V.
Bull of Pope John XXII. in which he authorizes the foundation of a University in the City of Cahors, his birthplace, as a memorial of his interest in the townspeople and a monument of his zeal for education.
Confirmatio erectionis Universitatis studiorum in civitate Cadurcensi.
Ioannes episcopus servus servorum Dei, ad perpetuam rei memoriam.
Cum civitas Cadurcensis, quam excellentiae divinae bonitas multiplicium gratiarum bonis et dotibus decoravit, propter ipsius commoditates et conditiones quamplurimas apta non modicum generali Studio censeatur, nos reipublicae multipliciter expedire credentes, quod in civitate praefata fiat et emanet fons scientiarum irriguus, de cuius plenitudine hauriant universi, litteralibus cupientes imbui documentis, et etiam cultores sapientiae inserantur et provehantur diversarum facultatum dogmatibus eruditi, facundi et undique illustrati, fructum uberem, largiente Domino, suo tempore producturi; attendentes quoque sincerae fidei puritatem, ac eximiae devotionis affectum, quos dilecti filii consules et Universitas eiusdem civitatis ad nos et Romanam Ecclesiam habere noscuntur: ex praedictis causis, porrectis etiam nobis pro parte consulum et Universitatis praedictae humilibus et devotis supplicationibus inclinati, auctoritate apostolica statuimus et ordinamus, quod in civitate praedicta perpetuis futuris temporibus generale. Studium habeatur et vigeat in qualibet licita facultate, quodque praefatum Studium, ac eius Universitas, ac doctores, magistri, licentiati, baccalaurei et scholares pro tempore commorantes causa studiorum ibidem, omnibus privilegiis, liberatibus et immunitatibus, concessis Studio Tholosamensi ac Universitati eius, plene et libere gaudeant et utantur.
Nulli ergo omnino hominum etc.
Datum Avenione vii idus iunii, pontificatus nostri anno xvi.
Dat. die 7 iunii 1332, pont. anno xvi.
APPENDIX III.
MEDIEVAL LAW FOR THE REGULATION OF THE PRACTICE OF MEDICINE.
It is usually presumed that the practice of medicine was on a very low plane during the Middle Ages, and that while only little was known about medical science, the methods of practicing the medical art were crude, as befitted an earlier time in evolution before modern advances had come. Any such impression is founded entirely on ignorance of the conditions which actually existed. In his studies in the history of anatomy in the Middle Ages, Von Töply [Footnote 48] quotes the law for the regulation of the practice of medicine issued by the Emperor Frederick II. in 1240 or 1241. The Law was binding on the two Sicilies, and shows exactly the state of medical practice in the southern part of Italy at this time. Everything that we think we have gained by magnificent advances in modern times is to be found in this law. A physician must have a diploma from a university and a license from the government; he must have studied three years before taking up medicine--then three years in a medical school, and then must have practiced with a physician for a year before he will be allowed to take up the practice of medicine on his own account. If he is to take up surgery, he must have made special studies in anatomy. The law is especially interesting because of its regulation of the purity of drugs, in which it anticipates by nearly seven centuries our Pure Drug Law of last year. (This law was published in the form here given in the "Journal of the American Medical Association," January, 1908.)
[Footnote 48: Studien zur Geschichte der Anatomie im Mittelalter von Robert Ritter Von Töply. Leipzig, 1898.]
"While we are bent upon making regulations for the commonweal of our loyal subjects, we keep ever under our observation the health of the individual. In consideration of the serious damage and the irreparable suffering which may occur as a consequence of the inexperience of physicians, we decree that in future no one who claims the title of physician shall exercise the art of healing or dare [{420}] to treat the ailing, except such as have beforehand, in our University of Salerno, passed a public examination under a regular teacher of medicine, and been given a certificate not only by the professor of medicine, but also by one of our civil officials, which declares his trustworthiness and sufficient knowledge. This document must be presented to us, or in our absence from the kingdom to the person who remains behind in our stead, and must be followed by the obtaining of a license to practice medicine either from us or from our representative aforesaid. Violation of this law is to be punished by confiscation of goods and a year in prison for all those who in future dare to practice medicine without such permission from our authority.
"Since students cannot be expected to learn medical science unless they have previously been grounded in logic, we further decree that no one be permitted to take up the study of medical science without beforehand having devoted at least three full years to the study of logic." (Under logic at this time was included the study of practically all the subjects that are now taken up in the arts department of our universities. Huxley, in his address before the University of Aberdeen on the occasion of his inauguration as Rector of that University, said that "the scholars [of the early days of the universities] studied Grammar and Rhetoric; Arithmetic and Geometry; Astronomy, Theology and Music." He added: "Thus their work, however imperfect and faulty, judged by modern lights, it may have been, brought them face to face with all the leading aspects of the many-sided mind of man. For these studies did really contain, at any rate, in embryo--sometimes, it may be, in caricature--what we now call Philosophy, Mathematical and Physical Science, and Art. And I doubt if the curriculum of any modern university shows so clear and generous a comprehension of what is meant by culture as the old Trivium and Quadrivium does." Huxley, Science and Education Essays, page 197. New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1896.--J. J. W.)
"After three years devoted to these studies, he (the student) may, if he will, proceed to the study of medicine, provided always that during the prescribed time he devotes himself also to surgery, which is a part of medicine. After this, and not before, will he be given the license to practice, provided he has passed an examination in legal form as well as obtained a certificate from his teacher as to his [{421}] studies in the preceding time. After having spent five years in study, he shall not practice medicine until he has during a full year devoted himself to medical practise with the advice and under the direction of an experienced physician. In the medical schools the professors shall during these five years devote themselves to the recognized books, both those of Hippocrates as well as those of Galen, and shall teach not only theoretic, but also practical medicine.
"We also decree, as a measure intended for the furtherance of Public Health, that no surgeon shall be allowed to practice, unless he has a written certificate, which he must present to the professor in the medical faculty, stating that he has spent at least a year at that part of medicine which is necessary as a guide to the practice of surgery, and that, above all, he has learned the anatomy of the human body at the medical school, and is fully equipped in this department of medicine, without which neither operations of any kind can be undertaken with success nor fractures be properly treated.
"In every province of our Kingdom which is under our legal authority, we decree that two prudent and trustworthy men, whose names must be sent to our court, shall be appointed and bound by a formal oath, under whose inspection electuaries and syrups and other medicines be prepared according to law and only be sold after such inspection. In Salerno in particular, we decree that this inspectorship shall be limited to those who have taken their degrees as Masters in Physic.
"We also decree by the present law, that no one in the Kingdom, except in Salerno or in Naples (in which were the two universities of the Kingdom), shall undertake to give lectures on medicine or surgery, or presume to assume the name of teacher, unless he shall have been very thoroughly examined in the presence of a Government official and of a professor in the art of medicine.
"Every physician given a license to practice must take an oath that he shall faithfully fulfil all the requirements of the law, and in addition, whenever it comes to his knowledge that any apothecary has for sale drugs that are of less than normal strength, he shall report him to the court, and besides he shall give his advice to the poor without asking for any compensation. A physician shall visit his patient at least twice a day, and at the wish of his patient once also at night, and shall charge him, in case the visit does not [{422}] require him to go out of the village or beyond the walls of the city, not more than one-half tarrene in gold for each day's service." (A tarrene in gold was equal to about thirty cents of our money. Money had at least twenty times the purchasing power at that time that it has now. At the end of the thirteenth century, according to an Act of the English Parliament, a workman received 4d [eight cents] a day for his labor, and according to the same Act of Parliament the following prices were charged for commodities: A pair of shoes cost eight cents, that is, a day's wages. A fat goose cost seven cents, less than a day's wages. A fat sheep unshorn cost thirty-five cents; shorn, about twenty-five cents. For four days pay a man could get enough meat for himself and family to live on for a week, besides material out of which his wife could make excellent garments for the family. A fat hog cost twice as much as a fat sheep, and a bullock about six times as much.--J. J. W.) "From a patient whom he visits outside of the village or the wall of the town, the physician has a right to demand for a day's service not more than three tarrenes, to which maybe added, however, his expenses, provided that he does not demand more than four tarrenes altogether.
"He (the regularly licensed physician) must not enter into any business relations with the apothecary, nor must he take any of them under his protection nor incur any money obligations in their regard." (Apparently many different ways of getting round this regulation had already been invented, and the idea of these expressions seemed to be to make it very clear in the law that any such business relationship, no matter what the excuse or method of it, is forbidden.--J. J. W.) "Nor must any licensed physician keep an apothecary's shop himself. Apothecaries must conduct their business with a certificate from a physician, according to the regulations and upon their own credit and responsibility, and they shall not be permitted to sell their products without having taken an oath that all their drugs have been prepared in the prescribed form, without any fraud. The apothecary may derive the following profits from his sales: Such extracts and simples as he need not keep in stock for more than a year before they may be employed may be charged for at the rate of three tarrenes an ounce." (90 cents an ounce seems very dear, but this is the maximum.) "Other medicines, however, which in consequence of the special conditions required for their preparation or for any other reason the apothecary has to have in [{423}] stock for more than a year, he may charge for at the rate of six tarrenes an ounce. Stations for the preparation of medicines may not be located anywhere, but only in certain communities in the Kingdom, as we prescribe below.
"We decree also that the growers of plants meant for medical purpose shall be bound by a solemn oath that they shall prepare medicines conscientiously, according to the rules of their art, and as far as it is humanely possible that they shall prepare them in the presence of the inspectors. Violations of this law shall be punished by the confiscation of their movable goods. If the inspectors, however, to whose fidelity to duty the keeping of these regulations is committed, should allow any fraud in the matters that are entrusted to them, they shall be condemned to punishment by death."
APPENDIX IV.
CHURCH DECREES RELATING TO MEDICINE.
Besides the Papal documents referred to in the body of this book and quoted in the original in the Appendix to the first edition immediately preceding this, there is a series of decrees of Councils and Synods of the Church which are sometimes referred to as representing a distinct policy of opposition on the part of the Church to science and particularly medical and surgical practice, as if their purpose had been to force people to have recourse to prayers and relics and pilgrimages and masses rather than to take advantage of medical knowledge and surgical experience for the relief of their ills. The Papal documents quoted and discussed in the previous edition of this book proved to have no such meaning as was attributed to them and the history of the medical sciences as traced, shows that these Church regulations were not misconstrued either in their own or subsequent generations in such a way as to have the effect of interfering with the development of medical science or medical education as has been claimed. Their citation in support of the thesis of Church opposition to science, theoretic or applied, is entirely without justification.
Exactly this same thing is true with regard to the other documents that are referred to as having a parallel and confirmatory significance of Church opposition to medical science, or medical or surgical practice, or medical teaching. It requires no lengthy explanation to see that the decrees referred to are simply ecclesiastical disciplinary regulations, aimed at putting an end to certain abuses that had arisen in religious matters, and well calculated to prevent their further occurrence. The Church authorities recognized as will anyone who understands the circumstances that men who had devoted their lives in religious orders exclusively to the work of religion, should not be permitted to neglect their religious vocations because of devotion to some secular profession. They were forbidden to practice and to study medicine, but the practice of law was forbidden to them quite as well and for the same reason. There was no question of limiting the number of persons who might take up medical study, but all those who had bound themselves for life to religious duties must not withdraw from these to take up secular occupations. The case against the Church as opposed to science, and above all medicine and surgery, must indeed be weak [{425}] when it has to be bolstered up by recondite references to documents such as these, the purport of which is so clear and the good sense of which is as evident now as it was when they were issued.
Everyone recognizes that absorbing professional occupations such as the practice of medicine or of law keeps men from devoting themselves to the intellectual or the spiritual life. The opposite is also felt to be the case and there is still a profound distrust of the lawyer or the physician who devotes himself to literature or to any intellectual avocation, for the feeling is that he cannot be practically successful at his profession. This feeling is often a mere prejudice and great lawyers and great physicians have often been litterateurs of distinction, but as a rule there is incompatibility between the two modes of occupation. In the medieval period it was felt that there was the same incompatibility between proper devotion to the spiritual life and the professions, and as members of religious orders had given up worldly affairs and interests in order to devote themselves to other-worldliness and had taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience for that purpose, it was sincerely felt that they should not engage in gainful occupations and professional work that distracted them from the religious profession which they had taken up. Hence these decrees.
The only way to make perfectly clear the meaning of these decrees in their proper place in history both as regards education in general and medical education, is to give the text of the documents in the accompanying translation. I owe the text of them to Father Corbett of the Seminary of St. Charles Borromeo at Overbrook, Pa., who supplied me with the similar documents for the first edition of this work. The translations are made from the recognized authoritative edition of the decrees of the Church councils and synods issued at Paris in 1671, the title page of which reads as follows: "Sacrosancta concilia ad regiam editionem exacta quae nunc quarta parte prodit auctior studio Philip. Labaei et Gab. Cossartii, Soc. Jesu Prebyterorum, Tomus Decimus, 1053--1197, Lutetiae Parisiorum 1671." [Footnote 49]
[Footnote 49: I feel that I should say that when there was question of publishing these documents I consulted Dr. Garrison, the Assistant Librarian of the Surgeon General's Library at Washington and the author of the best history or medicine in English, as to the Church decrees that ought to be published in their entirety in order to make their meaning perfectly clear. I have followed the list suggested by him.]
The Council of Rheims held under Pope Innocent II, A.D. 1131, Canon VI, forbidding monks or regular canons to study law or medicine for the sake of gain.
"An evil custom as we consider it and detestable has grown up by which monks and regular canons after having received the habit and made their profession, spurning the rule of their blessed masters Benedict and Augustine, learn secular law and medicine for the sake of temporal gain. Inflamed by the fire of avarice they make themselves the patrons of causes [that is the attorneys of legal proceedings] and when they ought to be devoting themselves to psalmody and hymns, confiding in the support of a fine voice and the variety of their pleas, they confound justice and injustice, right and wrong. Imperial constitutions attest that it is absurd, nay even an opprobrium, for members of the clerical order to wish to be skilled in forensic disputation. We decree that violators of the religious life of this kind should fall under the severe judgment of the apostolical authority, for as they have neglected the cure of souls and in no way attend to the purpose of their order, promising health for filthy lucre, they make themselves guardians of human bodies. And since an impure eye is the index of an impure heart and since religion ought not to deal with those things even to talk about which brings the blush of shame to the cheek of honesty, in order therefore that the monastic and canonical order should be preserved inviolably pleasing to God in its holy purpose, we interdict by the apostolical authority that any such proceeding should be allowed hereafter. Bishops therefore and abbots and priors who consent to such an enormity shall be deprived of their own dignities."
The Council of Tours held under Pope Alexander III, A.D. 1163, Canon VIII. That religious should avoid secular studies.
"Not only does the envy of the old enemy of mankind bring him to labor greatly to destroy the infirm members of the Church, but he also puts his hand to securing the desirable members of the Church and strives even to supplant the elect according to the saying of the Scriptures 'for the elect are his food.' He plumes himself if he can bring about the fall of many, but especially if he can bring down some more distinguished member of the Church by making him lukewarm. Hence it is that he knows how to transfigure himself after his usual fashion into an angel of light, so that under the pretext of caring for the health of ailing brethren and more faithfully carrying out ecclesiastical business he leads members of the regular religious orders to the study of law and of physical problems which have to be given attention outside of the cloister. For this reason, so that spiritual men under the pretext of science may not again become involved in mundane affairs and themselves lose their interior life while they are thinking to provide for others in the exterior, we have decreed by the assent of the present council in the endeavor to meet this evil, that no one at all after taking the vows of religion or the making of religious profession should be allowed to absent himself from the cloister for the study of medicine and physic. If however he has already absented himself and shall not have returned to his cloister within the space of two months he is to be avoided by all as excommunicate, and if he should presume to try the effect of patronage in no case should [{427}] he be heard. On his return to the cloister he must always be the last of the brothers in the choir and unless by the special indult or permission of the Holy See must lose hope of all promotion."
The Council of Paris, A.D. 1212, Second Part, Canon XX.
"Since certain of the members of the regular orders under the pretense of caring for the bodies of ailing brother members and of more faithfully managing ecclesiastical affairs, to use the words of the Lateran Council, have not hesitated to go out of their cloisters to learn mundane law and give themselves to the study of physical problems in order to give their time to jurisprudence and medicine and on account of that are lacking in the interior life because they are devoting themselves to care for external things, we walking closely in the footsteps of that council decree that unless within the space of two months such students of law and medicine return to their cloisters, in spite of the permission of their abbot, which he is not empowered to give, they are to be excommunicated and avoided by all; and in no case if they should endeavor to use patronage to aid them are they to be admitted.
"We prohibit also anyone who enters the cloister for the sake of religion to go out of it in order to go to school; whatever a student may wish he should learn in the cloister. Those who are now in the schools should within two months return to the cloister."
Decree of the Council of Montpellier held under Pope Alexander III, 1162.
Since the proceedings of this Council are not extant the records of it are preserved in two monuments. One an Epistle of Pope Alexander to the Bishop of Verona and the other the decrees of the Council of Montpellier held in 1195 which enacted similar legislation.
Cap. 15. "The Council prohibited besides under the full severity of ecclesiastical discipline any monk or canon regular or other member of a religious order to take up the study of secular laws or medicine. Anyone violating this statute must be canonically published by the diocesan Bishops according to the decree promulgated in this matter under Pope Alexander in the Council of Montpellier."
It has been suggested that this exclusion of monks and religious from the study of medicine by Church ordinance practically shut out all the clerics, that is, all the educated men of the medieval period, from the medical profession. Any such idea, however, could only have occurred to one who does not realize that at any given time there are only a comparatively few religious and a great many secular clergymen. Practically all those who could read and write in the Middle Ages were known as clerks, that is clerics, and were under the protection of the Church, most of them indeed receiving minor orders, and if all the clergy were to have been excluded [{428}] from the medical profession this contention would be true. So far is it from the truth, however, that a number of the great physicians and surgeons of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries belonged to the clerical orders, not a few of them were priests and some of the greatest of them, like Theodoric, were actually bishops. It was only the religious, that is the men who had specially devoted their lives to monasticism, who were forbidden to take up the study of medicine because it did not comport with their monastic vocation.
A second series of ecclesiastical decrees that are often referred to in the history of medicine are those which concern the relations of the physician and his patient whenever there is danger of death. The Church's duty was to secure the proper dispositions on the part of those who were in danger of death. Physicians sometimes did not let patients and their friends know how serious the illness was and as a consequence patients died without the sacraments and rites of the Church. In order to prevent this the Church regulation was promulgated that a physician was bound to have a patient take care of his soul at the same time that his body was being treated. Physicians of the present day, even when they are not themselves Catholics, know how much of good, even physical good, is done to patients almost without exception by the consolations of religion. Instead of being perturbed as is sometimes thought by those who have not had experience with the custom, exactly the opposite effect is produced, and patients often drop their anxieties and solicitudes and begin to improve immediately after the reception of the sacraments. They usually submit themselves to whatever Providence has in store for them, put off their worries, and this factor of itself is eminently therapeutic.
Many a non-Catholic physician obeys these decrees of the Church with regard to the summoning of a priest to an ailing Catholic patient without knowing anything about them. He does it because of his experience that his patients are benefited by the consolations of religion. The wisdom of the Church in the decrees is seen very well by the paragraph in which it is suggested that the reason for having the physician always advise the calling in of a priest is that if this advice is given only when there is serious danger of death many patients knowing this will be thrown into a state of depression very harmful to them when the suggestion is made.
How such decrees could be thought in any way to interfere with medicine or its practice, or with the physician and his duties, or, above all, represent any effort on the part of the Church to hamper medical science or discourage patients from having physicians, I [{429}] cannot for the life of me imagine. The idea sometimes suggested that the real reason for this legislation was that the Church did not want patients to die before priests were given an opportunity to secure money for services in the administration of the last rites or for masses for the recovery of the patient and the like, would only enter into the mind of someone who not only did not understand the Church and had no experience of Catholics and Catholic life, but who had no proper recognition of the place of religion in life as a great source of consolation and strength in the face of the mystery of death and the hereafter.
Those who think religion a mere hypocrisy imposed on people by designing clergy are so lacking in the knowledge that would enable them to judge of the meaning of such decrees that their opinion is not worth while considering. It must not be forgotten that these decrees are still binding on a Catholic physician, and far from resenting them we welcome them as helps in securing the aid of the consolations of religion for our patients. Many a worried business man suffering from some severe disease like pneumonia or typhoid fever, goes on to develop a much more favorable mental attitude toward himself and his affection after he has seen the priest. The last paragraph of the first decree also emphasizes the wisdom of the Church and shows how much of an aid her legislation was in the support of ethical standards, for it forbids under the severest penalties that a physician should ever advise a patient to anything contrary to his conscience. This paragraph is also still binding on Catholic physicians.
The Fourth Lateran Council held under Pope Innocent III, A.D. 1215, Canon XII. That the sick should rather provide for the soul than the body.
"Since bodily infirmity sometimes proceeds from sin, the Lord himself saying to the ailing man whom he had cured 'Go now and sin no more lest something worse should happen to you,' we declare by the present decree and distinctly impose upon physicians of the body that whenever it shall happen that they are called to ailing persons, they must before all warn and persuade the ailing that they should call in physicians of the soul so that after the spiritual safety of the sick has been provided for he may proceed more healthfully to the remedy of corporeal medicine, since the cause ceasing the effect shall also cease.
"This among other things gave cause for this edict that certain people lying on a bed of sickness when persuaded by physicians that they should dispose things for the safety of their souls fall into a condition of despair whence the more easily they incur the danger of death.
"If any one of the physicians after this constitution of ours shall have been published should transgress it he should be kept from entrance to the Church until he shall have satisfied competently for the transgression.
"Besides, since the soul is by far more precious than the body, we prohibit under dire anathema that any physician should ever advise a patient to do anything for his corporal welfare that would bring him into danger of losing his soul."
The Synodal Statutes of the Church of Mans (the chief town of the Province of Main), A.D. 1247.
On Communion for the Sick.
"It was decreed in the general session and distinctly enjoined on physicians of the body that when they happen to be called to the ailing they must before everything else warn and persuade their patients to call physicians of the soul, in order that after the spiritual safety of the sick one may be provided for they may proceed with more assurance to the remedy of corporal ills. If any physician should transgress this constitution let him be kept from entrance to the Church until he shall have made competent satisfaction.
"Besides since the soul is much more important than the body it is prohibited under anathema that any physician should advise a patient anything for his bodily health which might bring his soul into peril."
APPENDIX V.
PAPAL PHYSICIANS.
To make many sources of information with regard to this vexed question of the relation of the Popes to Science more readily available, a series of authoritative references to Papal Physicians so far as we know them and their work during the past seven centuries has seemed to me especially needed. Physicians at all times have been interested in phases of science besides medicine and have not infrequently made important discoveries in the non-medical sciences. Their constant occupation with scientific subjects in their professional capacity has always given them an open mind for scientific advances. As the Papal Physicians were at all times men chosen because they had reached distinction in medicine, they were usually scholars who thought for themselves and were ready to recognize the new in science in any department from which it might be presented. Many of the Papal Physicians made important contributions to other sciences and not a few of them laid important foundations, especially in the biological sciences. The fact that the Popes constantly had near them, in the confidential capacity so inevitable between a man and his physician, scientists of prestige in their chosen profession, so often the teachers of their generation in medicine and almost as a rule interested in the sciences related to medicine and not infrequently in physical science generally, is the best possible evidence not only that there could not be opposition, but on the contrary that there must have been, so far as human assumption may go, a constant favorable attitude of mind of the Popes toward science.
