THE INFLUENCE OF THE OCCULT SCIENCES ON THE MEDICINE OF THIS PERIOD.
Most of the partisans of occult science were restless minds, such as are found in all ages, who chafed under the yoke of authority, and who practiced as well as deduced their lines of thought and conduct in accordance with their own ideas. Some of these men did not lack in sagacity, imagination, or audacity, but almost all of them lacked in consistency of idea and dignity of thought. Most of them lived isolated lives, apart from each other and from the rest of the world, and were, to a large extent, what we would now regard as "cranks." While they made a wide departure from accredited doctrine, they depended upon imagination rather than upon reason. This happened to be a period, however, when such men achieved great notoriety,—more so than the same class of individuals have done since their time.
Cornelius Agrippa (born in 1486) was an early promoter of occult science. He came of a noble family of Cologne, received the best éducation of his time, was a man of varied attainments, great inconsistency in conduct, and a caustic humor which everywhere made him enemies and prevented him from having any settled abode. He wandered from place to place, sometimes honored with the favor of the nobility and sometimes plunged into extreme misery. He early became a secretary in the court of Emperor Maximilian I, and under that monarch distinguished himself in the army by such bravery as to win him spurs as a knight. Soon disgusted with the profession of arms, he devoted himself to law and medicine, but his intemperate pen soon drew him into quarrels and persecution. At Dole he fell out with the monks; at Paris and Turin he compromised himself with the theologians; at Metz he incurred the animosity of the Jacobins for attacking the prevailing opinion that St. Ann had three husbands. He became a vagabond and almost a beggar in Germany, England, and Switzerland, and then went to Lyons, where the mother of Francis I, who was then Queen Regent, made him her physician. He soon lost favor here, and was disgraced and banished; then he went to the Low Countries, where he was imprisoned on account of his treatise on The Vanity of the Sciences. Afterward he returned to Lyons, was imprisoned anew, for an old libel against his former patron, and finally died in the hospital of Grenoble, in 1535, at the age of about fifty. His treatise on The Vanity of the Sciences made him most trouble, and showed best both his bitterness of spirit and the extent of his learning. Herein he laid down the paradox, which was later renewed and sustained by Rousseau, that there is nothing more pernicious and injurious to common life, or more pestilential to the salvation of souls, than the arts and sciences. He founded this thesis on Scriptural authority, and supported it by profane testimony.
The conclusions which Agrippa drew were not so strange to the eyes of his contemporaries as they are to ours. Long before him, men of character and attainments, such as Pic de la Mirandola and Bessarion, had attempted to introduce the Platonic idea, that the best means of acquiring science and truth were introspective. They were, moreover, persuaded that a great number of phenomena and events have their origin in astral influences. From this system to the extravagance of the Cabal * is but a step; indeed, the Christian doctrine, that events and phenomena are influenced by the direct intervention of the deity or of the devil, is but a small transposition. The cabalistic theory, summed up, was that all the events of life and all the phenomena of nature proceed from influences which gods, devils, or the stars exercised on the "archetype"'—that is, on the essential spirit, or substance. He who could withdraw his spirit possessed supernatural faculties. The day and the hour of birth, according to this view, were under the domination of particular stars and each of the principal members of the body was supposed to correspond with some planet or constellation. This is the fundamental idea underlying the pictures—which are still to be found on almanacs used by quack-medicine firms—of the individual whose interior is so completely and uncomfortably exposed, while around him are arranged the signs of the zodiac, with indications as to which part of the body is governed by each.
* Cabal, or Kabbalah: A theosophieal or mystic speculative
system, of Hebrew origin, which flourished from the tenth to
the sixteenth century. It included a mystic theosophy and
cosmogony, attributing to deity neither will, desire, nor
action, but teaching that from it emanated wisdom, grace,
intellect, power, beauty, firmness, and other attributes. It
also ascribed hidden meanings to the sacred Hebrew writings
and words. Even in the letters and forms of the sacred words
the followers of the cabal pretended to find wonderful and
hidden meanings; hence the modern expression "cabalistic."
The teachings of the cabal were esoteric, of course, and
inculcated mysticism and occultism in everything, but
appear to have been more or less influenced by neoplatonism.
