The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800

by Albert H. Buck

Another celebrated character who dabbled in the black art was Johannes Faust, who was born in 1485, obtained his degree of Bachelor of Arts at the University of Heidelberg, and died in 1540 in Staufen in Breisgau. Professor Scherer of Berlin says that “he was a great braggart, never failed to create a sensation wherever he went, and had the conceit and effrontery to pass himself off as a scientist among the learned men of his day. He called himself the philosopher of philosophers, a second Magus. He maintained that he was both a physician and an astrologer, and claimed that he could restore the dead to life, and could predict future events from a mere inspection of fire, air and water.”

But although the persistent and wonderfully energetic activities of the alchemists failed to find the philosophers’ stone, or to transmute the baser metals into silver and gold, they placed in the hands of man the key to a knowledge of chemistry, that branch of science which was destined in later years to play such an important part in pharmacy, in agriculture and in other industries. Thus we owe to alchemists the discovery of many processes and the invention of many apparatus which serve as the groundwork of modern chemistry. Some of the more important of these are the following: The use of the spirit lamp; the invention of tubular retorts; the production of potash and soda by burning the hard deposit which collects in wine casks as well as various marine plants; the oxidizing of certain metals (iron, lead, copper, quicksilver and antimony); the making of metallic arsenic, of wine of antimony, of sulphate of iron, of chloride of silver, of acetic acid and of many other chemical products; the purification of metals by the use of lead, etc.

Supplementary Data Relating to Balneotherapeutics.—I have referred to this subject on several occasions in the course of the earlier chapters of this history, but always without entering very much into details. This policy was adopted, partly because the facts upon which a satisfactory sketch of the growth of balneotherapeutics might be based were not very numerous, and partly because of the necessity of gaining space for more important matters.

The principal facts to which I made reference were: First, that before the Christian era the employment of baths in a variety of different ways for therapeutic purposes was universal in the East; and, second, that in the city of Rome during the centuries immediately following the birth of Christ, facilities for this kind of treatment were provided on a most lavish scale—as in the baths of Agrippa (27 A. D.), of Titus (79 A. D.), of Caracalla (211 A. D.), and of Diocletian (302 A. D.). I may now add that the warm springs of Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), Baden-Baden and Wiesbaden, in Central Europe, and Bath, in England, were known to the ancient Romans, and were utilized by them to some extent for therapeutic purposes; but it was not until a much later period that they and the less well-known springs of Schwalbach, Driburg, Warmbrunn, Goeppingen and Gastein began to be actively frequented for remedial purposes. By the beginning of the sixteenth century it had become a very popular thing for sufferers from all sorts of ailments to resort to these and other European springs. The history of the therapeutic employment of mineral waters belongs, however, to the period of modern medicine rather than to that which I have been considering in the present volume.

PART III
MEDICINE DURING THE RENAISSANCE

CHAPTER XXVI
IMPORTANT EVENTS THAT PRECEDED THE RENAISSANCE—EARLY ATTEMPTS TO DISSECT THE HUMAN BODY

Important Events Immediately Preceding the Renaissance.—Three hundred years before the Christian era Erasistratus and Herophilus made, at Alexandria, Egypt, an attempt to develop a correct knowledge of anatomy by means of dissections of human corpses, but the political and religious conditions at that time were not favorable to scientific work, and therefore the success attained was of a very restricted character. Then, during the succeeding three or four centuries, this early movement gradually died out, and no further contributions to our knowledge of human anatomy were made until toward the end of the second century of the present era, at which time Claudius Galen, a man of giant intellect and tireless energy, did his best to supply the anatomical knowledge so urgently needed. But the deeply rooted prejudices of that age against dissections of the human body lay like an insurmountable barrier across his path and forced him to confine his efforts to the dissection of those animals whose bodily construction resembled more or less closely that of man. Galen believed that the anatomy which he thus evolved for the guidance of his professional brethren would satisfy all their legitimate wants of this nature, and he proceeded to build upon this faulty and unstable foundation an equally faulty physiology. History records the extraordinary fact that Galen’s belief in the sufficiency of his anatomy and physiology for all the reasonable needs of physicians and surgeons was so well grounded that during the following thirteen or fourteen centuries nobody dared to cast the slightest suspicion upon the trustworthiness of these foundations of the science of medicine. Then followed, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, an awakening which seemed to affect all departments of human activity. This movement, which is commonly termed the “Renaissance,” developed at first very slowly, and reached a noteworthy degree of momentum only toward the middle of the fifteenth century, about which time there occurred several events that contributed greatly to strengthen and perpetuate the movement. Such were, for example, the employment of gunpowder in the wars of Western Europe; the invention of a method of manufacturing paper—a discovery which led to the abandonment of the much more expensive parchment, and prepared the way for the invention of printing in its different forms; the taking of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453; the discovery of America in 1492; and, finally, the Reformation inaugurated by Martin Luther. Let us pass in review very briefly each of these events, in order that we may the better appreciate how the science of medicine, in the short space of time represented by a couple of centuries, made a greater advance than it had previously made in the course of several hundred years.

The employment of gunpowder in warfare robbed the knight of the protection which he had previously enjoyed from the wearing of metal armor, and thenceforward his life was as much imperiled in battle as was that of the foot-soldier, who was not permitted to protect his person in this manner. Thus were the two upper classes of the community, the nobles and the bourgeois, in any conflict which might arise between them, placed more nearly upon a footing of equality. The ultimate result showed itself in an increased importance, an increased prosperity, of the middle class or bourgeoisie, from which the physicians chiefly came. Indeed, feudalism from this time forward rapidly ceased to exist.

The discovery of paper, an excellent and relatively cheap substitute for parchment, facilitated wonderfully the spread of knowledge. Parchment, the material upon which books were written, was expensive and was at times difficult to obtain; both of which circumstances rendered books so costly that only a few physicians were able to become the owners of the important standard medical works of that period—such, for example, as the Hippocratic writings, Galen’s treatises, the surgical manuals of de Mondeville and Guy de Chauliac, the pharmacopoeia of Dioscorides, and still other books of lesser value. And, if a satisfactory method of manufacturing paper had not first been discovered, the benefits growing out of the invention of printing in 1467 would have been far less than they actually proved to be. Some idea of the magnitude of these benefits may be formed from the following statement of facts. The demand for books, after the invention of printing, became so great that the presses were kept almost constantly busy. At first, according to the record furnished by Haeser, Venice and Rome took the lead in supplying this great demand for books; the former city printing 2978 and the latter 972 volumes between the years 1467 and 1560; but, during a later period (1500–1536), Paris outstripped Venice with a total of 3056 volumes, and Strassburg advanced to the second place with a showing of 1021 volumes printed during the same period of time. Thanks to the great diminution in the market price of books that resulted from the two inventions named—the manufacture of paper and the introduction of printing—almost every physician in fairly prosperous circumstances was able at that period to purchase the relatively few medical treatises which issued from the presses; and, besides, new authors were thenceforth stimulated to put their experiences into print.

Among the very first medical books printed the following deserve to be mentioned:—