In my chapter on Papal Physicians in the first edition of this volume I gathered such references as would enable me to bring out the valuable services of many of the medical attendants of the Popes to medical and physical science. I was not aware then that a more or less complete list of Papal Physicians for some five centuries at least had been published, giving an excellent idea of what they had done and written in scientific matters. There was no copy of the work in this country so far as I could learn and it was only after considerable difficulty that I was able to secure the volumes through the kind offices of Rev. Father Hagan, S.J., who is the Papal Astronomer in Rome at the present time. From that [{432}] work the History of the Papal Physicians, originally written by Mandosio at the end of the seventeenth century and extended and annotated by Marini at the end of the eighteenth, [Footnote 50] it has seemed worth while to present such abstracts as will supply ample material for the consultation of those interested in Papal relations to science yet who have not the longer work available for reference. This will show that many of the Papal Physicians were, as I have said, leaders in the science of their time, not only in medicine and also the biological sciences generally, but in all departments of physical science.
[Footnote 50: Degli Archiatri Pontifici, Roma, Pagliarini, 1784.]
Nicholas I the Great (858-67).--Almost needless to say the available list of the Papal Physicians does not go back much beyond the thirteenth century, though we have the name of one Ursus who is mentioned in a very old manuscript, No. 5696 (Fol. 184) of the Vatican Library. The author of this manuscript work is Anastasius the Abbot and he dedicates it to Ursus, Physician, Domestic Prelate of Pope Nicholas I. Beyond a mention of Ursus by Fioravante Martinello in his work, Roma ex Ethnica Sacra, (p. 414), nothing else is known of this old-time physician. Even this mention, however, seems to make it clear that there was a physician formally attached to the Papal See thus early in the Middle Ages.
Sylvester II (999-1003), Victor III (1086-87).--In the tenth century Gerbert, who became Pope under the name of Sylvester II, was famous for his knowledge of medicine as well as other sciences and the close personal friend of men who did much for medical education in France, as we have noted in the body of the book. Before the end of the eleventh century the Abbot Desiderius, as we have said, became Pope after having been for years the intimate friend of Constantine Africanus, to whom we owe the earliest serious development of the medical school of Salerno and the first important medical writings in modern Europe. We owe much of Constantine's writing to Desiderius' inspiration.
Innocent III (1198-1216), Gregory IX (1227-41), Martin IV (1281-85).--With the beginning of the thirteenth century the documents for the history of culture in Europe are better preserved and the list of Papal Physicians begins to be more complete. Guy of Montpellier was summoned to Rome to establish the Hospital of Santo Spirito by Innocent III just at the opening of the thirteenth century. Richard the Englishman was the physician to the famous Pope Gregory IX, one of Innocent's successors in the first half [{433}] of this century. Another Englishman, Hugo Atratus or Atractus, said to have been from Evesham, became the physician of Pope Martin II, 1281. Oldoino in his Athenaeo Romano mentions a series of books written by this Hugh of Evesham, as he is called in English. They bear the titles Medicinales Canones, Medical Canons, and De Genealogiis Humanis and there is besides an opusculum by him on the work of Isaac the well-known Jewish physician of the Middle Ages "On Fevers." The physicians of Pope Honorius IV, Taddeo the Florentine, and of Nicholas IV, Simon a Corde, or as he is better known, Simon Januensis, are mentioned in the body of the book.
Boniface VIII (1294-1303), Benedict XI (1303-04), Clement V (1305-14).--In the preface of his great text-book of surgery, written in the first half of the fourteenth century, Henry of Mondeville, whose work represents an important landmark in the history of surgery that has been reissued in our own generation in at least two editions, one in Germany, the other in France, declares that "I began to write this work ... on the proposal and request of Master William of Brescia, distinguished professor in the science of medicine and formerly physician to Pope Boniface VIII, and Benedict XI, and Clement V, the present Pope." This is almost all that we know of William, and he is not mentioned in Mandosio's list of Papal Physicians nor in Marini's additions to Mandosio. This is not so hard to understand because no printed edition of Mondeville, who died untimely from tuberculosis and whose work was left unfinished, was issued until our time. If William had done nothing else, however, than stimulate his younger colleague Mondeville to write his great book, which Pagel thought it worth while to edit in our generation and to which Gurlt, in his History of Surgery, devotes some forty pages, he would have a right to a distinctive place in the history of surgery. As it is we have Mondeville's praise of him and as the French professor of surgery was himself one of the most scholarly men of that important period, his opinion is of great value.
Another of the physicians of Pope Boniface VIII, Angelus Camerinensis, is called by Oldoino "a most learned doctor of medicine (medicus absolutissimus) who made a fortune out of his profession and for many years not only pleased but benefited the students who crowded to hear him." The two books from him that we know are on "The Regimen for Preservation from the Pest" and on "Protection against Poisons."
One of the most distinguished of the Papal Physicians was Arnold [{434}] of Villanova, who, after having been protected by Pope Benedict XI from enemies who insisted that his scientific writings were heretical, afterwards became the friend and physician of Pope Clement V at Avignon. He is the author of a great many writings which have gone through a number of editions. His works have proved a treasure house of quotations from a number of his colleagues in medicine and surgery who lived before his time, from whom nothing has been preserved except these quotations in Villanova. The edition of his works published at Lyons in 1504 contains some fifty-five different treatises.
One of the physicians of Pope Clement V, at least he seems to have been summoned in consultation when the Pope was suffering from a severe illness, the cure of which was attributed to him, was Petrus Aichspadius. He appears to have been a very Admirable Crichton of various learning, for Mandosius says of him that "he was distinguished for his knowledge of the best literature, and as a theologian as well as for his virtues, an excellent physician whose reputation had made medicine respected in his time." With all this he was the Bishop of Basel and after Pope Clement's recovery he was transferred to the See of Moguntum by the Pope, who declared that as he was such a happy curer of bodies it seemed only appropriate that he should be given a larger cure of souls.
Pope John (XXI) XXII (1314-16).--Gentilis Gentilis, said to have been the son of another Papal Physician of the name of Gentilis, was the medical attendant of John (XXI) XXII. His death was due to his faithful devotion to the citizens of Perugia during a time of pestilence. He is the author of a volume of Commentaries on Avicenna, of "The Best Councils for every Form of Disease of the Whole Body," of a volume "On Fevers," of a treatise "On Leprosy," a monograph "On Baths," and of a book that went through many editions after printing was introduced on "The Proportions of Medicine and the Method of Investigating their Composition and of Knowing the Appropriate Dose of Each Medicine." This was printed at Padua more than a century after his death and later at Lyons, and there seems to have been another edition in the Low Countries. He wrote a series of smaller medical treatises on "The Activity of Medicines," on "Phthisis" and on "Medical Dosage." He also wrote "On the Pulse and on Urine" in a volume of which editions were issued at Venice and at Lyons.
Another of the physicians of Pope John XXII was Dino del Garbo, a Florentine, the son of Bruno del Garbo, a skilful surgeon and the disciple of Taddeo of Florence. He is sometimes known as [{435}] Dino the Expounder because of his successful devotion to the exposition of Galen and Avicenna. Like many of the physicians of his time he had degrees in both medicine and philosophy and was celebrated for his scholarliness. According to Van der Linden, he wrote De Caena et Prandio Epistola, which was published by Jerome of Cartularius in 1545; Commentaries on Hippocrates' Nature of the Foetus, Venice, 1502; a treatise on surgery which was published at Ferrara in 1485 and a subsequent edition at Venice in 1536. His Commentaries on Avicenna and the General Practice of Medicine were published at Venice in 1495 and his book on The Virtues of Simple Medicines, a commentary on the Second Canon of Avicenna, was published at Venice the same year. Dino is usually looked upon as one of the most distinguished contributors to medicine in the fourteenth century. His son Thomas is said also to have been in the service of the Popes and has written books on The Reduction of Medicines, a Commentary on Avicenna and a commentary on Galen's work "On Fevers."
John XXII (1316-34), Clement VI (1342-52), Innocent VI (1352-62), St. Urban V (1362-70).--Of Guy de Chauliac, physician to the Popes at Avignon, enough has been said in the text of this book to make clear how important was his place in the surgery of his time and, indeed, of all the modern time. I have written on him more at length in my Old Time Makers of Medicine (Fordham University Press), and during the ten years that have elapsed since the writing of the original edition of this volume on The Popes and Science, Guy de Chauliac's fame and merits have come to be recognized everywhere.
Gregory XI (1370-78).--One of the well-known physicians of the Popes at Avignon was Jean de Tornemire, known by his Latin name of Tornamira, the physician of Pope Gregory XI, who on the death of that Pope went to Montpellier, where he became Dean and Chancellor of the Medical Faculty. Gurlt, in his History of Surgery, says that he must be "counted among the most learned and expert physicians of his time." He wrote a commentary on Rhazes and some notes of his on stone in the kidney and bladder show how careful an observer he was. His Rhazes was published at Lyons, 1490. His collected works were published in many editions in the sixteenth century.
Urban VI (1378-89), Innocent VII (1404-06), Martin V (1417-31).--Francis Casinus, the son of a noble family of Siena, one of the best-known of the physicians of North Italy in the fourteenth century, was chosen physician to Urban VI in 1378. His son [{436}] Francis was physician to Pope Martin V, 1417. A brother of Francis Casinus, John by name, was Papal Physician to Pope Innocent VII. Isadoras Ugurgerius in his work "Le Pompe Sanesi" says, "The Casini among the philosophers and physicians of their time held easily the first place. John lectured on the theory of medicine at Siena about the year 1370 and afterwards was summoned to Rome by Pope Innocent VII, by whom he was admitted among his most intimate friends and declared the guardian and conserver of his health." One of John Casinus' sons became Cardinal Antonius Casinus, and another, Bartholomeus, was the Abbot of Valombrosa, while the son of Francis Casinus, his brother, became Bishop of Massa and is famous for a collection of manuscripts made during the first half of the fifteenth century.
Another of the physicians of Pope Martin V was Andrew Gamuccius, who had also been physician to Pope John XXIII. He was a descendant of a noble family of San Gemignano, well known for scholarship and for the number of distinguished men who came from it.
Eugene IV (1431-47) chose as his physician John Baptist Verallus, doctor of medicine and philosophy, to whom he gave besides the title of archiater to the Pope that of chief physician of the city. Verallus is famous for his work in improving the health of Rome itself and represents one of the pioneers in public hygiene. At various times most of our modern hygienic regulations were anticipated at Rome. The ancient Romans had brought in water from a distance, because they had experienced the seriousness of contamination and during the early Renaissance the aqueducts which had fallen out of repair were gradually restored. The contagiousness of tuberculosis began to be suspected at this time and the idea of intimate contact with patients suffering from disease as a definite cause took shape. In a chapter of "The Century of Columbus," Catholic Summer School Press, N. Y., 1914, I reviewed some of these anticipations in Italy of our modern hygiene due to thinking physicians, of whom Verallus was one of the pioneers.
Another of the physicians of Pope Eugene IV was Ludovicus Scarampus. His fame was for surgery rather than medicine, so that it is interesting to learn in spite of the supposed ecclesiastical opposition to surgery that Pope Eugene learned to think so much of him that he made him a Bishop and then Archbishop of Florence, and afterwards Patriarch of Aquilea with the rank of Cardinal. More than one distinguished medieval surgeon in Italy had been a colleague in the episcopal dignity. Practically all the historical [{437}] writers of Scarampus' time give him a prominent place in their histories.
Nicholas V (1448-55).--One of the physicians of Pope Nicholas V, the Renaissance patron of learning, was Bernard Garzonius, distinguished for his knowledge of philosophy and medicine, who had been professor in the medical school at Bologna before being summoned to Rome. Alidosio in his volume I Dottori Bolognesi di Teologia, Filosofia, Medicina, ed Arti Liberali (page 29) gives an interesting account of the hours and subjects of his teaching at Bologna. At nine in the morning Garzonius lectured on the Theory of Medicine, and in the afternoon on the Practice of Medicine. Besides there were special lectures on Moral Philosophy probably setting forth the moral principles of medical practice on the festival days. Garzonius died in Rome of the pest in 1454, having devoted himself to the care of those suffering from the disease, though the mortality was so high that most of those who could, including even not a few of his colleagues in medicine, had left the city.
Another of the physicians of Pope Nicholas V was Laurentius Roverella of Ferrara, of whom his contemporaries speak in the highest praise for his erudition, his ability to teach and the piety and charity of his life. He was for a time professor at the University of Ferrara, but afterwards was called to Padua, where his lectures attracted a great deal of attention. He was recalled to Ferrara by the D'Estes in order to secure his prestige for his native city and it was from here that he was summoned to Rome to become the chamberlain and physician of Pope Nicholas V. After the death of Nicholas V he went to Paris, lectured there for a time and was crowned with the doctorate. After this he returned to Ferrara and was frequently sent as ambassador to diverse European princes by the Duke of Ferrara. He was also sent as ambassador for the Popes into France and Hungary. He died at the Monastery of Monte Oliveto in the arms of his brother, who was the Prior of the monastery, but his body was brought for burial to the Church of St. George in Ferrara. Roverella finds a significant place in all the histories of the time.
Calixtus III (1455-58).--The physician of Pope Calixtus III and Pius II was Joannes Serninus. He was a native of Siena, practised for a time in his native city, was offered the position with a good salary of public physician to Città di Castella, then went to Ancona in a similar position with such success, according to tradition, that his cures were considered almost miracles. From here he was summoned by Pope Calixtus III, and after his death [{438}] was retained as his physician by Pope Pius II, himself one of the Piccolomini family of Siena. After his death his body was transferred to Siena because the city considered that the remains of so great a son should rest in her soil. It is significant that this physician of wide experience in public health matters, whose successful career in helping various Italian towns to make conditions more healthy for their citizens gave him a wide reputation, should be the chosen physician of Pope Calixtus III, to whom is attributed a famous Bull, that has never been found however, against Halley's comet on its appearance in 1456. The selection of such a man as Serninus as Papal Physician makes it extremely improbable that the Pope should have issued any such document as is attributed to him. Its issue has been accepted only with the thought that in the middle of the fifteenth century the Pope and his court were buried in ignorance of science and above all of medicine and the cause of disease. [Footnote 51]
[Footnote 51: The whole subject of the supposed Papal Bull against the comet is discussed in my sketch of Regiomontanus the father of modern astronomy, as he is sometimes called, in "Catholic Churchmen in Science," second series, Phila., Dolphin Press, 1909.]
Another of the physicians of Pope Nicholas V and Calixtus III was Simon Tebaldi, who came of a distinguished family, one of whom was a Cardinal. He is called by the historians of the time an illustrious philosopher and physician of the period.
Paul II (1464-71).--Christopher of Verona is mentioned by Platina in his life of Paul II as the physician of that Pope, but nothing more is known of him. Jacobus Gottifredus, another of Paul's physicians, is better known. He taught medicine for a time at Rome, which was his native city, and devoted himself particularly to the practice of his profession. According to tradition he became the most sought after physician of the city and made a large fortune. He had many archaeological interests, collected curiosities of all kinds and generally used the fortune which he made in medicine for cultural purposes.
Another of the physicians of Pope Paul II was Joannes Burgius, who was also a bishop. He is highly praised by his contemporaries, and Mandosius describes a huge manuscript volume by him preserved in one of the libraries in Rome, bearing the title Secreta Verissima ad Varios Curandos Morbos--The Truest Secrets for Curing Various Diseases.
The fourth of the physicians of Paul II of whom there is record was Sanctes Floccus, whose activities as writer and physician are summed up in the inscription on his tombstone.
"Flocca Domus, nomen mihi Sanctes, Patria Firmum,
Scriptor eram, et medicus Paule Secunde tuus."
The fifth of the physicians of Paul II was Sebastianus Veteranus, who was also the archiater or chief physician of the city of Rome according to the list given in the appendix of the statutes of the Roman College, called Nomenclatura Medicorum. He is mentioned by his contemporaries as "well versed in the serious disciplines of philosophy and medicine and as constantly a diligent, fruitful cultivator of them, devoting his life to his studies."
Sixtus IV (1471-84).--One of the physicians of Pope Sixtus IV was Onofrio de Onofriis. Oldoinus declares him "a celebrated physician greatly esteemed for the success which he had in the treatment of patients and the very large practice which he consequently enjoyed." He had been a professor of philosophy and of medicine--the two nearly always went together in these days, unfortunately they do not so often any more--at the University of Perugia, where he achieved great success. It was from here that he was summoned to be the physician of Pope Sixtus. He wrote a series of books on medicine and some of his lectures were published, though these are not now extant.
Another of the physicians of Pope Sixtus IV, to whom he dedicated his important work on food, was John Philip de Lignamine, who had been professor of medicine at Perugia, where his lectures attracted a large following. His book, which appeared at Rome after his office of Papal Physician secured him the leisure for its completion, is "On Every Kind of Food and Drink Useful and Harmful For Man with a Consideration of Their Prime Qualities" (De Unoquoque Cibo, et Potu Utili Homini, et Novivo, Eorumque Primis Qualitatibus). [Footnote 52]
[Footnote 52: Lignamine interested himself in the new art of printing and was the publisher of a well-known series of finely printed incunabula.]
One of the important medical scientists of the end of the fifteenth century was Benedict of Nursia, whose book De Conservatione Sanitatis is really an important contribution to medical botany. He is placed in the list of Papal Physicians by Mandosius, whose authority is usually unquestioned. Giacobilli is his authority. Marini in his comments on Mandosius' work declares that Benedict was not a Papal Physician but the ducal physician at Milan, and tells the story of his exile from his native country Nursia. He was so distinguished for his medical learning that he became almost at once one of the most prominent of the physicians in Milan. There is no doubt, however, that Benedict dedicated his book, [{440}] which is now looked upon as basic in the history of medical botany, to Sixtus IV, and the suggestion that he was a Papal Physician seems to have come from the fact that though remaining in the service of the Duke of Milan he was summoned in consultation to see this Pope during an illness.
Innocent VIII (1484-92).--Petrus Leonius, one of the physicians of Innocent VIII, finds a place among Paul Jovius' "Eulogies of Learned Men" and is the author of a commentary on medicine and mathematics and a treatise, De Urinis. He had been a professor of medicine at several of the important Italian universities and was very well known throughout Italy. He was summoned to treat Lorenzo de Medici and the early death of that illustrious Florentine gave occasion for a good deal of opprobrium for his physician, though the most careful investigation has shown that there was no reason for criticism of him. The fact that Petrus Leonius had been called as the consultant in Lorenzo's case shows how thoroughly he was appreciated. One of his biographers suggests of him that he was "a learned rather than a lucky physician." Physicians will probably appreciate that distinction, better than others.
Alexander VI (1492-1503).--The first of the Papal Physicians of Pope Alexander VI (Alexander de Espinosa) was like that Pontiff himself of a family of Castilian origin though long enough in Italy to have become thoroughly Italianized and even to have received the Roman citizenship. He is mentioned in terms of praise by Baldus Baldi in his work on "The Oriental Opobalsam." Mandosius speaks of him as "a man of great erudition endowed with high intelligence and with a great zeal for promoting the health of humanity."
Gaspar Torella, also a Spaniard, was another of the physicians of Pope Alexander VI, and wrote a series of books on the venereal diseases which attracted so much attention in Italy about this time, and which are supposed to have been imported from America, though there is no doubt now of their existence in Europe and in Asia long before. He also wrote a book on "Portents, Prodigies and Prophecies" and another "On Diet or the Preservation of Health" in the form of a dialogue on eating and drinking which became rather popular. Torella was made a bishop under Pope Julius II and his volume on diet is dedicated to that Pope.
Another of the Papal Physicians of the end of the fifteenth century was Petrus Pintor, a Spaniard from Valencia, who was "the beloved friend and physician" of Pope Alexander VI. He wrote a [{441}] "Compilation of the Opinions of All the Doctors on the Prevention and Cure of the Pestilence" (under the word pestilence was included at that time any form of epidemic) which was published at Rome in 1499 and was very well known by his contemporaries.
Julius II (1503-13).--One of the Papal Physicians of Pope Julius II was Horatio Lancillotti, of whom it is declared that his whole delight was in books. "Constantly he was occupied with the thought of helping his patients and he practised medicine with liberality and good will, kindly caring for the infirmities of the poor and of friends so that he rendered himself worthy of every praise." He is spoken of as a man of sublime intellect who gave himself to medicine with his whole heart, but whose prudence, wisdom and conduct gave him a reputation even beyond that which he enjoyed as a physician. His son was made a Cardinal by Gregory XIII and other sons of his reached distinction.
Another of the physicians of Pope Julius II was Scipio Lancillotti, the brother of Horatio just mentioned. It is related of him that once when the Pope was severely ailing and on the fourth day of his illness was overcome by so deep a coma that for some hours he was considered dead, Scipio Lancillotti administered some medicine, and not only brought the Pontiff back to consciousness, but freed him from danger of death and restored him sufficiently to take up his work again.
Another of the physicians of Julius II was Joannes Bodier, whose tomb in the Church of Saint Sebastian on the Via Appia outside the Porta Capena is well known. He was a scholarly ecclesiastic who because of his intellectual and religious distinction was made the Abbot of the Monastery of San Sebastiano by the Pope.
One hears much of Jewish physicians in attendance on the Popes, but the records do not bear out the generally received opinion that there were many of them. Occasionally there is mention of one and usually he is some distinguished medical scientist well known in his time whose services were asked also for the Pope. Evidently even the Christian intolerance toward the Jews at this time was not sufficient to prevent such relations on the part of the Popes. Indeed the tradition of the frequency of Jewish physicians to Popes is probably due to the reaction produced by the surprise of finding that there were any Jewish physicians in attendance at the Papal Court. One of those who attended Pope Julius II was Samuel Sarfadi or Sarfati, a Spanish Rabbi who was looked upon as a leader of his people in Rome. It was he who as their [{442}] representative greeted Pope Julius during the procession when the Pontiff took possession of the city and in accordance with the ancient usage presented him with a copy of the Old Testament. Julius' reply was in the formula of the Roman Ordo commending the Law but condemning the religious practice that did not go beyond the Old Testament, which had reached completion in the New. The Pope and the rabbi continued on terms of intimate friendship and as Papal Physician he was able to protect his people and secure them in the rights that were more freely granted them at Rome than elsewhere in Europe.
Pius III.--One of the Papal Physicians of Pius III was Antonius Petrutius, Doctor of Philosophy and of Medicine, of whom Mandosius in his Lives of the Papal Physicians says that "he was the most excellent physician of his time."
Leo X (1513-21).--One of the physicians of Pope Leo X who served also in the conclave after his death was Dioscorides da Velletri, to whom we owe a series of monographs on medicine that are of special interest. He wrote on diet, De Ordine Cibandi; on diagnosis, De Cognitione Naturae Aegritudinis (literally on the recognition of the nature of disease), and on stone in the kidney, De Lapide Renum.
Another of the physicians of Pope Leo X was Bartholomeo of Pisa. He is mentioned by Carolus Cartharius in the Athenaeo Romano as a physician of great skill. He was professor in the Roman Archigymnasium and is the author of an Epitome of the Theory and Practice of Medicine issued at Florence early in the sixteenth century. This epitome is said to have been of special service because it contained in brief a great deal of information gathered from books and illustrated by Bartholomeo's own experience.
Still another of the physicians of Pope Leo X was Bernardinus Speronius, a Paduan by birth and a professor of high esteem in the University of Padua. Angelus Portenarius in his work Della Felicità di Padova says of him that he was a physician of such great skill and reputation that Pope Leo selected him for his physician while he was lecturing at Padua, and Bernardinus felt himself highly honored by the selection and accepted the post.
The fourth of the physicians of Pope Leo X was Jerome Sessa, Doctor of Philosophy and Medicine, who was afterwards the particular friend and physician of Pope Paul IV. He is the author of a treatise on medical matters, De Re Medica, and was singularly respected for his kindness to the poor, and for the [{443}] self-sacrifice with which he gave himself to the more difficult duties of his profession.