Occult philosophy, built upon this foundation, was divided into four branches: theosophy, to which a man raised himself by prayer; magic, or the art of controlling demons; astrology, or the art of reading future events by the stars; and alchemy, which teaches the secret of extracting the essence or the archetype of substances,—i.e., virtually the secret of the philosopher's stone, by which metals were to be transmuted and then abolished.
And so the errors of science, the prejudices of the superstitious, the excitement of the religious, and the cupidity of the rich and powerful, all concurred to propagate the faults of the cabal at the close of the Middle Ages. Never were there seen so many sorcerers, astrol-ogists, and alchemists; never were prophecies, visions, and prodigies so common. Whatever happened, it was pretended that it had been announced by some previous sign, or that it was a revelation of the future. This particular kind of folly persisted in Germany longer than in any other part of the world. Even Martin Luther seemed to share many of the cabalistic views, and his alleged struggle with the devil, his adventure with the inkstand, and so on, contributed much to spread them, and were, perhaps, the most prominent illustrations of their general acceptance. Surely, these were the Dark Ages.
Jerome Cardan was born at Pavia in 1501. His life, like that of Agrippa, was one of vicissitude and inconsistency. Being the idol of his mother and the detestation of his father produced a peculiar effect upon his character. When he began to study he made rapid progress, and at the age of twenty-two was able to discuss publicly all questions. About two years later he received his doctor's hat. He practiced medicine in various places until he was thirty-three, and was then made professor of mathematics at Milan. He occupied this position but two years, then traveled in Germany, France, and England, and returning to Italy was imprisoned for debt in Bologna, and finally obtained a pension from the pope, in Rome, where he died in 1556. He was a man of great attainments and sagacity; his literary style was dignified, and, if he had not developed such a taste for the marvelous, such inconceivable credulity and superstition, and such vanity and boasting, he would have been a remarkable character in his age. Leibnitz said of him: "Notwithstanding his faults, Cardan was a great man and, without his defects, would have been incomparable." He wrote extensively on philosophy, mathematics, and medicine. Sometimes he admitted to his writings the most absurd statements of visions, etc., and again affirmed that he had never devoted himself to cabalistic art, blamed those who practiced it, and jeered at those who believed in it. He wrote extensively on chiromancy. For his own follies and misfortunes he apologized, attributing them all to the influences of the stars.
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The most colossal figure in this collection of mediaeval charlatans and knaves was Paracelsus. He was born in 1493, near Zurich, of a well-to-do family, his father being a physician. He had a good preliminary education, and then visited the various universities, or rather university towns; but, instead of listening to the professors, Paracelsus associated with clever women, barbers, magicians, alchemists, and the like, from whom he acquired much information. He was led at once to the vagaries of the cabal, and, according to his own statement, he did not open a book for ten years. He neglected his studies and forgot his Latin, so that he became incapable of expressing himself in that language. From the age of twenty-five he became a hard drinker, and this habit ultimately worked his ruin. One of his disciples says of him that during the two years which he passed with him he was so inclined to drinking and debauchery that he could scarcely be seen for an hour or two without being full of wine, although that condition did not prevent him from being admired by every one as a second Æsculapius.
At this time Paracelsus was between thirty-three and thirty-five years of age, and at, apparently, the most brilliant period of his life. He had written extensively and with emphasis of his numerous cures, after the fashion of charlatans of those days,—and, unfortunately, of to-day,—and claimed to be possessed of infallible secrets against the most intractable diseases. He had just been called to Basel to the chair of physic and surgery, and crowds of curious and idle persons attended his lectures, which he gave in the vernacular, and not, as was customary in those days, in Latin. In order to strike his auditors with astonishment, he began by burning the works of Galen and Avicenna, and then reading from his own writings, breaking off from time to time into the statement: "Know, ye doctors, that my hat knows more than you; that my beard is more experienced than your academies. Greeks, Latins, Arabians, French, Italians, Jews, Christians, and Mohammedans, you must follow me; I shall not follow you, for I am your monarch, and sovereignty belongs to me." As may be imagined, his professorship was not one of long duration, and he soon had few or no listeners. In consequence of some mishaps he left Basel quite precipitately, his departure causing no such sensation as his arrival. He then resumed his nomadic life, and we find him at Alsace in 1528, at Nuremberg in 1529, at St. Galle in 1531, at Mindelheim in 1540, and in the following year at Salzburg, where he died in the hospital at the age of forty-eight.
