blind foes destroyed one of religion's greatest apostles. What was his influence on religion? He substituted for repetition, by rote, of worn-out theories of dead men, conscientious and reverent searching into the works of the living God; he substituted for representations of the human structure—pitiful and unreal—truthful representations, revealing the Creator's power and goodness in every line. [114]

I hasten now to the most singular struggle and victory of medical science between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Early in the last century, Boyer presented Inoculation as a preventive of small-pox, in France; thoughtful physicians in England, led by Lady Montagu and Maitland, followed his example.

Theology took fright at once on both sides of the Channel. The French theologians of the Sorbonne solemnly condemned the practice. English theologians were most loudly represented by the Rev. Edward Massy, who, in 1722, preached a sermon in which he declared that Job's distemper was probably confluent small-pox, and that he had been doubtless inoculated by the devil; that diseases are sent by Providence for the punishment of sin, and that the proposed attempt to prevent them is "a diabolical operation." This sermon was entitled "The Dangerous and Sinful Practice of Inoculation." Not less absurd was the sermon of the Rev. Mr. Delafaye, entitled "Inoculation an Indefensible Practice." Thirty years later the struggle was still going on. It is a pleasure to note one great churchman, Maddox, Bishop of Worcester, giving battle on the side of right reason; but as late as 1753 we have the Rector of Canterbury denouncing inoculation from his pulpit in the primatial city, and many of his brethren following his example. Among the most common weapons hurled by churchmen at the supporters of inoculation, during all this long war, were charges of sorcery and atheism. [115]

Nor did Jenner's blessed discovery of vaccination escape opposition on similar grounds. In 1798 an anti-vaccine society was formed by clergymen and physicians, calling on the people of England to suppress vaccination as "bidding defiance to Heaven itself—even to the will of God," and declaring that "the law of God prohibits the practice." In 1803 the Rev. Dr. Ramsden thundered against it in a sermon before the University of Cambridge, mingling texts of Scripture with calumnies against Jenner; but Plumptre in England, Waterhouse in America, and a host of other good men and true, press forward to Jenner's side, and at last science, humanity, and right reason, gain the victory. [116]

But I pass to one typical conflict in our days. In 1847 James Young Simpson, a Scotch physician of eminence, advocated the use of anæsthetics in obstetrical cases.

Immediately a storm arose. From pulpit after pulpit such a use of chloroform was denounced as impious. It was declared contrary to Holy Writ, and texts were cited abundantly. The ordinary declaration was, that to use chloroform was "to avoid one part of the primeval curse on woman." [117]

Simpson wrote pamphlet after pamphlet to defend the blessing which he brought into use; but the battle seemed about to be lost, when he seized a new weapon. "My opponents forget," said he, "the twenty-first verse of the second chapter of Genesis. That is the record of the first surgical operation ever performed, and that text proves that the Maker of the universe, before he took the rib from Adam's side for the creation of Eve, caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam."

This was a stunning blow; but it did not entirely kill the opposition. They had strength left to maintain that "the deep sleep of Adam took place before the introduction of pain into the world—in the state of innocence." [118] But now a new champion intervened—Thomas Chalmers. With a few pungent arguments he scattered the enemy forever, and the greatest battle of science against suffering was won. [119]

But was not the victory won also for religion? Go to yonder monument, in Boston, to one of the discoverers of anæsthesia. Read this inscription from our sacred volume: "This also cometh from the Lord of hosts, which is wonderful in counsel and excellent in working."