The fifth physician of Pope Leo X was Clementius Clementinus, noted in distinction from many of his colleagues as a Doctor of Arts and Medicine instead of the usual combination with philosophy. Van der Linden declares that "he was second to none in the opinion of Rome and the whole of Italy in his knowledge of medicine though he was at the same time a very celebrated astronomer." He had been professor of philosophy and mathematics at Padua. He is the author of a work on The Precepts of Medicine published by Jacob Mazzocchium at Rome, 1512. He also wrote a work on astronomy, and a monograph on fevers.
Adrian VI (1522-23), the distinguished Belgian scholar elected to the Papacy to succeed Leo X, had the honor of having dedicated to him a monograph, De Pestilentia, written by the well-known Bartholomeo Montagnana, who is one of the great Renaissance physicians of Italy. The almost equally famous John Battista Elisio dedicated to him his work De Praesagiis Sapientum, On the Prognosis of the Wise. Some of Adrian's physicians were among the most widely known members of the medical profession at this time. To one of them, Giovanni Antracino, John De Vigo dedicated his treatise De Morbo Gallico in words of the highest praise. Latin dedications lend themselves to flattery, but with even all due discount for this, Vigo's expressions show how much Antracino must have been appreciated at the time. He praises him for "his singular wisdom, marvellous perspicacity, rightness of judgment and serious purpose," and recalls that in many consultations where they had been present together Antracino had excelled not only in medical theory, but in medical practice.
Another of the physicians of Pope Adrian VI was Francesco Fusconi, whose name is sometimes wrongly given as Frasconi. Amato Lusitano calls him "a most famous physician," and Marsilio Cagnati in his work De Aeris Romani Salubritate notes that Francesco was the first to recognize that starving a fever and especially the malarial fevers of the neighborhood of Rome, though it had been the custom for a long time for physicians to advise it, did much more harm than good. He insisted that the ailing should be more richly nourished and that above all they should be fed on chopped meats which would make it easier for them to ingest such quantities as would be good for them. Cagnati says that many Roman physicians followed this teaching and saved much [{444}] suffering and many lives. Fusconi is the physician whom Benvenuto Cellini praises for having saved his life. The famous sculptor was taken with a very severe fever and the "first physicians" of Rome were called to see him, among them Master Francesco (Fusconi) Da Norcia, who was a very old man, but of great reputation. The fever increased to such a degree that the professors held the disease for desperate, but not Norcia. He took charge of the case and by the most careful treatment succeeded in freeing Benvenuto from an illness which did not seem as though it could possibly come to an end without fatal issue.
Clement VII (1523-34), who was of the Medici family, had a number of physicians and on one occasion when ill no less than eight were in attendance on him. This gave occasion to the satiric poet Berni to declare in verse that when the Pope after his recovery went to make his thanksgiving to Our Lady he might indeed have felt that it was a miraculous event to have been saved from the hands of eight physicians all at once. At least three of these physicians of Pope Clement are famous in the history of medicine; that is to say, they wrote books frequently referred to by their medical colleagues. One of these, Andrea Cibo, or Andreas Cibbo, was also physician to Pope Paul III and will be mentioned under his name. Cibo had been a professor at the University of Perugia before being made Papal Physician. One of his contemporaries refers to him as "the secure health of the sick." Another of Clement's physicians was Andrea Turini, who had been a professor at Pisa. He seems afterwards to have been royal physician to Louis XII, King of France. There are two books of his, De Embrochia and De Curatione Pleuritidis published at Lyons in 1537, in which Andrea gives himself the titles of physician and counsellor of the Pope and the King. Andrea was something of a wit and is quoted in the Facetiae of Domenichi. After a visit to Pisa he declared that "Pisa was a maritime city without fish, having a handsome Cathedral without a sacristy, a leaning tower which did not fall, a well without any buckets, and a university without professors."
Ludovico Augeni, another of the physicians of Pope Clement VII, taught for a while at Perugia and is said to have written a book on the use of wines in health and disease, but he is famous principally as the father of Orazio Augeni, professor at the Sapienza at Rome, who dedicated to his father his commentary on the nine books of Rhazes. A nephew of his, Sabastiano, issued a volume, De Catarrho, which he dedicated to Paul IV.
One of the most famous of the Papal Physicians, though he is known much more for his work in history and literature than in medicine, is Paulus Jovius, another of the physicians to Clement VII. His "Histories of Illustrious Men" and his "Eulogies of Men Distinguished in Letters and in War," as well as his other writings, are well-known sources of historical material. He is besides the author of a series of volumes on natural history that are not so widely known, but deserve a place in the history of science. They include a book on Roman fishes and another on marine fishes and shellfish as well as descriptions of Lake Como, of England, Scotland and Ireland and the Orkney Islands that have a niche of their own in natural history. He had been the intimate friend of Pope Leo X, Pope Adrian VI made him a canon of the Cathedral of Como and he was one of the close associates and a domestic prelate of Clement VII, who assigned him apartments in the Vatican. Jovius made a magnificent collection of memorials of the illustrious men whose lives he wrote, and we owe to him the preservation of many historical materials that would otherwise almost inevitably have been lost.
Still another of the physicians of Clement VII was Matteo Corti, of whom Aller declares that "he was as great in speech as with the scalpel, read the Greek authors and taught his colleagues to prefer them to the Arabs and recalled Galen into the schools." He was summoned from Venice to be physician to Pope Clement because of "the great reputation for knowledge of disease and skill in the treatment of patients that he had gained." He is noted for having modified the habits of the Romans by advising them to take less food in the middle of the day and to take a better meal at night. This putting back of the principal meal gradually spread in the cities of the world until the present custom of evening dinner became established. He wrote a series of books, but his constant insistence was on the avoidance of disease by careful attention to diet and mode of living rather than by the cure of it. He made it his special boast that many of those who followed his directions were either not ill for years or else were afflicted with but minor ailments. After the death of Pope Clement he was professor of medicine in Bologna and then the physician of Cosimo de Medici in Florence and at the end of his life held a professor's chair in medicine at Pisa. Ghilinus in his work The Theatre of Literary Men (Teatro d'Uomini Letterati) talks of Matteo Corti (in Latin, Matthaeus Curtius), as "a very celebrated doctor of medicine who as a professor was the peer of all and the superior [{446}] of most of his colleagues and who revived with benefit to his students and their patients the true manner of treating illness according to Hippocrates and Galen." He was looked upon as one of the distinguished physicians of his time. He wrote concerning the manner of dining and supping, (De Prandio et Coena), a commentary on Mondino's anatomy and a book On Venesection and another On Dosage.
Paul III (1534-49).--One of the distinguished consultant physicians of the mid-sixteenth century was Antonio Musa Brasavola (sometimes written Brasovola), whose years run with the century. His studies were made with the famous Leonicenus at Ferrara. He became the physician in ordinary and personal friend of Hercules II, Duke of Este, and accompanied him to France when the Duke espoused the daughter of Louis XII. He was at various times the physician to four Popes and was called in consultation to Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France. He devoted himself particularly to medical botany and pharmacology and was one of the first to hold a professorship in these subjects. He was well known for his life-saving practice of tracheotomy and he restored paracentesis thoracis as a standard remedy. He introduced the use of radix chinae, a kind of smilax related to sarsaparilla, and put lignum guiaci into the pharmacology of the day. He wrote a series of monographs on botanical subjects which have given him an enduring place in the history of that time. A distinguished group of men were near the Popes in Rome at this time with whom Brasavola was in close relations. They included Eustachius the great anatomist, Columbus, discoverer of the circulation in the lungs, Caesalpinus and Fallopius, who was a professor at the University of Bologna, that city being at this time in the Papal States.
One of the great Renaissance physicians and surgeons well known in our histories of medicine for an important contribution to the treatment of gunshot wounds, is Alfonso Ferri, a Neapolitan, who, after some years of professorship in surgery in Naples, became the physician of Pope Paul III. His book, which is founded on his "experience at home and at war," went through a number of editions at Rome, at Antwerp and Frankfurt and other places, and he was evidently widely read and considered an important authority. He invented some instruments for the removal of bullets and has many practical hints with regard to the treatment of gunshot wounds. He was the professor of surgery at the Sapienza, [{447}] Rome, and has written a volume on the carunculae, or hard multiplex tumors, which arise at the vesical neck.
Silvius Zeffiri, another of the physicians of Pope Paul III, is the author of a volume on "Putrefaction or The Best Method of Protracting Life," which was published at Rome in 1536. Zeffiri seems to have anticipated the modern popular notion of the putrefactive conditions in the human system as one of the most important factors in shortening life, and he discusses various means of preventing them.
Ferri's Instruments:--20 a, hollow probe or canula with screw; b, canula with rounded end alone; c, screw; 21, 22, Alphonsinum or grasping instrument for the removal of foreign bodies; 23, curved needle.
Another of the physicians of Pope Paul III was Andreas Cibbo, Doctor of Arts and Medicine, of whom Caesar Crispoltus in his work on distinguished Perugians called Perugia Augusta (Book III, P. 335) tells that having lectured for many years on medicine at the University of Perugia and practised his profession with great reputation, Andreas was called to Rome by Clement VII as Papal Physician, and also occupied that post under Pope Paul III. He accompanied Pope Paul on a journey to Nice on the occasion [{448}] when the Emperor Charles V and King Francis I of France met, and he was chosen by special honor to assist at the banquet given these sovereigns.
Maggi's Bullet Extractors and Needles:--10, 11, 12, shot borer (canula with screw); 11, screw alone; 12, canula alone; 13, protective tube for the introduction of boring instrument; 14, 15, lance needles; 16, 17, fistula scalpels.
Another of the physicians of Pope Paul III was Jacobus Bonacossus, of whom Mandosius says that "he was famous for his wide knowledge not only in science, but on all culture subjects, as well as for his magnanimity, his affability of manners and his careful attention in his professional work to the poor as well as to the rich." He came of a distinguished family of Ferrara and is given an important place in the list of "Illustrious Men of the City of Ferrara" published by Augustin Superbo.
Another of the physicians of Pope Paul III was Joannes [{449}] Franciscus Emanuelis, also called Manovelli. He is mentioned in the volume of Statutes of the College of Physicians of Florence and was looked upon by his contemporaries, according to Baldo Baldi, as a very learned man whose knowledge was only surpassed by his cultivation of the social virtues. He was a professor at Florence when he was summoned to Rome to become Papal Physician.
Maggi's Instruments for Gunshot Wounds:--
6 a, b, c, separable bullet forceps;
7, bullet spatula;
8, 9, anserine bullet forceps, separable and with a screw-crushing arrangement.
A very distinguished man who also occupied the post of physician to Pope Paul III was Thomas Cadimustus, a Belgian, who, after securing the doctorate in medicine and philosophy with distinction at Louvain, came to Rome and soon secured a place among the [{450}] teachers there and attained a reputation for great learning and successful care of his patients. He became Secretary Apostolic as well as physician to the Pope, and evidently enjoyed the close friendship of the Pontiff.
Some Instruments of Maggi:--
1, surgical hook;
2, double hook for the extraction of bullets;
3, concave toothed forceps;
4, straight-toothed forceps;
5, crow-beak forceps.
Another of the physicians of Pope Paul III was Tiberius Palella, famous for his knowledge of medicine and with a special reputation for information with regard to plants. He is known for his many friendships with men of learning and left behind [{451}] him the reputation, according to Mandosius, of being "a physician of the highest integrity interested above all in the health of the poor as well as the rich, without envy for others and a constant diligent seeker of the right."
Another of the physicians of Pope Paul III who as the great friend of the Jesuits might possibly be expected by those who misunderstand that Order to be opposed to Science, but proves to have been a great patron and friend of a whole series of the most prominent scientists of the time, was Joannes Aquilinus, or John of Aquila, a noted Neapolitan physician, who, after acquiring a great reputation in Naples, was called to the Professorship of Medicine at Pisa when that University was at the climax of its development. There he achieved so great a reputation that his contemporaries referred to him as a "second AEsculapius." Lacuna, who published a famous edition of Galen in 1548 which went through a series of editions, dedicated one portion of the edition to Aquilinus out of deference to his "love for good literature."
Another of the physicians to Pope Paul III was Franciscus Frigimelica, who, after having acquired extraordinary fame as a teacher, having been made professor at the University of Padua at the early age of twenty-eight, received offers from many of the Italian princes to become their physician. De Renzi in his Storia della Medicina in Italia says that he refused them all, but yielded to the solicitation of Pope Paul III, and seems to have been tempted by the atmosphere of intense medical science that had been created at Rome at this time. Frigimelica is famous for his study of baths and his treatise on the making of artificial baths with metallic salts. De Balneis Metallicis Artificio Parandis is an early classic in balneology. He also wrote a volume "On Various Medical Questions," a Pathologia Parva, and a number of his consultations were published.
Julius III (1550-55).--A very important Papal Physician is Maggi, who had been the professor of anatomy and surgery at Bologna, the uncle and teacher of the celebrated anatomist Aranzi. He became physician to Pope Julius III about 1550. His book on gunshot wounds is dedicated to Prince Giovanni Battista De Monte, nephew of Pope Julius and General-in-Chief of the Papal Army. Gurlt, in his great History of Surgery, declares that Maggi was the first who showed very clearly that shot wounds neither caused burning nor poisoning. To demonstrate this he made a series of carefully planned, most ingenious experiments and [{452}] observations which were repeated hundreds of years afterwards, but only to confirm his conclusions. His method of handling gunshot wounds was very simple, and he laid the greatest weight on treatment directed to permitting the free exit of pus. He was the inventor of a series of instruments, the pictures of which we have and some of which are here reproduced. They show his ingenuity and anticipate a good many ideas that are supposed to be much more modern than his time. Gurlt has devoted more than eight pages of rather small type to a summarization of Maggi's work so that there is no doubt about its great importance in the history of surgery.
Another of the physicians of Pope Julius III was Hippolytus Salvianus, a doctor of medicine and of philosophy, of whom one of his contemporaries said that it was doubtful in which of these sciences he was the more learned and whether Hippolytus deserved more praise for his science or his faith or his diligence in caring for the sick. He wrote a volume in folio on fishes, illustrated by copper plate engravings (Rome, 1555), a volume On Crises as a commentary on Galen (Rome, 1558), and a book on aquatic animals (Venice, 1600). He has the distinction also of having ventured successfully in literature and he published poems and comedies which went through a number of editions. One of his sons became a popular Roman physician, the other a poet.
One of the great Italian anatomists, a pioneer in the development of the biological sciences, was John Baptist Cananus, who was one of the medical attendants of Pope Julius III. His well-known work "Illustrated Dissections of the Muscles of the Human Body," Musculorum Humani Corporis, Picturata Dissectio, Ferrara, 1572, in quarto, is one of the precious bibliographic treasures in medicine. He was the first to discover valves in veins, finding them in the azygos, and he made a series of original observations on the sense organs which gave a great stimulus to the development of the minute anatomy of these structures at this time.
Another of the physicians of Pope Julius III was Augustin Ricchi, one of the scholarly medical writers of the sixteenth century, whose erudite translations enriched the medicine of that time and of subsequent generations. Van der Linden notes that he translated a number of the books of Galen, adding annotations. They were published in Venice shortly after the middle of the sixteenth century. He had a wide acquaintance and friendship with the most learned men of his time.
Paul IV (1555-59).--One of the physicians to Pope Paul IV, of whom it is noted that he was also an intimate friend whom the Pontiff loved very dearly, was Jerome Cessa, doctor of medicine and philosophy, who wrote a work on medicine and a treatise on religion, and who is said to have refused the dignity of cardinal which was offered him because he felt that others worthier might be chosen.
One of the distinguished physicians of this time was Professor Altamare of Naples, of whom De Renzi in his Storia della Medicina in Italia tells that when he was compelled to fly from his native country by political disturbance, he was given a refuge by Pope Paul IV, under whose "wise and benevolent protection" he was able to continue his medical work for a time and through whose patronage he was restored to his professorship at Naples. As a mark of gratitude Altamare dedicated to Pope Paul IV his book De Medendis Humani Corporis Malts, Ars Medica.
Pius IV (1559-65).--Alidosius, in his work on "The Foreign Doctors Who Have Been Professors of Theology, Philosophy, Medicine and The Liberal Arts in Bologna" (Li Dottori Forestieri, che in Bologna hanno Letto Teologia, Filosofia, Medicina ed Arti Liberali), mentions John Andrew Bianchi, a doctor of medicine and the liberal arts, famous for his learning, who taught in the University of Bologna from 1525 to 1561 with great success and then was summoned to Rome to be the physician to Pope Pius IV to the satisfaction of everyone, for it was felt that he had achieved the highest place in his profession of medicine.
Simon Pasqua, a physician to Pope Pius IV, was the author of a book On The Gout and of a description of his Embassy to Great Britain from Genoa in the time of Queen Mary and Philip, but this, unfortunately, was only in manuscript and seems to have been lost.
Pompeius Barba, or dalla Barba, was another of the physicians of Pope Pius IV. He wrote a volume on "The Immortality of the Soul according to the Peripatetic Philosophers" which was published at Florence in 1553. Two years later he wrote a commentary on some of the writings of Pico della Mirandola and nearly twenty-five years later there appeared at Venice a dialogue of his "On Arms and Letters." He left in manuscript a book On Baths as well as some poems.
Still another of the physicians of Pope Pius IV was Franciscus Gymnasius, described by a contemporary (Caesar Mezamici in his Notizie Istoriche) as "so distinguished in the profession of [{454}] medicine that while he was professor in Bologna many of the princes of Italy called him in consultation when they were seriously ill and constantly with a happy issue." Pius IV called him to Rome, honored him with one of the principal chairs in the Papal University of the Sapienza, providing a special stipend for him, and made him his personal physician. Gymnasius added to his fame and obtained universal esteem in the Curia. His tomb is in the Church of the Minerva at Rome.
A very interesting character at Rome during the later Renaissance was Jerome Cardan, who though not a papal physician by formal appointment, after wandering all over the world in various capacities, lived his last years at Rome, enjoying a pension from the Pope. He is a type of the many-sided, many-minded man of the Renaissance. In 1524 he received his degree of doctor in medicine at Padua, practised for ten years and then became professor of mathematics in Milan, and a few years later taught medicine at Pavia, refused the corresponding professorship at Copenhagen, spent nearly a year with Archbishop Hamilton of St. Andrews, the primate of Scotland, returned to Italy to practise once more, refusing many offers of professorships in foreign universities, taught for some years at Pavia and then at Bologna and spent the last five years of this varied, and at the end rather stormy career, at Rome living on the Papal bounty. He is one of the great geniuses of the time whose "vanity, boastfulness, childish credulity, superstitiousness was bound up with a genius that opened up many new paths in science" (Gurlt). His work meant more for philosophy and, above all, for mathematics than for medicine, but he has an important place in the history of science.
Another genius who spent some years in Rome about the same time, and evidently found it eminently favorable for his work, was Jerome Mercurialis, who was sent by his native city to Rome on a mission to Pope Pius IV, when about 32, and secured opportunities for study in Rome so much to his desires that he spent seven years in medical and philological studies there. After this he was invited to be Trincavella's successor at Padua and from here was summoned by the Emperor Maximilian II on a consultation to Vienna and richly rewarded for his services. After seven years of medical professorship at Padua he was for some twelve years in a similar capacity at Bologna, which was then a Papal University, and then accepted the call of the Grand Duke Cosimo I to Pisa. The Medici were laboring at this time to make Pisa an important rival in education of Padua and Bologna and [{455}] were offering alluring salaries and special inducements to the most distinguished teachers in every department. Mercurialis' books on skin diseases, on women's diseases, on the diseases of children and on gymnastics, went through many editions and now sell for good prices in auction rooms, for he is considered one of the classics of medicine.
Pius V (1564-72).--One of the physicians and intimate friends of Pope St. Pius V was Placidus Fuscus, who wrote a volume "On the Use and Abuse of Astrology in Medicine." Fuscus, according to the inscription on his tomb, was "distinguished for his social service, his work at the hospital of the Santo Spirito and among the poor of Rome and especially those in prison."
Gregory XIII (1572-85).--As might be expected, the physician of Pope Gregory XIII, the Pope to whom we owe the correction of the calendar, was a distinguished medical scientist who had been earlier an intimate friend as well as physician to St. Ignatius Loyola the founder of the Jesuits. His name was Alessandro Trajano Petronio of Castiglione, and he is often mentioned in the medical literature of the time and wrote a book, De Victu Romanorum et de Sanitate Tuenda, "On The Diet of the Romans and the Preservation of Health," which he dedicated to Pope Gregory XIII. He also wrote a work on "The Water of the Tiber" and a series of dialogues on medicine as well as "Medical Aphorisms" (Venice, 1535.)
Sixtus V (1585-90).--The principal physician of Pope Sixtus V was Andreas Baccius, "who was famous not only as a physician but as a philosopher and a man of erudite and polished intellect." Pope Sixtus occupied himself with bringing fresh supplies of water into Rome and we have a series of studies of these waters made by his physician. He also wrote on baths and especially on those in the neighborhood of Rome. There is also a book by him on "The Wines of Italy and The Banquets of the Ancients." He was much more than an amateur as an antiquary and wrote a book on "The Origin of the Old City of Cluana." There is also a book of his on "Gems and Precious Stones," a volume on "Poisons and their Antidotes," as well as a series of shorter writings.
De Renzi in his Storia della Medicina in Italia tells the story of the earlier career of Baccio. As a younger man he became so deeply interested in his scientific studies at Rome that he did not succeed in practising medicine and was in danger even of starving because he had not practical ways. He was rescued by Cardinal Ascanio Colonna, who became his patron and provided him with the [{456}] opportunity to devote himself to scientific studies without the necessity of thinking about the obligation of gaining his daily bread. Baccio became celebrated for his learning so that according to De Renzi his "profound erudition passed into a proverb in his time." His great opportunity came, adds De Renzi, when he was made Papal Physician to Pope Sixtus V.
Castor Durantes, a skilled physician and poet, was another of the medical attendants of Pope Sixtus V. In Giacobilli's catalogue the following works are noted--"Treasure of Health," "On the Nature of Food," which ran through many editions, the New Herbarium, and Theatrum Plantarum, Animalium, Piscium, et Petrarum, Venetiis, 1636. His Herbarium was done in verse and besides he wrote a series of poems in Virgilian metre which attracted favorable attention from his contemporaries.
Urban VII (1590-91).--The physician of Pope Urban VII was Demetrius Canevarius, who was in his time, according to contemporary authorities, the leading physician of Genoa when he was called to Rome. He made a magnificent success at Rome, became very wealthy, but was famous for his hospitality, his many friends and the magnificent library which he collected, "filled with all the best books." We have from him a book on "The Practice of Medicine," another on the "Diagnosis, Prognosis and Cure of Fevers" and a third on "The Procreation of Man." Like most of the physicians of his time he was a philosopher as well as a medical scientist and so we have two philosophic monographs from him, one on "The Origin and Destruction of Natural Things," another on "First Principles."
Canevari, to use his more familiar Italian name, is famous as one of the great bibliophiles of history. He had a series of the most beautiful bindings made for his books and these have been the precious treasures of collectors ever since. To own a Canevari binding is a much-prized distinction in the world of rare books.
Innocent IX (1591).--Malpighi, one of the Papal Physicians of this Pope, is one of the greatest of medical scientists. His career is sketched earlier in this book. Another of his scarcely less distinguished physicians was Lucas Tozzius, who succeeded Malpighi. It would indeed have been difficult to have filled adequately the room of so great a predecessor, but while Tozzi's powers of observation and scientific genius were not so penetrating as those of Malpighi, his books probably influenced his own generation of physicians almost more than those of his great scientific predecessor. He wrote a volume on the theory and another on the practice of [{457}] medicine, wrote commentaries on the aphorisms of Hippocrates and on the medical art of Galen, as well as some volumes on philosophy and even lighter subjects. He was looked upon as one of the most talented men in Italy of his time and his scholarly erudition made him the friend of learned visitors to Italy from every country in Europe.