Few men there are of whom so much good and so much evil has been written as of Paracelsus. Few are there of whom it is to-day so hard to judge, since, if we refer to his contemporaries, they disagree completely concerning him, and if we refer to his own writings we fall into still greater chaos and have to abandon the attempt. His writings show ideas without connection, observations which contradict each other, and phrases which defy comprehension. At one moment he gives proof of admirable penetration, at the next simply abject nonsense.
That he exerted an influence upon his time is certain, but that this influence was retrograde rather than progressive seems quite likely. His exact duplicate has probably never existed since his time, and we may say that never was there another man like Aurelius Phillip-pus Theophrastus Paracelsus Bombastus ab Hohenheim—his full name.
Although this man was such a prominent character in his day, his name must be erased from the list of those who have contributed to the world's progress. He was simply a pretended reformer, who counted as nothing the most erudite writings, and who relied solely on his own experience. He had the most profound self-confidence, and played upon the credulity of his neighbors and victims with the toys which were furnished him by the prevalent cabalistic notions of the day. The school which he would have founded was nothing but a school of ignorance, dissipation, and boasting—a school of medical dishonesty. In a word, it was, as Renouard has said, "a school of which Thessalus, of Tralles, had been the Corypheus in antiquity, which John of Gaddesden revived in the Middle Ages, and to which Paracelsus gave a new development."
While, as has been briefly recounted, the partisans of the occult sciences strove to completely overturn the scientific edifice of antiquity, other reformers, more sensible and less daring, were content to expose its defects without attacking it in its entirety. These were, for the most part, enlightened men, and at the same time free thinkers,—friends of progress, and not of destruction. During the sixteenth century these men were few in number, but at least three or four of them deserve mention.
John Argentier was born in Piedmont, and taught in Naples, Pisa, and Turin. He did not hesitate to take issue with the theories and statements of Galen, and criticised those who adopted them too servilely. Of him it may be said that, although styled a reformer, nevertheless, he kept too near to the doctrines of those against whom he inveighed to seriously weaken their position.
Leonard Botal, also a Piedmontese, was born in 1530. First a surgeon in the French army, he later became physician to the kings Charles IX and Henri III. He was the first to recommend frequent and general bloodletting. Apparently before his time this practice was greatly restrained. He carried his views so far as to maintain that an infirm old man should be bled from two to six times a year, and that it was good custom to open the veins of healthy individuals every six months. He wrote a remarkable memoir on the cure of disease by blood-letting. It is not to be denied that he obtained some remarkable success with his copious venesections, and it must be said, in his defense, that, if he overdid it, his contemporaries did not resort to it often enough, and that his own practices were instructive to others. In his writings he united independence and energy of thought with elegance and purity of style.
Joubert (1529-1583) was Chancellor in the University of Montpellier and physician to King Henri III. He wrote a treatise on Popular Errors, which had an unheard-of success. In less than six months there were sold nearly five thousand copies, which, considering the times, constituted a prodigious edition. For one thing, it was written in the common tongue, and so placed within the reach of all. It was also diversified with anecdotes and jokes, some of which were not of the most delicate character; in fact, the author endeavored to atone for some of its salacity by dedicating it to Queen Marguerite. He really proposed for his main purpose a serious and useful one,—namely, that of combating prejudices which were both injurious and ridiculous. Although we may make light of Joubert's treatise, it certainly achieved a useful end by dissipating a multitude of errors, giving information to those who could scarcely get it as well from any other source. That it was full of defects is simply another form of saying that it was published in the middle of the sixteenth century.
It was during this period of which we have written that the separation of the priesthood from medicine was completed. From the sixteenth century celibacy was not obligatory on physicians in the Kingdom of France, and they no longer enjoyed ecclesiastical benefices. At this time, too, surgery, which had naturally been separated from medicine, began to approach it, the combination thus gradually brought about inuring to the benefit of all concerned. From now on, the professors of St. Come were on the same level as the professors of the university, and enjoyed equal privileges. Institutions for instruction in medicine increased, and those which already existed were developed. Amphitheaters for dissection were open in every city in Europe. Hospitals and dispensaries were established alongside the schools, and by the various governments more attention was paid to the protection of the public from imposition, and to the amelioration of every evil affecting either public or private health.