The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800

by Albert H. Buck

In 1638—so the story runs—the wife of Count Cinchon, Viceroy of Peru, was cured of a stubborn intermittent fever by the native physicians, who employed, in their treatment of the malady, the bark of the tree now universally known by the name of “Cinchona.” In 1640 Juan del Vego, the regular medical attendant of Count Cinchon, introduced the new remedy into Spain, but it was not until after the lapse of about fourteen years that the drug found its way into England and Central Europe. The price at which it could be purchased was at first very high; it was almost literally “worth its weight in gold.” Even as late as 1680 the bark sold in England for £8 sterling per pound. Notwithstanding the generally recognized value of the drug in the treatment of certain fevers there were not a few men who continued for many years to oppose its use. Thus, Johann Kanold, a practitioner of medicine in Breslau, Germany, is reported to have said, on his death-bed in 1729, that he would rather die than be cured by a remedy the action of which was so opposed to all the principles which he considered right in therapeutics.

Ipecacuanha, another very important drug, was added to our stock of remedial agents toward the end of the seventeenth century. It was brought into France from Brazil, in 1672, by a French physician named Le Gras, but its value as a remedy for the cure of dysentery did not begin to be appreciated until after Helvetius, a semi-quack, had sold to Louis the Fourteenth, for one thousand louis-d’or (about $4000), the formula for the preparation which he (Helvetius) had been using with great success during the recent epidemic of that disease, and which moreover had effected a remarkably rapid cure in the case of the King’s own son—the Dauphin. After the purchase had been made by Louis the Fourteenth, in the interest of the French people in general, it was ascertained that the only active reagent among the ingredients of the formula was ipecac, a drug with which the Paris physicians had long been more or less familiar. Ipecac, it will also doubtless be remembered, constitutes the important element in what is known as the East Indian treatment of dysentery.

Probably the earliest modern treatise on matters connected with pharmacy is that which bears the title “Onomasticon Latino-Germanico-Polonicum rerum ad artem pharmaceuticam pertinentium.” It was published about the year 1600, and its author was Paul Guldinus.

One of the most important iatrochemical authorities of the seventeenth century was Johann Rudolf Glauber (1604–1668), to whom we are indebted for the invention or improvement of a large number of medico-chemical products. The well-known “Glauber’s salt” may be named as one of these products, and chloride of iron as another.

CHAPTER XXXII
SOME OF THE LEADERS IN MEDICINE IN ITALY, FRANCE AND ENGLAND DURING THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES

Eminent French Physicians.—Among the physicians of France who attained a widespread and well-grounded celebrity throughout Europe during the sixteenth century, Pierre Brissot deserves to be given the first place. He was born in 1478 at Fontenay-le-Comte, not far from Rochelle, and was a professor of medicine at Paris. He attained considerable distinction, during the sixteenth century, by his advocacy of the superiority of the Hippocratic method of bloodletting over that introduced—or, rather, perpetuated—by the practitioners of that day in Central Europe. The rule which was laid down by Hippocrates was to the effect that, in venesection, the blood should be drawn from the vein lying nearest to the part inflamed. The Greek physicians of a later period forgot all about this rule and adopted in its place one that was based on the doctrine that venesection practiced in the vicinity of a focus of inflammation favors a determination of blood to that part and therefore does only harm; and they accordingly—especially in cases of pleuritis—abstracted blood from the arm on the side opposite to that on which the disease was located, or from one of the veins of the foot. This new rule was subsequently adopted by the Arabian physicians, and it remained in full force up to the end of the sixteenth century. A wide experience in the treatment of the epidemic pleuritis which raged in Paris in 1514 confirmed Brissot in the belief that the Hippocratic method is the one to be preferred; but, despite his pleadings, the Parisian physicians refused to adopt the method which he advocated and used their influence in securing from the French Parliament an order forbidding him to continue employing it in Paris. Discouraged by the treatment which he experienced in that city, Brissot removed to Lisbon in Portugal, and soon had occasion (in the epidemic which raged at Evora in 1516) further to satisfy himself that the Hippocratic rule is the correct one. But here too he encountered bitter opposition on the part of the Portuguese physicians; his most active opponent being Dionysius, the Physician-in-Ordinary to the King. Brissot then wrote an elaborate defense of the method which he advocated, and this treatise was submitted to the judgment of the Medical Faculty of the University of Salamanca. When the decision of this learned body was given in Brissot’s favor, his opponents, dissatisfied with the result, made still another effort to gain their point, viz., by appealing to the Emperor Charles the Fifth. They assured his Majesty that the Brissot Heresy, as they termed it, was fully as dangerous to the cause of humanity as that championed by Luther. But here again they failed. This final victory, however, brought no satisfaction to Brissot, who died of dysentery in 1522, just before the decision was rendered. Haeser speaks of this unusually bitter dispute as one of the last of the violent battles which occurred between the adherents of the Arabian physicians and the supporters of the teachings of Hippocrates, and which terminated in “a most brilliant victory of experience over Arabian dogmatism.”

FIG. 16. “THE LOVESICK MAIDEN.”

(After the painting by Jan Steen, 1626–1679.)

One of this famous Dutch artist’s objects, in painting the scene here represented, was to satirize the practice, which was very prevalent among certain physicians of that period, of pretending to diagnose all sorts of maladies from the mere naked-eye inspection of his patient’s urine.