Clement VIII (1592).--Jerome Provenzalis, "a philosopher of distinction, most expert physician, theologian of great name and yet a practical genius of the highest ability who had scarcely his equal in his generation in Italy" (Mandosius), was the medical attendant of Pope Clement VIII. One of his books, a treatise on the senses (Rome, 1597), attracted wide attention in his time and still has a place in the bibliography of the sensations.
Another of the physicians of Pope Clement VIII was Jerome Rubeus, who wrote books on history as well as medicine. He is well known as the author of a history of Ravenna and its neighborhood and people which contains an account of the Goths, the Lombards and the Italians of the earlier Middle Ages from the materials then at hand. He is best known in medicine for his "Annotations on Cornelius Celsus' De Re Medica." He wrote a treatise on Destination and a monograph on The Dietetic Value of Melons. His book on Destination appeared in editions at Venice, at Basel, at Ravenna and probably also at Rome. Rubeus has a place in most of the histories written at this time.
Another of the physicians of Pope Clement VIII was Jerome Cordella. While he is highly praised for his knowledge of philosophy and his skill in medicine he is better known for his intimate friendship with St. Philip Neri, of whom Cardinal Newman, in the nineteenth century, was so proud to proclaim himself the spiritual son. Jerome was of assistance to St. Philip particularly in the magnificent social work which meant so much for the correction of social abuses at this time and, above all, the occupation of youthful minds with higher thoughts.
Among Zecchius' books, who was another of the physicians to Pope Clement VIII, is one on "The Means of Curing Especially Such Fevers as Arise from Putrid Humors." Another is called "Medical Consultations or The Whole Practice of Medicine Briefly Treated," a third is on "The Use of Italian Waters," and then besides there are a series of shorter papers on Hippocrates' Aphorisms, on Digestion, on Purgation, on The Letting of Blood, on Critical Days and on the Morbus Gallicus.
Caesalpinus the Botanist.--Caesalpinus is mentioned in the [{458}] text of the previous edition of this work as a professor at the Papal Medical School, the Sapienza, and physician to Pope Clement VIII. In the history of science, however, he should rather be counted among the botanists than the physicians, though there is no doubt that he was the first fully to describe the systemic circulation. Edward Lee Greene, in his Landmarks of Botanical History, which is "A Study of Certain Epochs in the Development of the Science of Botany" (part of volume 54 of the Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Washington, 1909), mentions that "The Caesalpinus system of plant arrangement seemed incomparably superior to every one that had preceded it." Linnaeus in the warmth of zeal for the great Caesalpino had pronounced him "first in the order of time among real systematists." Caesalpinus is then one of the great founders of modern botany and his work De Plantis is a foundation stone of the science. Gurlt talks of him as the greatest botanist of his century and his work as director of the botanical garden of Pisa did much both for medicine and botany. A little practical work of his was a Manual of the Practice of Medicine, which attracted much attention and is in line with the efforts of Papal Physicians as a rule to make knowledge available for the use of physicians generally.
Still another of the physicians of Pope Clement VIII was Michael Mercatus, an intimate personal friend of the well-known social reformer St. Philip Neri, whose profound influence on the social life of Rome is a matter of history and to whom such men as Newman and Faber and the English Oratorians turned with the loving name of Father in the nineteenth century. Mercatus wrote a series of instructions on the Pest and his medical volume contains also articles on antidotes against poisons, the gout and paralysis. Like many of the physicians of his century he was interested in Oriental problems and wrote a volume on the obelisks of Rome which was published in 1589 and dedicated to Pope Sixtus V. This led to a controversy with Latino Latini during which Mercatus published another volume on the obelisks. Mercatus came of a well-known scholarly family, for his grandfather had been a close friend of Marsilio Ficino and a member of the famous Platonic Academy.
Another of the physicians of Pope Clement VIII, at least he received the honor of the appointment as Papal Physician, though he could not come to Rome to fulfil its duties because of the approach of age, was Nicholas Masinus. He is well known for his work on "The Abuse of Cold Drinks," which was published in [{459}] 1587. The custom of gathering snow on the mountains and using it in their wine and other drinks during the summer time, which had been practised by the ancient Romans, was revived at the time of the Renaissance and Masinus was sure that it was productive of harm to the digestive system.
Still another of the physicians of Pope Clement VIII who deserves mention was Jacobus Bonaventura, to whom Athenius of Brussels dedicated his edition of the "Medical Consultations of Jerome Mercurialis," calling him "a very distinguished man." He was a particular friend of Mercurialis, who expressed his opinion of him in the highest terms. He made a great many friends among the nobility of Italy and was very dear to the Sovereign Pontiff.
Still another of the physicians of Pope Clement VIII was Julius De Angelis, who came of a well-known academic family with many members distinguished in law and medicine. He was professor at Padua for years and afterwards at the Sapienza in Rome and was chosen by the Pope to give special lessons for the benefit of physicians and medical attendants at the Santo Spirito Hospital in Saxia as it was called. He is mentioned in a number of medical works of the time, and in the book of the Statutes of the College of Physicians of the City of Rome.
Paul V (1605-21).--One of the physicians of Pope Paul V, though at first he had refused the honor because it is said that as an astrologer he had found the stars unfavorable to his acceptance of it, was Pompeius Caimus, from whom we have a number of medical writings. Van der Linden, in De Scriptis Medicis, and others furnish the list of them. He wrote "On Congenital Heat," on "The Indications of Putrid Fevers," on "The Recognition and Cure of Melancholia," on "The Nature of Science and Its Acquisition," "On Grief," a "Treatise on Human Longevity and the Climacteric Years," as well as "Dissertations on the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna," which had been delivered as lectures at Padua, on "The Nature and Differences of Winds," and on "The Early Recognition and the Lengthening of Old Age," besides translating and annotating a number of the works of the old Greek philosophers and physicians in Latin. It may seem strange that a man of such wide erudition and scholarship should still cling to the delusion of astrology, but about this same time Galileo and Kepler were drawing up horoscopes, and in the middle of the eighteenth century Mesmer's astrological essay was accepted for the degree of Doctor of Medicine at the University of Vienna. Caimus, after refusing the chair of [{460}] medicine at the University of Pisa, to which a magnificent salary was attached, became the physician to Pope Gregory XV.
Gregory XV (1621-23).--Vincentius Crucius was another of the physicians of Pope Gregory XV. He had been a professor at Bologna and we have from him his lectures at Bologna on "Epilepsy or The Comitial Disease," published at Venice in 1603. Books of his "On Catarrh," published at Ravenna, on "The More Frequent Diseases of The Head; Catarrh, Phrenitis, Lethargy and Epilepsy," published at Rome, 1617, and "The More Frequent Diseases of the Chest; Phthisis, Haemoptysis, Asthma, Peri-pneumonia, and Pluritis," issued also at Rome, a volume on "The Diseases of The Stomach" and a series of volumes of Consultations on Medicine, were well known to his contemporaries and to succeeding generations. He wrote besides a commentary on Lucretius, another on Hippocrates, a book on Prophylaxis, a volume on Vesuvius and a popular work in Italian, all his other works having been in Latin, meant to be of assistance to ordinary people in avoiding disease and especially the infectious diseases.
Two of the Papal Physicians of Gregory XV are the brothers Giovanni and Bernardino Castellani. John is the better known and was for years the director of the Hospital of Santo Spirito and received the much coveted title of Roman Citizen for his work for Roman citizens there. He succeeded Elpidiano as lecturer on anatomy and surgery at the University of the Sapienza and left a large anatomical work in manuscript with many copper plate engravings, which were never published. The book of his by which he is known is a volume of directions for venesection from the standpoint of the anatomist. It was the custom then for nearly everyone to have himself let blood several times a year and especially in the spring, somewhat as in our time many people take purgatives. The practices are about equally foolish unless there is some special indication for them. In many families the barber-surgeon was called in almost as regularly for this and with quite as little anxiety about it as for the cutting of the hair. Naturally there had been many mishaps in this practice because the barbers were expert enough but ignorant, and venesection was done from blood vessels all over the body because one patient thought his head ought to be relieved, another his foot, another his chest, and the like. Castellani's book then, called Phylacterium, which I suppose might be translated The Protective, was meant to indicate the anatomical landmarks that should guide the barber-surgeon so as to avoid the danger points. Like so many other of the works of the [{461}] Papal Physicians it was directed to the correction of popular practices that were the source of injury and suffering to the people. Castellani's book contained directions for the application of cups, dry and wet, which was also a popular practice confided to the barber-surgeons at this time, and like blood-letting had been subject to many abuses.
Urban VIII (1623-44).--One of the scholarly Papal Physicians was Julius Mancinus of Siena, who secured the much coveted position of physician to the Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome by competition. He obtained a great reputation for his ability to make the prognosis of disease and acquired an extensive practice as a consequence. He accumulated a great fortune from his practice but lived very modestly and used his income partly for the education of ambitious youths of talent who were without the means of securing an education and partly in the collection of works of art. He wrote a book on "The Pictures of Rome." A number of books were dedicated to him, and Antonio Recchi in his scientific work expresses his gratitude to him for the help afforded in the collection of plants, animals, and minerals from Mexico.
Two of the Papal Physicians of Pope Urban VIII were the uncle and nephew Sylvester and Thaddeus Collicola. Sylvester taught medicine at the Sapienza and was a very popular teacher mentioned in a number of books of the time. Thaddeus had studied law before taking up medicine, but devoted himself entirely to the second profession and Mandosius speaks of him as "the greatest physician of his time, dear to all the learned men who knew him and to all the good men who were brought in contact with him." Thaddeus was evidently a friend of the literary men of his time, for he is often mentioned by poets and writers. Several books were dedicated to him by scientific and literary admirers.
Innocent X (1644-55).--One of the copious writers among the Papal Physicians was Baldus Baldi, who was the medical attendant of Innocent X. We have a series of books from him, one On Contagious Diseases, a treatise on Hippocrates' Suggestions concerning Air, Water and Habitation, a book On Pleurisy, a detailed account of the fatal illness and the autopsy on the body of Cardinal Bevilacqua and academic lectures on poisons as well as a book on the Opobalsamo Orientate.
A distinguished Papal Physician under Pope Innocent X was Paul Zacchias, "a most learned philosopher and physician who had a very versatile genius and whose deep interest in every form of intellectual work, not only such serious studies as philosophy, [{462}] medicine, theology and jurisprudence, but also the lighter arts of poetry, music, painting and so forth, made him distinguished among his contemporaries." Zacchias is best known as the author of a book on medico-legal questions which went through a series of editions, was published originally at Rome and afterwards at Lyons in at least two editions there. Zacchias wrote a volume on the keeping of Lent in which he discussed various questions of the relationship of fasting and health, which went through several editions and is often referred to by the moralists. He also wrote a book on Hypochondriasis. Some of his writings that were widely circulated in manuscript are On Sudden and Unexpected Death, On Macules Contracted from the Foetus in Utero, on Rest in the Cure of Disease, on Laughter and Grief, on a Physical Consideration of The Miracles of Holy Scriptures, and other subjects that might be expected to interest a medico-legal expert who was occupied particularly with the psychology of many human problems.
The Papal Physicians were not all Italians, indeed Italian as a national designation was almost unused, men were Neopolitans, Genoese, Venetians, Paduans, Bolognese, Sicilians, Milanese quite as distinctly as now they are French, English, Spanish or whatever else it may be. The Popes usually chose physicians from their own cities but not to the exclusion of others and not a few Papal Physicians were from outside of Italy. Pope Innocent X chose Gabriel Fonseca, a Portuguese, whose father had been a teacher of medicine at Pisa and at Padua, and who himself held chairs in medicine at both of these universities before he was invited to Rome to be a lecturer at the Sapienza and Papal Physician. Van der Linden notes among his writings a work on medical economy, Medici Oeconomia, and a series of lectures on Contagious Fevers, as well as a book on Medical Banquets. Fonseca came to be looked upon as one of the most distinguished teachers of medicine in Italy in his time.
Alexander VII (1655-67).--One of the physicians of Pope Alexander VII was Matthias Naldius, Doctor of Medicine and of Philosophy and a man of great erudition, a scholar in Latin and in Greek, who knew Hebrew, Chaldaic and Arabic. He was sent by the Duke of Etruria on a medical mission of consultation to the Prince of Damascus, who was suffering from what seemed to his attending physicians an incurable disease, and Naldius was able to relieve him. The incident called attention to him all over Italy and he was sent for in consultations to most of the Italian cities. He taught at the medical school of Siena, his birthplace, and wrote [{463}] a series of volumes on medical subjects. One of these is the rather well-known "Pamphilia or Friendship of the Whole World," the subtitle of which is "The Conciliation of the Opinions of Disagreeing Philosophers." This was published at Siena in 1647 in quarto. He issued a small volume of "Rules for the Cure of Contagious Diseases," Rome, 1656. His great work is the Rei Medicae Prodromi, or introduction to medical science, which has for subtitle "Treatise on the Principal Problems of Physiology."
A distinguished scientist of the seventeenth century who found Rome a refuge and place of opportunity for his studies at this time when beset with difficulties elsewhere, was Borelli, the first to apply mechanical principles to the explanation of physiological problems in his work De Motu Animalium. Borelli had been a professor of science in Messina, visited Florence for a time in order to be with Galileo shortly before the great astronomer's death, accepted the call of the Duke of Tuscany to Pisa, where he had as colleagues Redi and Malpighi, with whom he founded the Accademia del Cimento. He left Pisa, not long after, to return to Messina, whence however he had to flee, having fallen under the suspicion of taking part in a conspiracy against the government, and now found a refuge in Rome. He was pensioned by Queen Christina of Sweden, who was then living in the Papal Capital, but after a time he retired to the monastery of San Pantaleone in Rome, where two years later he died. Professor Foster, in his Lectures on the History of Physiology, which were delivered at a number of universities in this country and subsequently published in the Cambridge Biological Series, devotes a whole lecture, some thirty pages, to "Borelli and the Influence of the New Physics." He does not hesitate to say at the conclusion of the lecture that "when we consider the effect which a perusal of Borelli's book has upon the reader now, we can easily understand how he was the founder of a great school which flourished long after him. He was so successful in his mechanical solutions of physiological problems that many coming after him readily rushed to the conclusion that all such problems could be solved by the same method. And as is often the case the less qualified alike as regards mechanical as well as physiological knowledge and insight to follow in Borelli's path were the men of succeeding times the more loudly did they often proclaim the might of Borelli's method." It has always been thus and doubtless always will be. The smaller men who come after the great masters are quite sure that they can go farther than the master himself and push his system, as did the Darwinians in [{464}] our time, to silly exaggerations. When the question of the attitude of the Popes to science is under consideration, however, it is well to recall that Borelli's revolutionary work was completed under the aegis of the Popes and a religious order in Rome and the account of it was not actually published in its completed form until after Borelli's death, and then at the expense of ecclesiastics. It is the knowledge of details of this kind that gives us a real insight into the significance of ecclesiastical relations to science.
Innocent XI (1676-89).--The Papal Physician of this Pope was Floridus Salvatorius, to whom the Provost, the Trustees and his Colleagues of the College of Physicians of Rome dedicated, in an Introductory Epistle, a volume of the Statutes of the College of Physicians of the City, in which they praised him very highly. He seems to have been a great favorite with the members of the medical profession in his time at Rome, and other books on medicine were also dedicated to him.
Another of this Pope's physicians was Lancisi, one of the most important in the list, whose place in the history of medicine is pointed out in the body of this book.
Alexander VIII (1689-91).--The physician to this Pope was Romulus Spezioli, doctor of philosophy and of medicine of the University of Firmo, who acquired a great reputation at Rome as physician and finally was selected as Papal Physician. He became professor at the Sapienza, the Roman University, and was very popular as a teacher. After the death of the Pope he gave up his profession of medicine and, like Linacre a century before, became a priest, but his scientific knowledge was taken advantage of to enable him to give lectures on subjects in the borderland between religion and medicine, what has come to be called in our time pastoral medicine, to the theological students at the Roman University, and his medical experience was used in the causes of canonization in order to pass on miracles.
Innocent XII (1691-1700).--Both of the physicians of Innocent XII, Malpighi and Lucas Tozzi, are very well known. Malpighi deserves in medical history a place beside Harvey as one of the greatest of the contributors to the medical sciences and probably even a niche higher than the Englishman because of the number of original observations that he made. I dealt with him earlier in this volume. Lucas Tozzi is the author of a series of books on The Theory and Practice of Medicine that are classics. One of these was issued at Lyons in 1731, another at Paris in 1737, and a commentary on the Aphorisms of Hippocrates at Naples, 1743. He [{465}] wrote also a commentary on the Ars Medicinalis Galeni, besides smaller contributions to medical theory and practice. One of his books, with the title De Anima Mundi, The Soul of the World, in which he brings together a large number of the fallacies of philosophic writers before his time regarding the universe and man and their origin and destiny, was widely read. He suggests not only how little there is that we know, but how much there is that we think we know that is not so.
Pope Innocent XII died in 1700, and with the beginning of the eighteenth century we feel that we are in our own times. Whatever of direct opposition there has been supposed to be between the Popes and science has always been traced to the older times. It was nearly always shrouded in the mists of medieval history. It does not seem so important then, to follow out the lives of the Papal Physicians in detail in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For anyone who wishes really to know, the information is readily available. There is abundant evidence, moreover, of the favorable attitude of the Popes towards the medical sciences and a number of distinguished men are among their physicians. The great Morgagni, who in his time was undoubtedly the greatest of living physicians, was the intimate friend of a number of Popes and was frequently consulted on all scientific as well as medical matters. Both Pope Benedict XIV (1740-58) and his successor Clement XIII (1758-69) insisted, as we have said in the body of this volume, on having the great pathologist consider the Papal Palace always open to him as a place of residence, whenever he visited Rome. Almost needless to say this same favorable attitude has continued during the nineteenth century.
Pius VI (1775-99).--Among the physicians who treated Pius VI during the severe physical trials of a stormy pontificate was Professor Cotugno of Naples, to whom we owe a number of important discoveries in medicine. He was the first to point out the presence of the cerebro-spinal fluid and ably supplemented the investigations of Valsalva on the ear which did so much to clear up many problems in connection with that organ, most of whose anatomy we owe to Italians. He made a careful study of sciatica, De Ischiada Nervosa, Vienna, 1770, which is the classic foundation of our modern knowledge of that affection. He made a series of post-mortem observations on typhoid fever in which he demonstrated very clearly the intestinal lesions of that affection and came very near solving the important problem of the pathological basis of the disease. Like a number of others about the middle of [{466}] the eighteenth century, in spite of acute observations on intestinal lesions, he could not get away from the theory of fevers being constitutional and so was unable to separate abdominal typhus from dysentery on the one hand, nor true typhus on the other. The constitutional nature of the disease we have come to recognize to some extent again after the pendulum had swung very far in the direction of the declaration of its local character.
Pius VII (1800-23).--One of the physicians of Pope Pius VII was Professor Giambattista Bomba, who was professor of physiology at the Sapienza or Roman University of that time. One of the surgeons in attendance at the Papal Court was Antonio Baccelli, the father of Professor Guido Baccelli, the distinguished Italian scientist and statesman of the modern time.
Another of the physicians of Pius VII was Flajani, to whom we owe the first description of the affection known as Graves' Disease in English-speaking countries, and often as Basedow's Disease on the Continent, though the English physician Parry anticipated both of these in 1822. Graves' description did not come until 1835, Flajani's had been published in 1802; Basedow did not write the more complete description in which he called attention not only to the goitre and the rapid heart action as his Irish and Italian predecessors had done, but also to the exophthalmos, which is so common an accompaniment, until 1850. Flajani was distinguished for his ability as a clinical observer as his priority in this matter would well suggest.
Gregory XVI (1831-46).--The two of Gregory XVI's physicians who were best known were Professor Paolo Baroni, the distinguished Professor of Surgery, the University of Bologna, and Pier Luigi Valentini, Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the Roman University. At the conclave which followed his death for the election of his successor, Professor Giusseppe Constantini, the Professor of the Institutes of Surgery at the Roman University, was in attendance. [Footnote 53]
[Footnote 63: When the material of the famous Challenger expedition was being assigned for investigation to those who were expected to use it to the best advantage of science, the diatoms were handed over to the study of Francesco Castracane degli Anteminelli. He discovered in the material submitted to him three new genera of diatoms, 225 new species and some thirty varieties. Altogether he had written some 112 papers on the biology of his favorite microscopic plants. Castracane was a Catholic priest living at Rome in high favor with the ecclesiastical authorities and directly encouraged by the Pope in his work.]
Leo XIII (1878-1903) was so situated in his relations to the Italian government that it would have been almost impossible for him to have selected one of the distinguished professors at the [{467}] University at Rome, which was, after all, a government institution. His physician then was chosen from distant Ancona and proved to be a man of distinct intellectual capacity, who impressed himself upon the science of Rome in certain ways. This was Dr. Joseph Lapponi, whom those of us who had the privilege of meeting remember with special pleasure. He was professor of practical anthropology at the Academy of the Historico-Juridical Conferences of Rome and the author of a book on "Hypnotism and Spiritism; A Critical and Medical Study," which ran through two or more editions in the original Italian and was translated into several foreign languages. The English edition published by Longmans is well known.
Pius X (1903-14).--Dr. Lapponi continued as the Papal Physician of Leo XIII's successor until his death. Political conditions in Rome having been modified somewhat Professor Marchiafava of the Roman University, now in the hands of the Italian government, became the consultant Papal Physician, the latest of a long line of distinguished men. Marchiafava has done some excellent work with regard to malaria, working out the life cycle of the malarial parasite and demonstrating that the organisms of pernicious malaria and the tertian and quartan malarial fevers are quite different. In recent years Marchiafava has been particularly interested in the pathology of alcoholism, being a prominent factor in that movement in Europe which during our time has made it very clear that alcohol is never a stimulant but only a narcotic and that in practically all cases where it is used regularly, even though not consumed to excess, it produces definite pathological changes in human tissues.
With this list before him, the reader will have all the material necessary to understand the declaration that there is no series of men whose names are connected together by any bond in the history of medicine, even as members of the faculty of our oldest medical schools, that represent so much achievement and original investigation in medical matters as the Papal Physicians. With these men beside them as advisers and very often as intimate friends, it would have been quite impossible for the Popes to have been deliberate opponents of scientific progress. We all know that by a curious irony of fate physicians are sometimes found ranged against the line of advance in medical science, but this is inevitable with human frailty and the incidents of opposition have not done nearly so much harm as their conservative refusal to listen to enthusiastic discoverers, whose discovery was of no significance, has done of [{468}] good. No medical society in the world has an unblemished record of constant readiness to accept genuine new discoveries and all of them have sometime or other been in opposition to what proved eventually to be significant scientific progress. There are no striking incidents in the lives of the Papal Physicians in this regard though their admiration for Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen sometimes kept them over conservative. As a rule, however, they were ready to welcome every new step in medical advance that was made.
We all know how much a man's physician usually means in influencing him with regard to the attitude that he shall assume towards scientific advances generally and particularly announced progress in the biological sciences. The Popes could scarcely have had better advisers in this matter than the men who were actually chosen as Papal Physicians. They came from every part of Italy and sometimes even from other countries. A library consisting of their works alone would contain an extremely valuable collection of books illustrating nearly every phase of advance in medicine.
APPENDIX VI.
ASTRONOMY AND THE CHURCH.
Some Roman Astronomers.
A formal list of Papal Astronomers in any way comparable to that of the Papal Physicians cannot be given. Astronomy is not so compelling in its interests as medicine and while man's first serious scientific interest is his body, and the first modern university, that of Salerno, was founded around a medical school, the development of astronomy as a science was practically delayed until the Renaissance. Though a formal list of Papal Astronomers is not available, there is, however, a long series of names of workers in astronomy at Rome, some of whom occupied positions in the Papal capital actually called by that name, with many others who merited it for the work they did with Papal aid and encouragement. A large number of astronomical investigators conducted their researches under the patronage of the Popes, often dedicated their books, with permission, to them, were frequently supported by Papal revenues and had their observatories supplied by the Papal government, or else they were in intimate relations with the Papacy and received every stimulus for their researches.
For special purposes, as the correction of the calendar, distinguished astronomers were summoned from long distances to Rome. At the Sapienza Papal University and later at the Roman College directly under the control of the Jesuits, but with the entire approval and constant effective good-will of the Popes, men of great distinction in astronomy and mathematics have frequently been professors. Some of the very greatest contributions to the science of astronomy have been issued not only with dedications to the Popes, as I have said, but not infrequently have been printed at the expense of the Holy See.
In the chapter on Papal Physicians I have suggested that no list of men connected by any bond in the history of medicine are so distinguished as the roll of the Papal Physicians. The faculty of no medical school, for instance, no matter how long it may be able to trace its history, contains so many distinguished names. This same thing might well be said of the list of men who have done distinguished work in astronomy whose names are in some way [{470}] connected with the Papacy and whose relations to the Popes make it very clear that far from a determined course of opposition there was, on the contrary, a definite policy of encouragement and patronage for astronomical workers and that this greatly helped the diffusion of valuable scientific information with regard to the heavens and made the ecclesiastics of the world particularly interested in these important advances in human knowledge. In this appendix, then, as a complement to the appendix on the Papal Physicians, I have brought together some of the names and the achievements of astronomers who worked at Rome or were in some way connected with the Popes. I know that it is incomplete, but even as it stands it is a strong confirmation of that principle so surprising to many presumably well-informed people that the Popes were, as far as conditions permitted, always the patrons, not the persecutors, of scientists in all departments of the purely physical as well as biological, theoretic and applied sciences.
It is sometimes assumed in the modern time, and it used to be the custom a generation ago for nearly everyone in English-speaking countries to assume, that because we knew very little about science in the medieval period it must be because there was very little to know. We have learned the fallacy of that supposition to our cost, by the republication of the great text-books of medicine and surgery of the medieval period and by the deeper study of such great scholars as Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas. Even the scanty records that we have show us the Popes following the same sort of policy with regard to education and science as at the present time. Men who collected scientific information for academic or popular diffusion, as Isidore of Seville, Albertus Magnus, Thomas of Aquin, were not infrequently raised to ecclesiastical dignities during life and placed among the saints after death. Occasionally a distinguished scientist like Gerbert, who became Pope Sylvester II, or Petrus Hispanus the well-known physician, who became Pope John XXI, were even made Popes. It is easy to understand that their attitude as Supreme Pontiffs towards science would be not only not one of opposition but of sympathy and helpful patronage.
While as I have said astronomy as a formal science practically did not develop until the Renaissance, there were a series of important discussions of the relations of the earth to the other heavenly bodies and of the size and shape of the earth itself among the professors of the medieval universities, and the perfect freedom with which these discussions were carried on shows how unshackled [{471}] was human thought. Albertus Magnus discussed the antipodes, dismissed the notion that if there were men on the other side of the earth they would surely fall off by the thoroughly Socratic remark that we ourselves were on the other side from them yet did not fall off, and understood and taught very definitely the rotundity of the earth and other doctrines that are usually supposed to be much more recent, and that are often said to have brought their holders into ecclesiastical odium. Far from this, Albert was always in high favor and was made a bishop and canonized as a saint after his death.
Roger Bacon studied light, declared that it moved with a definite velocity and gathered and made good use in his teaching of an immense amount of information in the departments of knowledge that we now call astronomy and geography. Humboldt declared that it was a passage from Roger Bacon which more than anything else, even the Toscanelli letters, roused Columbus to his life purpose of sailing westwards. Roger Bacon's books, the one with the paragraph now famous because of its connection with Columbus among the number, were issued at the request of the Pope and it seems very probable that we would have had no idea of his marvellous anticipation of many modern scientific truths only for the definitely expressed wish of the Pope to know the English Franciscan's thought. We have just celebrated the seventh centenary of Roger Bacon's birth, and this has brought home to us how much of a loss to the history of human culture would have been the missing of Bacon's works. Bacon's difficulties in life were with his Order and were personal matters not directly connected with his science.
With the beginning of the Renaissance the stimulating effect of the study of Greek science on the men of the fifteenth century was exerted and one of those who was most deeply touched by the Greek spirit was Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, or Cusanus, as he is called from the Latin name of his birthplace. He wrote a series of books touching many matters in science and treating various phases of mathematics. He dwelt particularly on certain problems relating to geography and astronomy. I have summed up his scientific career in a chapter of "Old Time Makers of Medicine" (N. Y., 1911). He taught the rotundity of the earth and that the earth was the same sort of a body as the other stars in the heavens, that it was not and could not be the centre of the universe and that it had a movement of its own. Far from such revolutionary teaching leading to his persecution or bringing him under the suspicion [{472}] of the ecclesiastical authorities he was, on the contrary, looked up to for his scholarship, received successive ecclesiastical preferments, became Bishop of Brixen and then Papal Legate to Germany for the reform of abuses, and finally a Cardinal. He did much to encourage interest in mathematical, geographical and astronomical science, provided opportunities for students, encouraged Puerbach and Regiomontanus in their significant pioneer work in mathematics and astronomy, and generally showed himself the enlightened patron of every movement related to the physical sciences, and all the workers with the experimental method.
The first epoch-making astronomer who was brought into intimate relations with the Pope of whom we have definite knowledge was Regiomontanus. He is deservedly known as the Father of Modern Astronomy for his initiation of series of calculations and publications with regard to the heavens and his establishment at Nuremburg of a regular observatory. He was summoned to Rome to direct the calculations for the correction of the calendar, but unfortunately died there at the early age of forty. His invitation to Rome for this purpose came within the same decade when, if we were to trust certain modern historians of the relations of the Popes to science, Pope Calixtus III issued his supposed bull against Halley's comet. The bull has never been found. The attitude of the Popes towards science is much better illustrated by the invitation to Regiomontanus and the encouragement of astronomical research thus afforded than by the fictitious bull against the comet. The supposed bull has, however, played a large role in convincing a number of people of Church opposition to science, some of them being professors of science who knew nothing about the almost simultaneous appointment of Regiomontanus as Papal Astronomer.
Toscanelli, over the question of whose influence on Columbus an as yet unsettled controversy is waged, was a lifelong friend of Nicholas of Cusa, they had been schoolmates at College and undoubtedly the great cardinal doctor of laws or of decrees as they said at that time, owed much of his progressive advanced views on scientific subjects to his Florentine friend "the doctor of physic, Paul Toscanelli." Cusanus at the height of his fame dedicated his book on Geometrical Transformations "to Paul the Florentine physician." Regiomontanus, as well as Cusa, often sought Toscanelli's opinion on abstruse questions of mathematics and quoted him with confidence. The intimate relations of Cusanus and Regiomontanus with the Popes of the middle of the fifteenth century are very well known. Toscanelli's services to astronomy are only [{473}] less famous than those to cosmography. A series of his careful and painstaking observations and calculations of the orbits of the comets of 1433, 1449-50, of Halley's comet of 1456 and of the comets of 1457 and 1472 are preserved in manuscript. They demonstrate his profound and successful interest in astronomical subject and it is easy to see that they must have cost him, as indeed he tells in his letters, many a night's watching of the stars. The relations between the ecclesiastical authorities and Toscanelli are very well illustrated by that well-known monument to his astronomical skill which still interests visitors so much in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore at Florence. This is the gnomon arranged in the dome of the Cathedral by the shadow of which it is said that he could determine midday to within half a second. The use of the Cathedral for this purpose is interesting testimony to the cordial relations of science and religion at this time. It may be said in passing that Toscanelli's gnomon was later improved by Cardinal Ximenes of Spain, showing that these cordial ecclesiastical relations with science were not confined to Italy.
While Toscanelli was making his observations Antoninus of Florence was for some thirteen years the Archbishop of the city and was one of the learned members of the Dominican Order at this time, who had made his novitiate among the Dominicans with Fra Angelico and Fra Bartholomeo the great Renaissance painters. Antoninus was greatly influenced evidently by his associations with Toscanelli and formed one of a group of men containing the Florentine physician astronomer, Cardinal Cusanus and Regiomontanus, himself afterwards a bishop, who were on terms of intimate relationship at least in scholarly matters at this period. Archbishop Antoninus, who is the author of a Summa Theologica Moralis of which no less than fifteen editions were printed after his death, wrote also a series of histories in which he shows this influence by insisting that comets are celestial bodies like the others in the heavens and had no effect on the physical or moral conditions of the world and, quite contrary to popular beliefs, were not responsible for war or pestilence nor prophetic of evil to mankind. There had been a number of brilliant comets in the heavens about this time and there was consequently a widespread interest in them and much popular superstition with regard to them. Antoninus was on terms of familiar intimacy with Pope Eugene IV, who insisted on his becoming Archbishop of Florence, though Antoninus would have preferred to have remained a simple Dominican and keep his leisure for his scholarly work. When the Pope felt his end [{474}] approaching he called Antoninus to Rome to administer the last rites of the Church to him and be by his side during his last hours. Antoninus was frequently consulted by Pope Eugene's successors, Nicholas V and Pius II, both of whom were among the scholarly patrons of learning and art at this time. Some fifty years after his death Antoninus was canonized by Pope Hadrian VI, the scholarly Pope from Utrecht in Holland. His whole career then shows clearly the relations of the ecclesiastics and particularly the Popes of the time to science in a most favorable light.
The relationship with the rising science of the Renaissance period thus initiated was continued during the following century. At the end of the fifteenth century Copernicus studied for ten years in Italy and felt so thoroughly the interest of Italians in advances in science as well as scholarship that when some years later he came to formulate his great new hypothesis of the heavens, he sent an abstract of his theory to some of the Roman teachers with whom he had become intimate during his stay and it was taught publicly in the city to crowded audiences. This may well seem surprising to many whose only knowledge of the relations of the Popes to astronomy is the Galileo incident, but it must not be forgotten that Copernicus' great work in which he elaborated his theory, was dedicated, with permission, to the Pope, and not only received no censure until Galileo's time, nearly a century later, but was welcomed as a great contribution to science and thought. It was looked upon as a theory, to be discussed as any other. When Galileo, at the end of the first quarter of the seventeenth century, insisted on teaching it as absolute science, it must not be forgotten that there were no astronomers in Europe who looked upon Copernicanism as an accepted scientific doctrine. Even the reasons advanced by Galileo for its acceptance have all since been rejected. Owing to the discussions of it far and wide in the time of Galileo, certain expressions in Copernicus' great work were required by the Church authorities to be corrected so that his explanation of the heavens should be presented as the theory that it was and not as an absolute doctrine of science.
Toward the end of the sixteenth century the necessity for the correction of the calendar became more urgently manifest and Pope Gregory XIII invited Father Clavius, S.J., to take up the subject. At this time also, as is described by Pope Leo XIII in his Motu Proprio of 1891, "Gregory XIII [nearly half a century before the condemnation of Galileo] ordered a tower to be erected in a convenient part of the Vatican buildings and to be fitted out with [{475}] the greatest and best instruments of the time. There he held the meetings of the learned men to whom the reform of the calendar had been entrusted. The tower stands to this day a witness to the munificence of its founder. It contains a meridian line by Ignazio Danti of Perugia, with a round marble plate in the centre, adorned with scientific designs. When touched by the rays of the sun that are allowed to enter from above, the designs demonstrate the error of the old reckoning and the correctness of the reform." It was evidently the intention of the Pope that there should be, as a permanent institution in Rome, an astronomical observatory fully equipped and supported by the revenues of the Holy See and with a prominent scientist at its head. This purpose has been constantly kept in mind by the Popes ever since, though not long after Gregory's time, but not at all because of any opposition to science, the observatory founded by him came for more than a century not to be used for the purpose intended because its place was supplied by another Roman institution directly under the patronage of the Popes.
This was the Roman College, the great central school of the Jesuits, in the capital of Christendom. That Order was scarcely fifty years in existence in Pope Gregory XIII's time, yet it was to a member of it that the Pope turned for expert scientific direction in the correction of the calendar. During the next three centuries science as patronized by the Popes in Rome was mainly in the hands of the Jesuits. When it is recalled that this Order is directly under the control of the Pope, the professed members taking a special vow of obedience to him, it will be understood that the Jesuit policy with regard to science must be taken as representing the Papal position in its regard. If it is further recalled that Poggendorff in his Biographical Lexicon of Men Eminent in Science gives the names of some 500 Jesuits, though the Order was not in a position to do any work in science until 1550, it will be readily appreciated that the Popes acted wisely to encourage an institute so prolific in eminent scientists in its scientific work at the Roman College, rather than maintain a separate scientific department at the Vatican. The second institution would only have been unnecessary duplication of staffs and the connection between teaching and research at the Roman College was better for both functions.
Father Christopher Clavius, to whom more than to any other is due the Gregorian reform of the calendar, a magnificent practical application of astronomy and mathematics, is an excellent example [{476}] of the men who were near the Popes as counsellors and scientific advisers just before Galileo's time. Indeed Galileo and he were on the most friendly terms until his death in 1612. The circle of his friends included such men as Kepler, Tycho-Brahe and other great scientists of his time and he was called "the Euclid of the sixteenth century." His works were published at Mainz, in five huge folio volumes in a collective edition. The third of these is a commentary upon the Sphaera of John Holywood (Joannes de Sacro Bosco, the great medieval mathematician) and a dissertation upon the Astrolabe. The fourth volume contains a very full discussion of Gnomonics, that is, the art of constructing instruments of all kinds for determining the time by means of the sun. The fifth volume contains his papers with regard to the reform of the calendar. Most of these books were issued in many editions before and after his death, and their publication over and over again shows very clearly how much the men of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were interested in scientific subjects and how often and quite properly they looked to great clerical teachers as their leaders in science.
Just about the time that the Galileo matter was disturbing scientific and ecclesiastical circles at Rome, Father Scheiner, the Jesuit mathematician and astronomer became Professor of Mathematics in the Roman College. He is the inventor of the pantograph or copying instrument for drawings, and, being of an ingenious inventive disposition, constructed a number of instruments for astronomical investigation. He studied the sun carefully through colored glasses in a helioscope and then conceived the idea of projecting the sun's image on a screen in order to study its surface. Kepler used this same method, but Scheiner is said to have the right of priority in it. In March, 1611, he discovered by this method spots on the sun and while the priority of discovery was disputed by Galileo, three men, Fabricius, Galileo and Scheiner, seem all to have done their work independently in this matter, Fabricius being probably the first in time. For nearly a score of years Father Scheiner continued his observations on the sun and published his great work, which in the fashion of the day was called by the somewhat fantastic title, Rosa Ursina. He had the true scientific spirit and devoted himself to other subjects besides astronomy. He made important researches on the eye, showing that the retina is the seat of vision, and devised the optical experiment which bears his name.
One of Clavius' pupils was Father Matteo Ricci, S.J., founder of the Catholic missions of China, who in the midst of his successful [{477}] studies of mathematics and astronomy at the Roman College asked, at the age of twenty-five, to be sent on the missions in farthest Asia and was allowed to go the following year. He was selected to found missions in China and succeeded in breaking through the Oriental reserve and contempt for everything Occidental of the Chinese, and thus gained a foothold for Christianity in the country. It was Father Ricci's learning, particularly in cosmology, mathematics, astronomy and geography, that attracted the attention of the Chinese. He introduced astronomical studies at Pekin and brought over a series of instruments for an observatory which were so well thought of that they were preserved until our own time and some of them are said to have been taken from the Chinese capital by the allied troops, after the capture of the city following the Boxer Rebellion. He not only taught the Chinese European science, but he sent back to Europe true accounts of China and, above all, encouraged scientific studies among the missionaries. The example he thus set has always been followed and there has scarcely been a generation since when some Christian missionary has not been making original observations in natural history and collecting curious specimens to be sent home to scientists in Europe, while at the same time faithfully pursuing his missionary work.
Early in the seventeenth century, indeed just at the time when the Galileo case was most prominent at Rome, Father Athanasius Kircher was summoned to Rome and began his scientific work there, which included contributions to every department of physical and even some of the biological sciences. For some five years about the middle of the seventeenth century Father Kircher devoted himself to astronomy and the result was the publication, in 1656, of an astronomical treatise called Iter Celeste. A second volume on astronomy appeared in 1660. Anyone who is inclined to think that these contributions of the great professor of science at the Roman College were only reviews of the passing scientific opinions of the time, is not fully acquainted with Father Kircher's work. He never failed to illuminate anything that he set himself to study. His book on astronomy is of course a text-book, but it is magnificently illustrated; it is a very large work which shows the author's familiarity with the scientific literature of the time, but at the same time reveals his own scientific genius. Father Kircher was encouraged in every way by the Popes and high ecclesiastics of Rome and by his own Order, and his great text-books are among the bibliographic treasures of the history of science. Some idea of [{478}] his industry may be gathered from the fact that he wrote altogether some forty volumes folio on scientific subjects. He made many original observations, invented a number of valuable scientific instruments that are still in use, among others the vernier and magic lantern, and was productively occupied with nearly every branch of science in his time.
During the eighteenth century, before the suppression of the Jesuits, another distinguished mathematician and astronomer, famous throughout Europe, was working at the Roman College. This was Father Boscovitch, to whom we owe the plans for the erection of an observatory above the great pillars of the Church of the Gesu at Rome, which were not destined to be executed until the middle of the nineteenth century. Boscovitch is famous for a series of important works in mathematics and astronomy. He wrote books on Sun Spots, the Transit of Mercury, the Aurora Borealis, the Figure of the Earth, the Various Effects of Gravity, the Aberration of the Fixed Stars, and other astronomical problems. Pope Benedict XIV commissioned him and his brother Jesuit, Father Le Maire, to carry out several precise meridian arc measurements. He is the inventor of the rock crystal prismatic micrometer, the ring micrometer. After the suppression of the Jesuits Father Boscovitch was made Director of Optics for the Marine, a post created for him in order to secure his services for France.
During the second period of the history of the Vatican Observatory at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the upper story of the Gregorian tower was fitted up with meteorological and magnetic instruments with a seismograph, a Dolland telescope, a small transit instrument and a pendulum clock and a series of very careful observations on a number of subjects made. From 1800 to 1821 Gilii made an uninterrupted series of meteorological observations, reading the instruments twice a day, at 6 a.m. and 2 p.m. The observations are published for seven years and the rest are preserved as manuscripts in the Vatican Library. There are also deposited astronomical observations of eclipses, comets, Jupiter's satellites and of a transit of Mercury. Gilii laid down the meridian line in front of St. Peter's with the obelisk as a gnomon and the readings of the seasons by the length of the shadow. To him are due also the bronze marks on the floor of St. Peters, giving the comparative lengths of the greatest churches of the world. It was he who placed the first lightning rod on the cupola of St. Peter's. The [{479}] heavens, the weather, the lightning are supposed often to be set by religiously inclined persons particularly under the care of Providence, to be influenced by prayer, yet these are exactly the three departments of science that were faithfully followed in their detailed scientific aspects during all the centuries by the Papal Astronomers under the patronage and with the approval of the Popes, with the avowed purpose of discovering the natural laws under which they occur.
Two of the distinguished teachers of mathematics and astronomy of the end of the eighteenth century at Rome were Father Thomas Leseur, professor at the Sapienza, and Professor Franz Jacquier, professor at the Roman College, who wrote a commentary on Isaac Newton's Principia which did much to popularize Newton's work.
When, because political influence was brought to bear very strongly on the Pope, the Jesuits were suppressed in 1773, the Roman College passed from their hands and the real reason for allowing the Vatican Observatory on the Papal grounds to fall into disuse was manifest, for the Popes at once took up the question of re-establishing their own observatory. Not long after the suppression we find Monsignor Filippo Luigi Gilii placed in charge of the reorganized Roman Observatory by Cardinal Zelada, who had been appointed Vatican Librarian in 1780, and who found the old Gregorian tower available as a centre of astronomical observation and investigation of which Rome had been deprived since the suppression of the Roman College. After the restoration of the Jesuits early in the nineteenth century, the Roman College was opened once more and distinguished Jesuits, some of them with world-wide reputations, did their work there. With the occupation of Rome by the Italian government in 1870 the Jesuits were banished, the Roman College with its observatory was once more deprived of the learned expert direction of the Fathers of the Order, and once more efforts were made for the re-establishment of a Vatican observatory which is now in existence and under the direction of a Jesuit.
Another of the distinguished scientists of the eighteenth century who taught for a time at Rome was Father Beccaria, whose name is well known in the history of electricity. When not yet forty years of age he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London, always a much envied distinction, and as a consequence of his election some of his important papers relating to electricity and various astronomical subjects were sent to the Royal Society [{480}] and published by them. While no great discovery in physical science is attached to his name, few men did as much as he to awaken enthusiasm and experimental investigation into science in his time. He was one of the pioneers of the great scientific movement of the nineteenth century. Priestley called him one of the most eminent of all the workers in electricity on the Continent, and Professor Chrystal, in his article on electricity, in the Encyclopedia Britannica (ninth edition), gives him an important place. He had been trained to be a professor of experimental physics for his Order, and at this time every one of the teaching orders with colleges at Rome had distinguished men among their faculties.
The well-known astronomer, Father Piazzi, whose discovery of Ceres, the first of the planetoids found in the space between Mars and Jupiter, caused great excitement among astronomers, and whose subsequent work in astronomy brought him membership in many of the scientific academies of Europe, had been for some time a student and a teacher in Rome. While there he was a colleague of Professor Chiaramonti, who later became Pope Pius VII. During all his subsequent brilliant scientific career his special friendship with the Pope continued, and with all his many memberships in scientific bodies he remained a member also of the Theatine religious order which he had entered at a very early age.
After the restoration of the Jesuits the work in the sciences reverted once more to the Jesuits at the Roman College and the Vatican Observatory was discontinued. The interest of the Popes in science, however, was very well illustrated by the apostolic letter of Leo XII, Quod divina sapientia, which gave instructions to all Catholic educational institutions, as to observatories, publications and intercourse with foreign scientists.
The Jesuits at the Roman College reached noteworthy distinction for their astronomical work during the nineteenth century. Father Secchi came to be looked upon as probably one of the most distinguished astronomers in Europe. He received many prizes for his observations, for his invention of instruments and for important discoveries. His work on the sun, published in his book, Le Soleil, represents some of the most important contributions ever made to this department. It was translated into most modern languages. His observations on the corona of the sun during eclipses and especially photographs of the corona, place him among the great original contributors to modern astronomical knowledge. He made a critical examination and classification of the spectra of four thousand stars entailing an enormous amount of [{481}] work. He believed firmly that it was no use making observations unless they were thoroughly recorded and made available for others. His literary work in astronomy is almost incredible. He sent nearly 700 communications to 42 scientific journals, over 300 of which appeared in the Comptes Rendues and in the Astronomische Nachrichten, the French and German journals of astronomy that are the authoritative records of contemporary scientific work. In this country Newcomb and Langley quote from Secchi frequently and use his illustrations. He was the founder of a new branch of astronomy, Stellar Spectroscopy, and Secchi's types of solar spectra will probably ever remain an essential illustration in astronomical text-books.
Another of the astronomers who did excellent work among the Jesuits at the Roman College during the nineteenth century was Father De Vico, whose determination of the rotation period of Venus and the inclination of its axis was considered so exhaustive that it was not questioned for half a century. He also measured the eccentric position of Saturn in his rings and observed the motions of the two inner moons of this planet which had not been seen before this time except by Herschel. Father De Vico also discovered eight comets, one of them being the well-known comet with a period of rotation of five and a half years which bears his name. Father De Vico and Father Secchi were driven from Rome by the Revolution of 1848, but were brought back to continue their work just as soon as it was possible. In the meantime they continued to be personal friends of successive Popes, encouraged in every way, aided in their work and looked upon as ornaments of the Church. They were thoroughly respected by their Order and there was never the slightest question of any possibility of all their studies in science and all their profound investigation of the deepest scientific subjects disturbing their faith in any way.
One of the well-known contributors to astronomy during the nineteenth century was Father Benedict Sestini, who for his mathematical ability was appointed assistant to Father De Vico of the Roman Observatory. He was banished from Rome with his brother Jesuits by the Revolution of 1848, and taught at Georgetown College, Washington, D. C, for many years. His principal work is his catalogue of star colors, published in the Memoirs of the Roman College, 1845-47. He had very keen vision and fine skill with the brush, so that his catalogue, which embodies the entire B.A.C. Star Catalogue, from the North Pole to thirty degrees south of the equator, will be invaluable for deciding the question [{482}] whether there are stars variable in color. He made a series of sunspot drawings which were engraved and published as appendix A of the United States Naval Observatory volume for 1847, printed in 1853. He was the teacher of mathematics and astronomy to the American Jesuit students and wrote a series of text-books for that purpose.
As we have said, the Italian government suppressed the Roman College, declaring it State property and this prevented further work in the observatory there, which had been for nearly half a century under Father Secchi and Father De Vico, one of the most important centres in the world of astronomical advance. Beggared by the Roman confiscations which compelled the Popes to cut off all their support of scientific and educational work except what related closely to clerical education, it was not until 1888 that Pope Leo XIII found himself in a position to re-establish a Roman observatory in connection with the Vatican. In 1888 the Italian clergy, for the celebration of the Golden Jubilee of Pope Leo XIII, presented to him, knowing from his interest in science how agreeable such a gift would be to him, a collection of astronomical instruments and the Gregorian tower was selected once more for its former purposes and the Barnabite, Father Denza, the well-known founder of the Italian Meteorological Society, became the official head. Pope Leo XIII ceded to the Vatican Observatory a second tower more than 400 metres distant from the Gregorian. As this was of immense strength, the lower walls being some five yards in thickness, it seemed strong and firm enough to support the thirteen-inch photographic refractor which was ordered from Gauthier. Seven volumes of observations were published during the next fifteen years, four under Father Denza, a fifth under Father Lais and the last two under Father Rodriguez, an Augustinian, who was a specialist in meteorology.
The last Pope, Pius X, encouraged the Vatican Observatory in every way. The Gregorian tower being near the Vatican Library and too distant from the observatory was restored to its original library purpose and given over to the housing of the collection of Historical Archives. The second round tower of the old Leonine Fortress, together with the adjoining summer residence of Leo XIII, was devoted to astronomical work. Father Hagan, S.J., who had been distinguished for mathematical studies in connection with astronomy here in America, was chosen as the director, and there has been a magnificent development of the astronomical work. There is a new sixteen-inch visual telescope in the second tower, [{483}] called the Torre Pio X. There are four rotary domes covering the astrographic refractor in the Leonine Tower, and some excellent work is being accomplished. Every encouragement is given to it as far as the limited means of the Pope will permit, and a fine library is being collected for future workers.
APPENDIX VII.
THE FATHERS OF THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE.
There is a very general impression in many minds in our time that from the very beginning of Christianity the interest of Church men in the other world was so great that human attention was diverted just as far as possible from concerns of all kinds with the stage of existence through which man is passing here and now. As a consequence, there has been the feeling that from the earliest time the Church was opposed to science and scientific education, partly because this represented a rather compelling diversion from other-worldly interests, but mainly because it gave men control over natural forces which made life more comfortable, raised men up in their own estimation and was opposed to the spirit of humble faith best suited to the adherents of Christianity. Hence it is concluded that there was always a Church policy of deliberate opposition to science and indeed to all intellectual development. This attitude is often declared to be best represented by the expression attributed to one of the Fathers of the Church, "Heaven lies open to the simple of mind, the little ones of the earth, and the ignorant bear it away better than those who are proud of intellect."
Any such impression with regard to the Fathers of the Church as to the establishment of a policy of opposition to science and education is quite erroneous and entirely contrary to the general trend of their writings, even though it may be apparently substantiated by expressions taken at random from the writings of the Fathers at moments when they were emphasizing the truth that has always been so manifest, that from the knowing ones of earth,--and our use of the word knowing in the phrase is not complimentary,--especially from those who are conceited in their knowingness, many things are concealed that are revealed to those who are simple of heart and mind. It has seemed worth while, however, to devote an appendix to this subject of the real attitude of the Fathers to science. As Father Leahy, in his "Astronomical Essays," Boston (Washington Press, 1910), has answered Professor White's assumptions on this subject with a knowledge of the Fathers I could not hope to emulate, I have preferred to avail myself of his permission to quote him at length.
"By the Fathers we understand in general the Christian writers in the Church's early history. In the West the period may be held to have terminated with Isidore of Seville of the seventh century, and in the East with John of Damascus of the eighth. The important writers of this epoch number between fifty and a hundred, and their works constitute, as may be imagined, a body of literature of vast extent.
Our only present concern is to learn, if possible, what was the general attitude of this army of ecclesiastical writers towards the physical sciences, especially the science of astronomy. Explicit treatises on astronomy we shall not, indeed, expect them to supply. For their works when massed are seen to constitute a library of theology, and in such a collection we should no more look for scientific treatises than in a modern library for law. But inasmuch as the Fathers of the Church have been accused, by Andrew D. White and others, of having stayed and even thwarted the advance of science, it becomes the interest and the duty of the apologist to hunt up their scientific allusions that we may learn to what extent the charges made are true.
The Standstill of Science.--It has often been alleged as derogatory to the accomplishments of the Fathers, that they contributed nothing to the progress of scientific knowledge. From our modern standpoint we may be tempted to esteem this failure of theirs as a cardinal sin. But it would be wrong in this instance, as in every other, to render a verdict of guilt too hastily. We of the twentieth century are prone to forget that there are other fields of profitable intellectual exploration besides the physical, and that there may be objects of research and thought worthier of study than the material world.
The Fathers of the Church were philosophers and theologians occupied with the problems of the world's origin and destiny, higher themes, surely, than any with which physical science is concerned. It is the fashion of the day to praise the ancient Greeks at the expense of the patristic and medieval theologians. But the distinction is to a large extent inconsistent, since both bodies of writers were at work upon the selfsame themes. Philosophers like the Greeks, the Fathers were like them moralists as well, engaged in the elaboration of right rules of conduct. Finally, unlike the Greeks, the Fathers were Scriptural scholars, many of them of extensive erudition, in homily and commentary expounding with wonderful assiduity the Sacred Books in which they believed that God had given His revelation to man.
Analogous Examples.--Should we be surprised, then, if men so occupied failed to add much to the world's store of scientific knowledge? Though it were admitted, as it cannot be in its entirety, that they left physical science just where they found it, could not an explanation be discovered that would exonerate them from all blame? To justify such an apology, we do not even need to transport ourselves in spirit back to their time, a process which, however, strict fairness would demand. But in our own era we can think easily of dozens and hundreds of men of highest respectability and most beneficent accomplishment, men of books and men of affairs, jurists, statesmen, historians and others, who have [{486}] themselves done little or nothing for the onward march of Science. That the careers of these men are profitless, who shall allege?
Again, the present writer has often thought of the almost parallel example of the ancient Romans. It makes their history but little less illustrious to learn that this conquering people did nothing for Science's advance. Till Pliny of the first century after Christ, what Roman was a scientist? They were a nation of soldiers, statesmen, orators and jurists, and for seven hundred years they pursued through such avenues their triumphant course. Yet what writer of to-day rises to charge them with a cardinal sin, because Science remained at a standstill among them for seven full centuries? With these seven centuries can we not properly compare the later seven in which the Christian Fathers were the teachers of the civilized world?
Heritage from the Greeks.--Objection will be made, no doubt, that the Fathers began their career with fairer start than the Romans, forasmuch as they were the direct heirs of the astronomy and physics of ancient Hellas. And they will be incriminated with having abused their precious heritage, by not merely letting it lie fallow but by raising every possible obstruction to its further cultivation. Such is the tenor of Andrew D. White's accusations against them.
This well-known writer smiles at the puerilities of patristic science. He cites from among them Cosmas of Egypt as having propounded a perfectly childish theory of the structure of the earth and grafted it on the science of theology. The ready answer to this particular charge is that Cosmas' conception of the universe belonged to cosmogony and not theology, and further that it had no influence on subsequent thought. Returning to the general arraignment, White rebukes the Fathers for having clung so tenaciously to false opinions regarding the shape of the earth, the motion of the heavens, and the nature of the firmament. And, most seriously of all, he charges the Fathers with indifference and even hostility to the study of science itself.
In a few short paragraphs it is impossible to give an adequate rejoinder to these damaging complaints. But they demand some sort of reply, however inadequate it be, as emanating from an American scholar and statesman of high rank, and embodied in a work that has free and wide circulation among our college students.
Defence of Their Doctrine.--The first palliation for the reputed offence of the Fathers is that whatever false science they retail, was practically all of it derived from the very sources which it is the fashion of the day to laud in the highest degree. As far as was consistent with their faith, the Christian Fathers were the pupils of the Greeks. It was the latter and not the patristic writers who invented the false theories of a solid firmament and a motionless earth. If Europe and Arabia down to the Renaissance believed in the Geocentric system, it was because they trusted Ptolemy the Greek, till then admittedly the greatest of astronomers. And a similar ancestry could be traced, we venture to say, for all or the major part of their scientific errors as far as these may have extended.
Restrictions Made by the Fathers.--But if the Fathers were in [{487}] general the heirs of the Greeks, they were not guilty of the mistake of accepting the inheritance in its entirety. To a large extent they could discern the chaff from the wheat, and were actually at pains to make the separation. It ought to be known that the scientific literature of the Grecians is teeming with the wildest and vainest of speculations regarding all matters within the scope of astronomical science. Here as elsewhere, the Greeks speculated endlessly, contradictorily, emptily, and almost aimlessly. In unfounded speculation they discoursed on all manner of astronomical subjects, the shape and size and distance of the sun, its nature and that of the moon and stars, and so on almost indefinitely, with scarcely any agreement or concomitance of opinion. There were almost as many diverse opinions as there were men.
To this motley assemblage of groundless and conflicting theories the Fathers had full access through the medium of Plutarch, the Greek compiler. Eusebius, for example, the Father of Church History, quotes Plutarch on just these topics for over thirty pages. If Eusebius and the other Fathers grew impatient with all this ill-assorted mass of soi-disant science, shall we charge them as Dr. White does with having been false to the interest of science? Should we not rather maintain that they helped save science from its enemies?
Opposition to Science.--It is only in the light of these indisputable facts that we can understand the sayings of the Fathers in which, as quoted by White, they upbraid science for its inutility. Be it noted in passing that White is wont to quote them not literally but freely, and apart from their context. Lactantius, Eusebius, Augustine, and Basil, these are the four whom he selects as representative. They are truly representative, and indeed any one of them might stand for all.
Let Eusebius be our particular choice, for he discusses astronomy more completely than the others. White alleges (Warfare, Vol. I, p. 91) that Eusebius endeavored to bring scientific studies into contempt, and quotes him as saying, "It is not through ignorance of the things admired by them [scientific investigators], but through contempt of their useless labor, that we think little of these matters, turning our souls to better things."
Who would guess from this brief epitome of Eusebius' views that the latter had devoted to the subject more than thirty pages? Who could possibly surmise that he had taken pains to write out, under the guidance of Plutarch, all the known opinions of the Greeks on some thirty-nine problems, all but two or three of them astronomical? Let the curious read Eusebius for themselves in the fifteenth book of his Praelectio Evangelica. They will there discover what White might have well acknowledged, that on not one of the problems are the Greek philosophers in agreement. On the nature of the sun there are nine opinions, on its size four, on its shape an equal number, on the moon's nature seven. And this discrepancy of judgment continues to the end. Moreover a large proportion of the theories are of the most fantastic sort.
In the face of this chaotic wilderness of diverse, fluctuating and contradictory teachings, what could Eusebius do but turn away in impatience, and take up in their stead the only truth of which he [{488}] felt certain, the truth of the Gospel? Such was his actual procedure. "Does it not seem to you that we have rightly and deservedly departed from the curiosity of all these men, so idle and so full of error?" He confesses frankly that he can see no fruit or utility for man in the teachings he has quoted. And he appeals for his complete justification to Socrates, the wisest of the Greeks, who in his day had adopted precisely the same stand. This and no other is the argument and spirit of Eusebius.
No Opposition to True Science.--This was the temper, also, that actuated the other Fathers named, Lactantius, Basil, and Augustine. No doubt these men valued spiritual knowledge above material. But it by no means follows from this that they undervalued Science. They were scholars of extensive culture, Basil a graduate of Athens, Augustine of Carthage, and Lactantius styled because of his proficiency the Christian Cicero. They were well acquainted with the learning of the Greeks. That they rebelled against the scientific fantasies of the latter, is not a proof that they were hostile to the advance of Science itself.
In the Imitation of Christ, Thomas à Kempis expresses a sentiment quite similar to theirs. "Surely a humble husbandman that serveth God, is better than a proud philosopher who, neglecting himself, is occupied in studying the course of the heavens." Like the Fathers, à Kempis had reason to be disgusted with the astronomy of his time, for it was beginning to be impregnated again with the virus of Astrology. By refusing to follow such pseudo-scientific teachings, both à Kempis and the Fathers did a real if seemingly negative service to the science of astronomy.
"He was born under a lucky star." Language of this sort, used now only in pleasantry, recalls a form of superstition which was once accepted seriously by all men throughout the civilized world. In many a period, mankind has believed literally that the stars and planets exercised a real influence in shaping human lives. And there have been many epochs, ancient, medieval, and even modern, when astrology, the telling of fortunes by the stars, was given a rank among the learned professions.
Even now there occur occasional sporadic outbreaks of the same superstition. Along with other quacks and necromancers, astrologers are still occasionally in evidence, advertising their trade through the columns of the press. Indeed it is affirmed by the Catholic Encyclopedia that the growth of occultistic ideas is reintroducing astrology into society.
Errors of Astrology.--Whatever the popularity of this practice in the past, and whatever its prospective vogue in the near future, it is to be set down without qualification or hesitation as a delusion and a snare. To suppose that the heavenly bodies have an influence on human conduct is in its origin a pagan error, closely allied with the pagan myth that the sun, moon and stars are presided over by as many separate deities. Only thus could have originated the delusion that Jupiter and Venus would procure a blessed destiny, and Mars and Saturn a troubled one, for the children born at the time of their rising.
Nor can the cult be justified by an array of the names of those who have been its votaries. It is true that many astronomers in the [{489}] past, including the great Kepler himself, have practised the astrological art, casting horoscopes for their clients. But in most cases it would be found, at least in the modern period, that these scientists merely yielded through tolerance to the weakness of their age. In true astronomy there is no place whatever for astrology.
Besides being groundless the practice is to be condemned for its perilous moral tendencies. Distracting the soul from the worship of the spiritual God, who alone governs the universe, it substitutes for His action that of mere material objects, stars and planets, which it thus elevates to the rank of lesser gods or demons. Pretending to forecast from birth what each man's course in life shall be, it robs the will of its proper share in moulding human conduct.
The Christian Fathers.--An interesting testimony to the former prevalence of this erroneous belief is found in one of Sir Walter Scott's novels, "Guy Mannering," whose whole plot turns upon the fulfilment of an astrological prediction. Reading the history at hand the novelist had learned what complete sway the cult had formerly exercised, almost down to the time of his writing. It would have interested the celebrated author to know that there was, however, one long period in which astrology was absolutely and effectually excluded from Christian Europe. For over a thousand years Christendom remained free from this blight, thanks to the teachings of the Fathers of the Church.
In discussing the relations of the Fathers towards the astral science, we have already shown how they purged it of some of its grossest errors. But their principal service to the science remains now to be told. For amongst all the vagaries of the science of the heavens, astrology is both in theory and in practice the most deplorable. That the Fathers placed the weight of their great authority in the scale against this superstition, is one of the most praiseworthy of their achievements.
First Efforts at Reform.--At the time that the Fathers began to write, in the century just following the labors of the Apostles, astrology formed everywhere an integral part of the science of astronomy. It was taught in all the schools, Chaldean, Jewish, Grecian and Roman. Almost from the beginning the defenders of the Christian faith proceeded to attack this pernicious error, realizing how inimical it was to the spread of truth which Christ had come to impart. Already in his address to the Greeks, Tatian was heard denouncing the absurdities of Grecian astronomy and astrology. This was in the middle of the second century, just at the close of what is called the Apostolic Period.
A little later, Tertullian, the famed apologist of the then flourishing African Church, placed himself on record as the uncompromising enemy of astrology. With his usual vehemence of language he declared that "of astrologers there should be no speaking even" among Christians; and went to the length of saying that "he cannot hope for heaven whose finger or wand abuses the heavens." These and many similar utterances may be found in his Treatise on Idolatry.
Respect for True Astrology.--With this denunciation of magic and idolatry there went hand in hand, however, a genuine respect [{490}] for the proper science of the heavens. Contemporary with Tertullian, and like him one of the great Christian masters of the period, was Clement Alexandria. To the Catholic astronomer of to-day it is gratifying to find this Father of the Egyptian Church giving generous testimony to the worth of astronomical science. With just discrimination he praises astronomy as "leading the soul nearer to the creative power, as helpful to navigation and husbandry, and as making the soul in the highest degree observant, capable of perceiving the true and detecting the false."
Another contemporary, Hippolytus, was indeed unsparing in his denunciation of astrology. In a treatise of eleven quarto pages, contained in his "Refutation of All Heresies," he riddled with merciless logic the vain pretensions of the Greek astrologers. But he showed that he had no quarrel with a well ordered study of the heavens, by giving liberal praise to Ptolemy, the ablest of the astronomers.
A Universal Teaching.--In far distant Syria, then a choice realm in the Church's patrimony, there was at the beginning of the third century another school of Christian philosophers who joined with their brethren in West and East in waging war on the same dread enemy. A Syrian work, called the Book of the Astrologers, has two quarto pages of excellent quality recounting and scoring the absurdities of current astrological practices. It is so like Hippolytus' work that one seems an echo of the other.
Perhaps the most interesting of all these concordant denunciations is that found in the "Recognitions of Clement," a patristic writing probably of the third century. Here the treatises on astrology run to full ten chapters, a sign that the author had abundant knowledge of the subject. In this work astrology is refuted particularly from the moral point of view. It is convicted of the double charge of being fatalistic in its tendency and subversive of all morality. "Men's conduct," says the author's thesis, "is due to their own free will and not to the configuration of the planets."
Golden Age of Patristic Literature.--So ran on in perfect unity and harmony the steady flow of patristic teaching. It reached its climax, as we should expect to find, in the heroic writers of the fourth century, the golden era of patrology. Lactantius, the Christian Cicero, re-echoed the voices of the past in pronouncing astrology the work of demons. An Augustine, the greatest of the Fathers, confirmed the decision of his predecessors by protesting against the amalgamation of astrology with the true science of nature.
So effectual indeed was the opposition to astrology of the earlier Christian writers, confirmed by the masters of the post-Nicene period, that the practice came to be regarded by all the faithful as a superstition and a danger, and continued to be so esteemed down to the time of the Crusades. For a full millennium, Christian Europe midst all its vicissitudes was spared the absurdities of astrological belief and practice, thanks to the patristic school of writers.
A Surprising Omission.--We have thought it well to bring to light these none too well-known facts regarding one important part of the astronomical teachings of the Fathers. How they could have [{491}] escaped the attention of Andrew D. White, or how he could have failed to find place for them in his voluminous work, it is difficult to understand.
His book bristles with accounts of superstitions, always telling against the theologians, and in favor of the scientists. But astrology is absent even from the index of his work. Had he allotted it a chapter, his numerous readers would have learned that one great school of theological writers, enduring for a thousand years, did wage war on a certain sort of science, to wit, the pseudo-science of astrology.
APPENDIX VIII.
SCIENCE IN AMERICA.
For Americans it is very probable that the chapter in the history of science which will demonstrate most clearly that there was not only no opposition on the part of the Popes or the Church authorities to the teachings of science or its development, but on the contrary encouragement and patronage, in spite of our English traditions to the contrary, is that which gives even very briefly the story of the evolution of science and its teaching on the American continent. Notwithstanding the very prevalent impression, indeed we might say the practically universal persuasion, that there was nothing worth while talking about in any department of education in America before the nineteenth century, except what little there was in the English colonies, and while it is confidently assumed that above all science received no attention from our Southern neighbors, Spanish America not only surpassed English America in education, but far outdistanced English America in what was accomplished for scientific research and the evolution of the knowledge of a large number of scientific subjects in a great many ways.
Even those among us who thought themselves well read in American history have, as a rule, known almost nothing of this until comparatively recent years. Professor Bourne of Yale, whose untimely death deprived the United States of a distinguished historical scholar, was the first to point out emphatically how far ahead of the English were the Spanish colonies in every mode of education, but particularly in the cultivation of science. In many places Prescott had more than hinted at this, but the materials for the whole story were not available until our time.
Some of Bourne's paragraphs represent a severe arraignment of the ignorance that has characterized so much of our supposed knowledge of the Spanish Americans and their culture in the past. After reading them it is easy to realize the truth of the expression that another distinguished university man from the United States made use of not long ago, after having visited the South American countries. He declared that it was time for North Americans to wake up and discover South America. Literally we have known almost nothing about it, indeed in a certain sense we have known much less than nothing, since we were quite sure that we knew [{493}] practically all there was to know while failing to know much that as Americans we ought to have known.
Two Spanish-American universities were founded under Papal charters almost a full century before Harvard as our first small college in English America began its career. Harvard was not to be a university in any proper sense of the term for a full century and a half after its foundation, while the universities of Mexico and Peru, largely under the influence of the ecclesiastical authorities and owing nearly everything to Church patronage under the Spanish Crown, had all the essential university faculties before the close of the sixteenth century. In spite of the predominant Church influence, which, if we were to credit former English traditions, must have been fatal to the evolution of science, Professor Bourne's researches show that in the sixteenth century the Spanish-American universities were already doing such scientific work as the students in English America became interested in only during the nineteenth century. Obviously I prefer to quote Professor Bourne's own words for such startling assertions. He said in his chapter on "The Transmission of Culture" in his volume in The American Nation Series, "Spain in America":
"Not all the institutions of learning founded in Mexico in the sixteenth century can be enumerated here, but it is not too much to say that in number, range of studies and standard of attainments by the officers they surpassed anything existing in English America until the nineteenth century. Mexican scholars made distinguished achievements in some branches of science, particularly medicine and surgery, but pre-eminently linguistics, history and anthropology. Dictionaries and grammars of the native languages and histories of the Mexican institutions are an imposing proof of their scholarly devotion and intellectual activity. Conspicuous are Toribio de Motolinia's 'Historia de las Indias de Nueva España,' Duran's 'Historia de las Indias de Nueva España' but most important of all Sahagun's great work on Mexican life and religion."
Indeed, it is with regard to science in various forms that one finds the most surprising contributions from these old-time scholars. While the English in America were paying practically no attention to science, the Spaniards were deeply interested in it. Dr. Chanca, a physician who had been for several years physician-in-ordinary to the King and Queen (Ferdinand and Isabella) and was looked upon as one of the leaders of his profession in Spain, was appointed by the Crown to accompany Columbus on his second expedition, partly for the sake of the health of those who went, but also in order to make scientific notes on American subjects. The report [{494}] of this scientific excursion is a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the state of science of the time and furnishes precious information with regard to Indian medicine, Indian customs, Spanish knowledge of and interest in botany and metallurgy, as well as certain phases of zoology and other scientific departments, which serves to show how wide was the training in science of this Spanish physician of over four hundred years ago. Dr. Chanca's epistle was republished as one of the Miscellaneous Publications of the Smithsonian Institution and a series of articles with regard to him from the pen of Dr. Fernandez de Ybarra has appeared in medical and other journals of the United States. Chanca is the author of a medical work on the Treatment of Pleurisy, published after his return in 1506, and a commentary on Arnold of Villanova's De conservanda juventute et retardanda senectute, "The Conservation of Youth and the Retardation of Old Age." Such a work is all the more interesting at this time because we know of De Soto's search for a "Fountain of Youth" in Florida and the popular belief in the existence of some such fabled miracle-worker for the old. Indeed most people seem inclined to think that such an idea represented very characteristically the naive medical science of the time. The Fountain of Youth was only like the many wonderful remedies--nearly always they are announced to have come from long distances--that are supposed to renew youthful vigor and which are sold so plentifully in our time. To take such popular notions as an index of the medical science of either that time or our own is quite absurd. The genuine medical science of this period is, as I have shown in my volume "The Century of Columbus," a never-ending source of surprise by its anticipation of many ideas that are usually supposed to be much later in origin and not a few of which are fondly supposed to be original discoveries of our time.
Evidently Spanish interest in science was broad and deep and this is confirmed by the story of the medical schools in connection with these Spanish-American universities which is of special significance. My own medical alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, whose medical school was the first in the United States, erected a tablet some years ago in which it was at least hinted that this was the oldest medical school in America. A few years later, on the erection of a second tablet to the earliest medical faculty, additional knowledge having come in the meantime, the inscription on this was worded so as to refer to the first school of medicine in North America.
HOSPITAL, MEXICO (ANOTHER VIEW) This hospital, as was noted in the caption to the other view of it (opp. page [272]), is the oldest foundation of this kind in America (1524) and is still in existence supported by the original endowment. The second oldest hospital in America was that of Santa Fé (in Mexico) founded in 1531 by a remarkable man who became Bishop of Michoacan, and who supported it at his own expense, besides forming at Santa Fe a community of thirty thousand Indians who lived like monks, practising hospitality and all the works of charity (A History of Nursing, Nutting and Dock, New York).
The medical school of the University of Lima, founded before the end of the sixteenth century, had meanwhile been discovered. Subsequently the medical school of the University of Mexico came to be known and the next tablet will have to be worded with due reference to that. The first chair in medicine was founded at the University of Mexico about 1580, almost two centuries before our first formal academic medical teaching in the United States was organized about 1770. During the course of a generation altogether seven chairs in medicine were founded in Mexico, including a chair of anatomy and surgery, a special chair of dissection, a chair of therapeutics and one of prognostics. The medical school of the University of Lima was organized about the same time.
With our rather complacent modern method of belittling the past and our disinclination to admit that the Spaniards were doing anything in science that the English Americans were not to think of for nearly two centuries, it would be easy to conclude that the teaching at these medical schools must have been altogether trivial and of no significance. When it is learned that most of the teaching was founded on Hippocrates and Galen some of our generation might think it hopelessly backward, but it would be well for those who think so, to be reminded that during the century following the sixteenth, Sydenham in England, and Boerhaave in Holland, the most distinguished medical men of their time who are deservedly looked up to with great reverence by most of the distinguished teachers of ours, were both of them pleading for a return to the broad, sane views and insistence on clinical observation of Hippocrates and Galen. As a matter of fact the medical schools of both the University of Mexico and of Lima were furnishing quite as good a medical training as the average medical school of Europe at that time. They were modelled closely after the Spanish universities and were in intimate relations with them, even exchanging professors and students, and at the middle of the seventeenth century at least maintaining excellent standards.
From the very beginning, then, the Spanish Americans made a definite attempt to develop scientific knowledge in America. In medicine, in botany, in pharmacology, as well as in geography, philology, ethnology, and anthropology, there are magnificent contributions made by Spanish scholars. Many a Spanish university student and teacher spent time in this country investigating the properties of plants, especially their relations to medicine, and laying precious foundations in botany. Besides there were university scholars at home in Spain taking advantage of these field investigations to [{496}] compile works of serious character which are well known by those who are familiar with the history of botany and pharmacology. What the Spaniards were doing in America the Portuguese were doing in India and South Africa, and a very serious attempt was made during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to bring to Europe every possible material, plant or mineral, that might be of value for human health and at the same time to increase the bounds of human knowledge by careful investigation.
Nor was this thoroughly scientific and practical education confined only to the upper classes nor exclusively to those of Spanish birth and blood. Even "the wild Indians," as Bourne tells us, "were successfully gathered together in a village called a Mission where, under the increasing supervision of the friars, they were taught the elements of letters and trained to peaceful, industrious and religious lives. In fact every mission was an industrial school, where the simple arts were taught by the friars, themselves in origin plain Spanish peasants." He continues, "Spanish America, from California and Texas, to Paraguay and Chili, was fringed with such establishments, the outposts of civilization, where many thousands of Indians went through a schooling which ended only with their lives." Bourne goes so far as to say "every town, Indian as well, as Spanish, was by law required to have its church, hospital, and school for teaching Indian children Spanish and the elements of religion." The Spaniards were actually anticipating for the young Indians some of the modes of vocational education, interest in which is only just being aroused among us at the present time.
No wonder that the work of conversion in Mexico followed hard upon the heels of conquest, and to quote Bourne's words farther, "The Aztec priesthood relaxed its bonds and the masses were relieved from the earlier burdens of the faith. In the old world the progress from actual to vicarious sacrifice for sin had been slow and painful through the ages; in the new it was accomplished in but a single generation. The old religion had inculcated a relatively high morality, but its dreadful rites overhung the present life like a black cloud and for the future it offered little consolation." ..."The work of the Church was rapidly adapted to the new field of labor." The triumph of the Church's influence was the preservation of the natives and their gradual uplift. This was a slow process and required almost divine patience, but it was infinitely better than the method by which the English-speaking colonies, in a chapter of history that is almost untellable in its [{497}] completeness, brought the natives of the country that they had invaded to ruin and practically obliteration. This experiment in applied sociology so successfully accomplished must be placed to the credit of the Spaniards also, and it stands out with all the more interest by contrast with English neglect of duty.
While seeing so clearly all that was accomplished in Mexico under the influence of the Church for education and social progress and scientific teaching and training in the arts and crafts and trades, Professor Bourne cannot quite bring himself to condemn entirely the almost complete failure that characterized all the relations of the English-speaking peoples to the natives here in America and he even seems to find some justification for their harsh treatment of the Indians. I think that our point of view generally has changed a great deal in this matter even in the last ten or fifteen years since we have come to recognize our social obligations more clearly and, above all, have come to appreciate better what is meant by "the white man's burden" in his relations to the dark-skinned peoples who are lower in the scale of civilization than we are. The Civil War did much to correct American notions on this point, but our attention to problems in the Philippines has done even more. I shall leave Professor Bourne's paragraph to speak for itself and each reader to say for himself whether the English method of dealing with the Indian is justified by comparison with the ruthless processes of nature as Professor Bourne would hint.
"Far different was the advancing frontier in English America with its clean sweep, its clash of elemental human forces. Our own method prepared a home for a more advanced civilization and a less variously mixed population and its present fruits seem to justify it as the ruthless processes of nature are justified; but a comparison of the two systems does not warrant self-righteousness on the part of the English in America."
Indeed we might well say far from it, for the almost literal obliteration of the Indian in North America as of the natives in Australia and New Zealand, only so much more complete there, represents ever to be regretted blots on the history of civilization for which there can be no possible justification.
Professor Bourne does not hesitate to continue the comparison of Spanish and English America down even to our own time and in doing so points out that our advances which have for the time being put us so far ahead of the Spanish Americans are mostly the gains of the age of steam and are due to the fact that it was hard for their mixed population with so many barbarous elements [{498}] in them to keep up with our comparatively homogeneous population, homogeneous at least in the sense of coming from the same strata and civilization in Europe. While our Indians have been almost entirely obliterated there are more Indians alive in Mexico and in South America to-day than there were when Columbus landed. With this fact in mind Professor Bourne's comparison and contrast takes on renewed interest and his apology for the Spanish Americans is all the more telling.
"If we compare Spanish America with the United States a hundred years ago we must recognize that while in the North there was a sounder body politic, a purer social life and a more general dissemination of elementary education, yet in Spanish America there were both vastly greater wealth and greater poverty, more imposing monuments of civilization, such as public buildings, institutions of learning and hospitals, more populous and richer cities, a higher attainment in certain branches of science. No one can read Humboldt's account of the City of Mexico and its establishments for the promotion of science and the fine arts without realizing that whatever may be the superiorities of the United States over Mexico in these respects, they have been mostly the gains of the age of steam."
If one reads Champlain's account of the City of Mexico as he saw it at the very beginning of the seventeenth century, as I have quoted it in the chapter "America in Columbus' Century," in "The Century of Columbus" (Catholic Summer School Press. New York, 1914), it will be quite clear that Humboldt was only seeing the natural development of culture and artistic progress that was already in evidence in the early sixteenth century.
"During the first half-century," Bourne continues, "after the application of steam to transportation Mexico weltered in domestic turmoils arising out of the crash of the old regime. If the rule of Spain could have lasted half a century longer, being progressively as it was during the reign of Charles III; if a succession of such viceroys as Revilla Gigedo, in Mexico, and De Croix and De Taboaday Lemos, in Peru, could have borne sway in America until railroads could have been built, intercolonial intercourse ramified, a distinctly Spanish-American federal State might possibly have been created, capable of self-defence against Europe, and inviting cooperation rather than aggression from the neighbor in the North."
If the effort to understand Spanish America now so manifest will only go to the extent of having our people realize the full truth that until the nineteenth century English America was far behind Spanish America in facilities for higher education, in culture and literature, in the application of the arts to municipal life and, above [{499}] all, in interest in science, then the prevalent impression that the Popes and the Catholic Church are opposed to genuine progress and true science will disappear. Catholic America was far ahead of Protestant America in scientific education and research until the untimely break from Spain left the Spanish-American countries the prey of political disturbances.
APPENDIX IX.
THE DANGER OF A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE.
Professor Draper's "The History of the Conflict between Religion and Science."
What I have tried to emphasize in this volume is that the arguments advanced to show the opposition of the Catholic Church to science are founded on actual ignorance of the history of science or misunderstandings of particular incidents of that history. Not only was there no policy of opposition to science, but on the contrary encouragement of interest in scientific subjects, patronage of scientific workers and even definite endowment of scientific research by the ecclesiastical authorities. The tradition of Church opposition to science is founded especially on lack of knowledge of what was done for science in the medieval period and a misunderstanding of the medieval universities. This tradition owed its origin partly to the Renaissance, which, having rediscovered Greek, despised whatever Western Europe had accomplished during the preceding centuries and spoke of all that was done as Gothic, as if only worthy of barbarous Gothic ancestors.
Another large factor, however, in the creation of this tradition and one which meant more for us here in America than the Renaissance, was the religious revolt of the sixteenth century in Germany which has been called the Reformation. The reformers made it a point to minimize, if not actually to misrepresent, what had been accomplished under the old Church regime, and this Protestant tradition lived on here in America with much more vitality even than in Europe.
The consequence was the bringing up of a series of generations, who, if not actually believing as so many absurdly did, that the Pope of Rome was the Scarlet Woman and the Church the Babylon of the Apocalypse, were quite sure at least that no good could possibly have come out of the Nazareth of pre-Reformation times. It is only in recent years that we have come to recognize that all the talk about the Dark Ages is, as John Fiske said, simply due to ignorance of the time and its accomplishment. The later medieval period might well be called the "Bright Ages" for its art and architecture, its magnificent literature, its interest in education and [{501}] in scholarship, its development of democracy and its formulation of the great laws and constitutions by which the rights of men were guaranteed in practically every country in Europe. Just as soon as this true state of affairs with regard to the medieval period is recognized, then all question of any policy of Church opposition to education and science disappears.
I have illustrated the lack of knowledge of the true history of science as the basis of the arguments for the thesis of Church opposition to science in the present volume by impugning what President White advances as facts. It can be illustrated still better, however, from another book written twenty years before President White's, even a little consideration of which shows how the whole status of the arguments with regard to the relations of Church and science has changed during a single generation. Our growing knowledge of history has literally taken away all the ground on which the older controversialists used to stand. This is the "History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science" by Professor John W. Draper, which was issued in 1874, just forty years ago, and already in 1875 had entered its third edition, so that the book sold almost as a popular novel at that time and evidently attracted wide attention. The volume was accorded the privilege of publication in the International Scientific Series, and as this set is among the recognized serious books of the time, some of them classics in science and most of them representing important contributions to knowledge, no wonder most readers never thought of doubting its authority or above all questioning its "facts."
Some of Dr. Draper's work made him deservedly one of the best-known biological scientists of the United States in his time. He had had a very striking career. As a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania he reported in his thesis for the doctorate in medicine, which had become at this time usually such a commonplace statement of conventional science that it was shortly after given up as a requirement, a series of observations on absorption through membranes, using bubbles for his experimental work, that attracted the special commendation of the faculty and the attention of the scientific world. He was not yet thirty years of age when he made the first photograph of a human being--that of his sister--ever made and in 1840 successfully secured the first photographs of the moon. During the next ten years he made a series of observations on the spectrum which attracted deserved attention and anticipated not a little of Kirchoff's work. Melloni, himself a distinguished Italian physicist, reported these observations [{502}] to the academy of Naples. Draper's text-book of physiology was without doubt the best medical text-book issued in America up to that time and deservedly held its place for many years in our medical schools.
It was no wonder then that Draper received many distinctions in the shape of membership in foreign scientific societies, honorable mentions, and prizes. His works were translated into many of the European languages. Late in life he gave up his experimental and scientific work to devote himself to the writing of history. His history of the Civil War was widely read both in Europe and America. His "History of the Intellectual Development of Europe," which only a little reading now in the light of recent knowledge of the Middle Ages shows us to be a caricature of the philosophy of history, was translated into several foreign languages and was probably more widely read than any serious work by an American author up to that time. What was very rare for an American book at that period it was read by a great many European teachers and students. All this gave added distinction to his writing on the subject of the relations of science and religion, and so it is easy to understand that he was considered by many to have made an almost final summary of this important controversy.
Professor Draper's book then became a sort of bible, that is a book of books, for a great many American teachers of science and, above all, for the younger generation of university lecturers who were to have the shaping of opinions among the students of scientific departments of our colleges and universities during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It does not seem too much to assume that most of the maturer scientists who are now teaching in the university scientific departments of this country, read Professor Draper's book and were led by it to an almost unshakeable conviction that religion and, above all, the Catholic Church, fearful lest science should take men away from her influence, had been constantly opposed to all true scientific progress, and what was more unpardonable, that religion as represented by the Church had been for the same reason a bitter enemy of any and every social progress that might lead to the real development of mankind. For them under Draper's inspiration it seemed that the deliberate Church policy was that if men were not happy here they would look with all the more eagerness to happiness hereafter and take all the means offered by the Church to secure it. That such a conclusion impugned the motives of millions of men whom their own generation had thoroughly respected and yielded to the most [{503}] dangerous of human ideas, suspicion, made no difference. No good could come out of the Nazareth of the Catholic Church.
It is quite certain that a great many of the younger teachers of science of that time who are still alive, even when not entirely conscious of the source of their opinions as to the relations of science and religion and the Church and education, have at the back of their minds certain prejudices, founded on the influence produced on them during their plastic, formative state of mind by the reading of Professor Draper's book. Indeed, so firm is the feeling in many of these men, that this whole subject is settled for them beyond the possibility of any modification, that they have insulated their minds from any further currents of information.
Controversy is distasteful at best; to find out that one has been cherishing a mistaken notion for years, is always disturbing as one grows older, and so it is not surprising that many of these men frequently use expressions with regard to the supposed relations of Church and science that are quite incompatible with what is now very generally known of the history of science. Their minds are made up, and they simply refuse to bring for a second time any of these subjects before the bar of judgment. Besides, though they would resent any such imputation as to their own state of mind, they have the feeling that people with religious convictions are prone to see only one side, and, therefore, anything that may be said on the other side is only a bit of special pleading for a conviction that no reasoning and no argument would change. They argue, as a consequence, that it would be quite useless for them to read the other side with any reasonable hope of getting at the real facts. This attitude of scientists is very different from the open-mindedness that is supposed to be characteristic of the devotees of science; but it is very human.
Now the interesting fact with regard to Professor Draper's books is that Professor Draper, a scientist, did not know the history of science at all. He was entirely ignorant of the great advances that were even then being made, with regard to our knowledge of the growth of science during the medieval period. He thought that there was very little, indeed practically no science, during that period. Looking about for a reason, he made the Church a scapegoat. The publication during the past generation of many German volumes on the history of the different sciences--and these German students went straight to the original documents--has shown us that there were magnificent developments of science during the medieval and early Renaissance periods, when the Church was in control of the educational institutions and of every phase of [{504}] academic work. The story of the opposition between religion and science falls to the ground at once when these facts are known. Some of them were already in process of publication even in Draper's time, but he knew nothing of them. He was so sure that there was nothing to know in this matter, that he probably did not bother his head very much about trying to get the latest results of scholarship in the matter.
Professor Draper's summary of the relations of the Church to science or learning, and his declaration of her absolute refusal to recognize anything as scholarship, except what was deduced from the Scriptures, shows how far a man can go in his assumption of knowledge when he knows literally nothing about a subject. For him the Dark Ages knew nothing because he knows nothing about them. If they knew anything, he would know it, but he does not. Of one or two men he knows something, but they are exceptions to the general rule of absolute negation of intellectual interests and developments. Draper said: [Footnote 64]
[Footnote 64: Page 250.]
"In the annals of Christianity, the most ill-omened day is that in which she separated herself from science. She compelled Origen, at that time (A.D. 231) its chief representative and supporter in the Church, to abandon his charge in Alexandria, and retire to Caesarea. In vain through many subsequent centuries did her leading men spend themselves in--as the phrase then went--drawing forth the internal juice and marrow of the Scriptures for the explaining of things. Universal history from the third to the sixteenth century shows with what result. The Dark Ages owe their darkness to this fatal policy. Here and there, it is true, there were great men, such as Frederick II and Alphonso X, who, standing at a very elevated and general point of view, had detected the value of learning to civilization, and, in the midst of the dreary prospect that ecclesiasticism had created around them, had recognized that science alone can improve the social condition of man."
Of course the man who wrote that either knew nothing at all about a whole series of triumphs of human intelligence, or else he deliberately put them out of his mind. One wonders if he had ever even heard of Dante, of whom more has been written than of any man who ever lived. Those triumphs of art, architecture, the arts and crafts, engineering, construction work of the highest genius, the Gothic cathedrals and the great public buildings, town halls, hospitals, university buildings, would surely have appeared to him as representing magnificent intellectual--and social--accomplishments, had he appreciated anything of their real significance or allowed himself for a moment to get out of the narrow circle of [{505}] interests in which he was unfortunately placed. Our architecture in his time was cheap; our art absent; our crafts lacked development; our civic and university architecture of the quarter century before he wrote was literally a disgrace, and of course Professor Draper could not be expected to appreciate the achievements of the Middle Ages in those departments in which his own generation lacked so much.
It is especially striking to take a paragraph of Professor Draper's, in which he sums up a whole movement, and place beside it a paragraph of a serious and informed student of the same subject. Professor Draper inherited the old traditions of lazy monks, living in idleness, a drain on the country, of absolutely no benefit to themselves or to others. Professor Draper wrote: [Footnote 65]
[Footnote 65: Page 267.]
"While thus the higher clergy secured every political appointment worth having, and abbots vied with counts, in the herds of slaves they possessed--some, it is said, owned not fewer than twenty thousand--begging friars pervaded society in all directions, picking up a share of what still remained to the poor. There was a vast body of non-producers, living in idleness and owning a foreign allegiance, who were subsisting on the fruits of the toil of the laborers. It could not be otherwise than that small farms should be unceasingly merged into the larger estates; that the poor should steadily become poorer; that society far from improving, should exhibit a continually increasing demoralization."
As a commentary on this, read the following paragraph from Mr. Ralph Adams Cram's book on "The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain," in which he describes what the monasteries actually did for the people. Mr. Cram has made a special study of the subject in connection with the magnificent architecture which these medieval monks developed, and which he would like to have our people appreciate and emulate. Professor Draper is much more positive, but Mr. Cram is much more convincing. [Footnote 66]
[Footnote 66: The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain. New York: The Churchman Co., 1905, p. 458.]
"At the height of monastic glory the religious houses were actually the chief centres of industry and civilization, and around them grew up the eager villages, many of which now exist, even though their impulse and original inspiration have long since departed. Of course, the possessions of the abbey reached far away from the walls in every direction, including many farms even at a great distance, for the abbeys were then the great landowners, and beneficent landlords they were as well; even in their last days, for we have many records of the cruelty and hardships that came to [{506}] the tenants the moment the stolen lands came into the hands of laymen."
Or, almost better still, read the following paragraph from an address at the summer meeting of the State Board of Agriculture of Massachusetts, delivered by Dr. Henry Goodell, the President of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, on the general subject of the influence of the monks in agriculture:
"Agriculture was sunk to a low ebb at the decadence of the Roman Empire. Marshes covered once fertile fields, and the men who should have tilled the land spurned the plow as degrading. The monks left their cells and their prayers to dig ditches and plow fields. The effort was magical. Men once more turned back to a noble but despised industry, and peace and plenty supplanted war and poverty. So well recognized were the blessings they brought, that an old German proverb among the peasants runs, 'It is good to live under the crozier.' They ennobled manual labor, which, in a degenerate Roman world, had been performed exclusively by slaves, and among the barbarians by women. For the monks it is no exaggeration to say that the cultivation of the soil was like an immense alms spread over a whole country. The abbots and superiors set the example, and stripping off their sacerdotal robes, toiled as common laborers. Like the good parson whom Chaucer portrays in the prologue to the "Canterbury Tales":
"'This noble ensample unto his scheep he gaf That first he wroughte and after that he taughte.'
"When a Papal messenger came in haste to consult the Abbot Equutius on important matters of the Church, he was not to be found anywhere, but was finally discovered in the valley cutting hay. Under such guidance and such example the monks upheld and taught everywhere the dignity of labor, first, by consecrating to agriculture the energy and intelligent activity of freemen often of high birth, and clothed with the double authority of the priesthood and of hereditary nobility, and, second, by associating under the Benedictine habit sons of kings, princes, and nobles with the rudest labors of peasants and serfs."
President Goodell has told the story of how the monks cleared and reclaimed the land, transformed fens into forests, marshes into gardens, and swamps into beautiful domains. As he says:
"A swamp was of no value. It was a source of pestilence. But it was just the place for a monastery because it made life especially hard, and so the monks carried in earth and stone and made a foundation, and built their convent, and then set to work to dyke and drain and fill up the swamp, till they had turned it into fertile plow land and the pestilence had ceased."
President Goodell did not hesitate to proclaim that the monasteries were the early representatives of our agricultural colleges. They taught the peasantry of the surrounding country how best to grow their crops and what to grow. Because of their wide affiliations they were enabled to secure seeds of various kinds, and stock for breeding purposes, and so were able to teach the people what was best for particular neighborhoods, and not only show them how to raise it, but actually supply them with the necessary initial materials. It became a proverb that the monks and their people were the best farmers. When we ourselves were ignorant of scientific farming, we did not appreciate what the monks had done for agriculture. Now that our soil is becoming exhausted by unscientific and wasteful farming, the foundation of agricultural colleges leads the men who have studied the subject to appreciate what the monks really accomplished. Professor Draper not only cannot find anything good to say of the monks, but he can scarcely find anything bitter enough to say of them. On the other hand President Goodell, who has studied the situation from his point of view very carefully, can scarcely find words strong enough to praise them. He concluded his address as follows:
"My friends, I have outlined to you in briefest manner to-day the work of these grand old monks during the period of 1500 years. They saved agriculture when no one else would save it, they practised it under a new life and new conditions when no one else dared undertake it. They advanced it along every line of theory and practice, and when they perished they left a void which generations have not filled."
In the light of these few quotations even it is easy to see that Professor Draper's book is really quite an amazing work to have come from the hand of a man widely read, acknowledged as an authority in certain subjects by his contemporaries and, above all, because the author seems to have thought that he had quite exhausted his subject. Here, for instance, is a portion of the paragraph in which he summarizes the beginnings of science in modern Europe (page 298).
"The science of the Arabians followed the invading track of their literature, which had come into Christendom by two routes--the south of France and Sicily. Favored by the exile of the Popes to Avignon, and by the Great Schism, it made good its foothold in upper Italy. The Aristotelian or Inductive philosophy, clad in the Saracenic costume that Averroes had given it, made many secret and not a few open friends. It found many minds eager to receive [{508}] and able to appreciate it. Among these were Leonardo da Vinci, who proclaimed the fundamental principle that experiment and observation are the only reliable foundations of reasoning in science, that experiment is the only trustworthy interpreter of Nature, and is essential to the ascertainment of laws. He showed that the action of two perpendicular forces upon a point is the same as that denoted by the diagonal of a rectangle, of which they represent the sides, etc."
We must suppose that the scientific readers of this book, for they were mainly scientists, and it had a place in the International Scientific Series, agreed with this marvellous exhibition of ignorance. Here is a man summarizing modern European science and leaving out all mention of Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, the great medical school of Salerno in the twelfth century, and the great medical schools of Italy farther north during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. This lack of knowledge of the history of medicine deserves, above all, to be emphasized because Draper as a professor in a medical school would naturally be supposed to know something about his own branch of science.
He attributes all the initiative of modern science to the impulse derived from the Arabs. This used to be a favorite way of looking at the history of culture for those who wanted to minimize just as far as possible all Christian influence. The facts of history are in constant contradiction with this. Modern European science began at the University of Salerno. It has often been stated that Arabian influence must have largely impelled Salerno's work, situated as it was in the southern part of Italy, but the use of any such expression means that the writer must forget that this southern part of Italy had been a Greek colony, was indeed called Magna Graecia and that Greek influence persisted there, and when the revival came after the Barbarians who had invaded Italy had gradually been brought by religious influence into a state where culture and science and civilization were to mean something for them, the influence of the old Greek authors was first felt here. Gurlt, in his History of Surgery, emphasizes the fact, for instance, that the first important modern (or medieval) writers on surgery, the Four Masters of Salerno, were not influenced by the Arabs. Their books contain no Arabisms but many Graecisms. They obtained their inspiration from the old Greeks and carried on the torch of learning in their own department magnificently as recent studies of the School of Salerno have shown. They corrected the polypharmacy of the Arabs and restored natural modes of cure to their proper place.
For Professor Draper, until after the Reformation there was practically no development of medicine. "It had always been the policy of the Church to discourage the physician and his arts; he interfered too much with the gifts and profits of the shrines." Professor Draper either knew nothing of the great series of Papal physicians and surgeons or else he ignored what they had done deliberately. It seems reasonably certain that he knew nothing about them, for if he had done so he would surely have mentioned them in order to minimize the significance of their work--for that is his way. He is emphatic in his declaration of the medieval neglect of sanitation and care for the ailing, and sets it down to the deliberate purpose to secure more money for prayers. "From cities wreaking with putrefying filth it was thought that the plague might be staid by the prayers of the priests." He knows nothing apparently of the well-directed attempts to organize sanitary control, of the appointment of archiaters or medical directors in Italian cities, of the recognition of the contagiousness of tuberculosis, and the effort to control it, and seems even to have missed the significance of the successful obliteration of leprosy by segregation methods, for that was one of the greatest triumphs of preventive medicine ever attained. Leprosy was probably as common in the thirteenth century in Europe as consumption is now with us or very nearly so, and yet in two centuries it had been practically eradicated. Well for us if we shall accomplish as much for our folk scourge of disease--the White Plague.
Above all, Professor Draper seems to know nothing of the magnificent hospitals of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, beautiful architecturally, well planned for ventilation and the disposal of waste material, with abundant water supply, with large open wards, windows high in the wall, tiled floors that could be thoroughly cleansed and which, alas! were to be replaced hundreds of years later by the awful hospitals of the first half of the nineteenth century, which with their small windows, narrow corridors, cell-like apartments and little doors, were to be more like jails than refuges. Some of the worst hospitals ever built in modern history had been erected in Professor Draper's own lifetime. Some of the most beautiful hospitals in the world had been erected in Italy and other countries during the later medieval and Renaissance period, before the Reformation, under religious influence,--but Professor Draper knows nothing of them. The history of hospitals here in America is as largely religious as it was in other countries and times.
Professor Draper seems to have known nothing of the fine hospitals and foundling institutions and the great surgery of the later Middle Ages, but he thinks he knows enough to be quite sure that any such developments were impossible. Certain incidents that he accepts as historical showed him what fools the Popes and all near them were in matters of science, and, therefore, it would be quite impossible that they could have any sympathy for scientific progress and quite easy to understand their opposition. It is from conclusions and assumptions in history that we need to be saved. A hundred years ago it used to be said with pride that if you gave a zoologist a single bone he could reconstruct the entire animal for you. We know that such reconstruction worked much harm to science. Many of the animals possess structures that even important portions of their anatomy in other parts of the body would give no hint of. History that is built up from single incidents is likely to be even more false because human conduct is much more complex than any animal body. What could be expected of the zoologist's reconstruction, however, if the original bone handed to him was factitious, what a curious result might be expected from his deduced skeleton.
This is what happened with Professor Draper's reconstruction of history from certain incidents that he accepted. The story of the Papal Bull against Halley's comet seemed enough to him to make it quite clear that for centuries the Popes must have been buried in the profoundest ignorance of science,--but then the story of the Papal Bull against Halley's comet is all a modern invention. Draper said: "But when Halley's comet came in 1456 so tremendous was its apparition that it was necessary for the Pope himself to interfere. He exorcised and expelled it from the skies. It slunk away into the abysses of space terror-stricken by the maledictions of Calixtus III, and did not venture back again for seventy-five years!" Of course this bit of supposed information is all nonsense; Calixtus did no such thing, and just at that time the Popes were encouraging Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa in his great mathematical work and astronomical speculations, were inviting Regiomontanus, "the Father of modern astronomy," down to Rome to do his work there and help in the correction of the calendar, while Cardinal Bessarion, one of the most intimate friends of the Pope at this time, was encouraging Purbach at Vienna and Regiomontanus to translate Ptolemy and providing them with manuscripts and putting them in touch with Greek science in every way.
Halley's comet is a favorite reference with Professor Draper. How well his readers must have remembered all about it! He says, for instance, on page 320:
"The step that European intellect had made between 1456 and 1759 was illustrated by Halley's comet. When it appeared in the former year, it was considered as the harbinger of the vengeance of God, the dispenser of the most dreadful of his retributions, war, pestilence, famine. By order of the Pope, all the church-bells in Europe were rung to scare it away, the faithful were commanded to add each day another prayer; and, as their prayers had often in so marked a manner been answered in eclipses and droughts and rains, so on this occasion it was declared that a victory over the comet had been vouchsafed to the Pope. But, in the meantime, Halley, guided by revelations of Kepler and Newton, had discovered that its motions, so far from being controlled by the supplications of Christendom, were guided in an elliptic orbit by destiny. Knowing that Nature had denied to him an opportunity of witnessing the fulfilment of his daring prophecy, he besought the astronomers of the succeeding generation to watch for its return in 1759, and in that year it came."
All this is of course mere persiflage once it is known that the story of the Papal Bull against the comet has no foundation in history. It is the sort of nonsense that a great many serious men permit themselves to indulge in when they think they are convicting some past century of sublime foolishness. Not infrequently they make themselves out just as absurd as they would like to present the men of former generations, because they show how credulous a modern scholar can be when his prejudices influence him. Unfortunately such passages have a particularly lamentable effect upon young minds. For them ridicule means much more than argument. For a young man to be ridiculous seems the worst thing that can possibly happen and when anything is made ridiculous for him he loses his respect for it. Ridicule is, as is well known, an extremely dangerous argument, however. Professor Draper and, indeed, many another teacher of history and, above all, lecturer and writer on the history of science, have made themselves supremely ridiculous by their ready acceptance of a legend for which there is not the slightest authority. It was made up to serve the purpose of exhibiting Papal ignorance and superstition, but it so happens that in serious history the Popes of the time when this is supposed to have occurred are among the most intelligent and scholarly men of history.
It seems worth while to go over the list of Popes who came during the twenty years just before and after the date given for the issuance of this supposed bull. Eugene IV, elected Pope in 1431, [{512}] whatever may have been his faults of lack of tact, was scholarly and unselfish. At an early age he distributed what was really an immense fortune in his time to the poor, and entered the monastery. When political troubles drove him from Rome he resided at Florence and the presence of the Papal Court there did much to foster the humanistic movement which was just then beginning. It was he who consecrated the beautiful church just finished by Brunelleschi. His successor in 1447 was Pope Nicholas V, a man of wide education and deep interest in the revival of classical literature and Christian antiquities. He was the founder of the Vatican Library and brought Fra Angelico to Rome for the great decorative work at the Vatican. Pope Calixtus III, who succeeded Nicholas in 1455, was a man of cultivated mind, scholarly tastes and shared with his predecessor the honor of having founded the Vatican Library. He encouraged the Greek scholars in Italy and added greatly to the collections of precious manuscripts. His desire to prevent the further destruction of Greek culture by the Turks who had just captured Constantinople, led him to devote himself mainly to the fulfilment of a vow that he had made to wrest Constantinople from the Moslem. To his influence is largely due the victory gained by the Christians at Belgrade at this time which prevented the further spread of Mohammedan power. Pope Calixtus had the Angelus Bell rung every day at noon to implore the aid of the heavenly powers against the Turks. There is absolutely no question of any reference in this matter to the comet, but here is where the story comes in.
Pope Calixtus' successor was the famous Renaissance scholar AEneas Sylvius Piccolomini. He was just beginning some of the reforms, the need of which had been pointed out by his friend, the scholarly Nicholas of Cusa, when his death occurred as a consequence of his fatigue in journeys undertaken to rouse the Christians of the West against the Turks so as to preserve Christian civilization. His successor was Pope Paul II. He found it necessary to suppress some of the academies of Rome whose privileges were being abused by fostering a pagan attitude toward philosophy and religion, and in revenge Platina wrote a bitter biography of him, but no one has ever doubted of his scholarliness. He built the Palace of St. Marco in Rome, now known as the Venezia, and organized relief work among the poor while encouraging printing, protecting universities, and showing himself a judicious collector of works of ancient art.
Professor Draper's summaries of periods of history are amusing [{513}] caricatures of the reality. I know no easier way to make a comic history of progress in Europe, so-called, than to take a series of excerpts from Draper's book and string them together. He ignores completely the wonderful work done for scholarship, he knows nothing apparently of the great series of books printed for us during the Renaissance, usually in magnificent editions, which preserve scholarly works of the Middle Ages, he utterly neglects the painting, the architecture, the sculpture, even the great engineering feats in the making of bridges and constructive work of all kinds, and then in order to explain why there was nothing done by mankind puts all the blame on the Church. As I have said before, in a period in which even well-read men knew nothing about the Middle Ages, self-complacency tempted them to conclude that such a gap in their knowledge could only be because there was nothing to know about them. They looked for some reason for the absence of accomplishment that made this blank in human history. With their feelings, the Church was just the one that must be responsible. Progress would surely have been made only that some factor was keeping it back.
Professor Draper makes an especially strong appeal to American readers by contrasting all the accomplishments of our material civilization here in the United States, with the results in Mexico and in South America. Our progress has been all beneficent, while the influence of the Spaniard was everywhere absolutely maleficent. He seems to forget all about our treatment of the Indian, with its awful injustice. He proclaims our increase in wealth as the surest sign of our intellectual superiority. He says: [Footnote 67]
[Footnote 67: Page 289.]
"Let us contrast with this the results of the invasion of Mexico and Peru by the Spaniards, who in those countries overthrew a wonderful civilization, in many respects superior to their own, a civilization that had been accomplished without iron and gunpowder--a civilization resting on an agriculture that had neither horse, nor ox, nor plow. The Spaniards had a clear base to start from, and no obstruction whatever in their advance. They ruined all that the aboriginal children of America had accomplished. Millions of those unfortunates were destroyed by their cruelty. Nations that for many centuries had been living in contentment and prosperity, under institutions shown by their history to be suitable to them, were plunged into anarchy; the people fell into a baneful superstition, and a greater part of their land and other property found its way into the possession of the Roman Church."
Place beside that a paragraph from the late lamented Professor Bourne of Yale, who having made special studies in [{514}] Spanish-American culture and education, as well as in its intellectual life, contrasts it quite unfavorably with what was accomplished in the English colonies. Professor Bourne was, like Draper, a professor at an American university, but he had made special studies in the subject, and knew something about it. Professor Draper talked out of the depths of his assumption of knowledge; Professor Bourne out of an intimate acquaintance that had been obtained by years of serious research work. Professor Bourne said:
"Both the Crown and the Church were solicitous for education in the Spanish colonies, and provisions were made for its promotion on a far greater scale than was possible or even attempted in the English colonies. The early Franciscan missionaries built a school beside each church, and in their teaching abundant use was made of signs, drawings, and paintings. The native languages were reduced to writing, and in a few years Indians were learning to read and write. Pedro de Gante, a Flemish lay brother, and a relative of Charles V, founded and conducted in the Indian quarter in Mexico a great school, attended by over a thousand Indian boys, which combined instruction in elementary and higher branches, the mechanical and fine arts. In its workshops the boys were taught to be tailors, carpenters, blacksmiths, shoemakers, and painters."
Sir Sidney Lee, the editor of the "National Dictionary of Biography of England," and the author of a series of works on Shakespeare, which has gained for him recognition as probably the best living authority on the history of the Elizabethan times, without deliberate intent, answered Draper almost directly, in the following paragraphs from his work, "The Call of The West," which appeared originally in Scribner's Magazine, but has since been published in book form. Since Mr. Lee cannot be suspected of national or creed affinities with the Spaniards, and his knowledge of the subject is unquestionable, his direct contradictions of Draper are all the more weighty:
"Especially has theological bias justified neglect or facilitated misconception of Spain's role in the sixteenth century drama of American history. Spain's initial adventures in the New World are often consciously or unconsciously overlooked or underrated, in order that she may figure on the stage of history as the benighted champion of a false and obsolete faith, which was vanquished under a divine protecting Providence by English defenders of the true religion. Many are the hostile critics who have painted sixteenth century Spain as the avaricious accumulator of American gold and silver, to which she had no right, as the monopolist of American trade, of which she robbed others, and as the oppressor and exterminator of the weak and innocent aborigines of the new continent, who deplored her presence among [{515}] them. Cruelty in all its hideous forms is, indeed, commonly set forth as Spain's only instrument of rule in her sixteenth century empire. On the other hand, the English adventurer has been credited by the same pens with a touching humanity, with the purest religious aspirations, with a romantic courage which was always at the disposal of the oppressed native.
"No such picture is recognized when we apply the touchstone of the oral traditions, printed books, maps, and manuscripts concerning America which circulated in Shakespeare's England. There a predilection for romantic adventure is found to sway the Spaniards in even greater degree than it swayed the Elizabethan Englishman. Religious zeal is seen to inspirit the Spaniards more constantly and conspicuously than it stimulated his English contemporary. The motives of each nation are barely distinguishable one from another. Neither deserves to be credited with any monopoly of virtue or vice. Above all, the study of contemporary authorities brings into a dazzling light, which illumes every corner of the picture, the commanding facts of the Spaniard's priority as explorer, as scientific navigator, as conqueror, as settler."
When an Englishman will admit this much in a comparison of his own countrymen with the Spaniards, it is easy to understand how great must be the actual historical contrast between the settlers of Spanish and English America.
Professor Draper's philosophy of history is, indeed, something to make one pause. He says on page 291, "The result of the Crusades had shaken the faith of all Christendom." As a matter of easily ascertainable history, the faith of Christendom was never so strong as during the century immediately following the Crusades. This was the thirteenth century, with the glorious Gothic cathedrals; the great Latin hymns; the magnificent musical development; the wondrous tribute of painting to religion, from Cimabue and Duccio to Giotto and Orcagna, and of sculpture from the Pisani to the great designers of some of the doors of the baptistry of Florence, of the finest arts and crafts in gold and silver, in woodwork, in needle-work, in illuminated books--all precious tributes to religious belief. In the hundred years after the Crusades, the Popes secured a position of influence in Europe greater than they had ever had before or have ever enjoyed since, which they used to secure the foundation of hospitals everywhere throughout Europe, the establishment of universities, the organization of religious orders for teaching and nursing purposes, and the finest development of social life and social happiness that the world had ever known.
According to Professor Draper, the removal of the Papal Court to Avignon in France gave opportunity for "the memorable intellectual movement that soon manifested itself in the great commercial [{516}] cities of Upper Italy." For him the earlier Renaissance begins with the fourteenth century, the thirteenth is entirely neglected, and a period that is really one of decadence is proclaimed a triumphant era of progress, because forsooth the removal from Rome of the Papacy and the abandonment by some of Christianity itself, gives him an opportunity to explain, thus from his prejudiced point of view, how the first stirrings of the Renaissance began. Verily indeed Professor Draper has written a joke book of history. Everything is along the same line. It is very rare, indeed, that by some chance he states a genuine historical truth, and when he does he usually disfigures it in some way or other. For him the Moors are the source of chivalry, of respect for women(!), and of the noble sentiment of personal honor. Everything else that is of any value in Christendom, must be referred to some source not Christian, lest by any chance religion should seem to have done any good in the world. And let us not forget that this book was taken seriously, and not by the ignorant, but by university men, college graduates, professors, and teachers in many parts of the country.
Above all Professor Draper can scarcely be too bitter in his denunciation of the way that the poor were imposed upon, their ignorance encouraged, their rights refused, and all opportunities denied them. All this was due, according to Professor Draper, to the tyranny of the Church. President Woodrow Wilson, after making a special study of that subject, suggested in a passage in his book, which may be found in "The New Freedom," exactly the opposite of this. He knew something of the subject. Professor Draper was quite sure that he knew all about it, and that no good could have possibly come out of the Church. President Wilson's expressions are interesting to those who do not know them:
"The only reason why government did not suffer dry rot in the Middle Ages under the aristocratic systems which then prevailed, was that the men who were efficient instruments of government were drawn from the Church--from that great Church, that body we now distinguish from other Church bodies as the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church then, as now, was a great democracy. There was no peasant so humble that he might not become a priest, and no priest so obscure that he might not become a Pope of Christendom, and every chancellory in Europe was ruled by those learned, trained and accomplished men--the priesthood of that great and then dominant Church; and so, what kept government alive in the Middle Ages was this constant rise of the sap from the bottom, from the rank and file of the great body of the people through the open channels of the Roman Catholic priesthood."
The greatest surprise is to be found in Professor Draper's ignorance of the history of his own profession. He says, "It had always been the policy of the Church to discourage the physician and his art; he interfered too much with the gifts and profits of the shrines." Professor Draper apparently knew nothing of the magnificent medical schools attached to the universities in the medieval period, whose professors wrote great medical and surgical text-books, which have come down to us, and whose faculties required a far higher standard of medical education than was demanded in America in Professor Draper's own day. For about 1871 anyone who wished might enter an American medical school practically anywhere in the country, without any preliminary education, and having taken two terms of ungraded lectures, that is, having listened to the same set of lectures two years in succession, might receive his degree of doctor of medicine. In the Middle Ages he could enter the medical school only after having completed three years of preliminary work in the undergraduate department, and then he was required to give four years to the study of medicine, and spend a year as assistant with another physician before he was allowed to practise for himself. This is the standard to which our university medical schools gradually climbed back at the beginning of the twentieth century--a full generation after Draper's time.
We know now that in those earlier centuries they had thorough clinical teaching in the hospitals, that is, physicians learned to practise medicine at the bedside of the patient, and not merely out of books and by theoretic lectures. Clinical teaching had not developed in Professor Draper's day to any extent. The medieval hospitals had trained nurses and magnificent quarters, while the trained nurse was only introduced into America in 1871, and our hospitals at that time were almost without exception a disgrace to civilization, according to our present standards of hospital construction. Our surgery was most discouraging, because there were so many deaths in the unclean hospital conditions. The medieval hospital surgeons operating under anesthesia, boasted of getting union by first intention, and were in many ways doing better work than their colleagues of 1870, Professor Draper's own time, before Lister's great discovery. Of all this Professor Draper had no inkling.
Draper's position is very like that of the specialist at all times. Dean West of Princeton once said, I believe, that a specialist is a man who knows so much more about one thing than he knows about anything else that he is inclined to think that he knows more about that than anyone else does. To which I once ventured [{518}] to add that the specialist is also a man who thinks because of his recognized attainments in one line, that if, for any reason, he should pay any serious attention to any other subject he would know more about that than anyone else does. Draper's views on universal history correspond exactly to such a definition. He jumped to conclusions in a way that he would surely have resented most bitterly and quite properly in anyone who attempted after slight acquaintance with his own department of science to express ultimate conclusions with regard to it, but he himself with the most scanty information gleaned only for the purpose of confirming some preconceived ideas, gathered entirely from secondary authorities without even an attempt to confirm his views by consultation of original documents, proceeded to tell the world just what it ought to think about questions of all kinds that have sometimes occupied historians for centuries and are by no means clear even yet.
Above all, he failed to realize the relations of whatever knowledge he had to the other facts of history. Deeply interested in science himself to the exclusion of nearly everything else, he could not understand how any generation and scarcely how any individual could live a deeply intellectual life without an absorbing interest in physical science. He seems to have had no conception of the fact that physical science is only a passing phase of man's interest, and that interests in philosophy, in art, in poetry, in literature are not only quite equal to science as a mental discipline, but must probably be considered to surpass it. Nothing can be so narrow as physical science pursued alone,--as Draper himself furnishes the best possible proof, but of this he seems to have had no hint. Fortunately humanity has drawn away from that exaggerated idea of the value of physical science as ultimate truth and we are able to judge a little more dispassionately.
Professor Draper's prestige, and the fact that his book was published in the International Scientific Series, led a great many people to read it, and it found its way into many of the public libraries of the country, on whose shelves it may still be found. Many of its readers thought it could never be effectively answered. Scientists were affected by it, or at least those interested in science, and it represented one phase of that pronounced opposition to religion which characterized what has been so well called the "silly seventies."
And if the seriously educated were willing to accept the ignorant and prejudiced views of Professor Draper, what was to be expected of the general reader? What has helped the position of the Church [{519}] in this country during the past generations is knowledge, and ever more knowledge. When those who are not of the fold know even a little of the history of the Church, know a reasonable amount of the other side of controversial problems, and, above all, when they have been brought into personal touch with the Church itself, her pastors and the hierarchy and religious men and women, prejudice disappears and understanding grows. We still have the monks and nuns of the olden time with us, but no one who knows them personally ever thinks for a moment of lazy monks and idle nuns. After a man has met scholarly Catholic clergymen, he has quite a different view of the relations of the Church to education. That is all that the Church has ever needed--to be known in order to be appreciated. Nothing emphasizes this so much as the change that has come over the opinions of those outside the Church as a result of growth in knowledge of the Church and her institutions during the generation that separates us from the writing of Professor Draper's book.