Among the many vegetable products which America introduced to Europe were maize, potatoes, chocolate, tobacco, ipecacuanha, and Peruvian bark, from which we obtain quinine. The discovery of this valuable medicine was due to the Jesuit missionaries. The second wife of the viceroy, the Count of Chinchon, accompanied him to Peru. In 1628 she was attacked by a tertian fever. Her physician was unable to cure her. At about the same time an Indian of Uritusinga, near Loxa, in the government of Quito, had given some fever-curing bark to a Jesuit missionary. He sent some of it to Torres Vasquez, who was rector of the Jesuit College at Lima and confessor to the viceroy. Torres Vasquez cured the vice-queen by administering doses of the bark.... The remedy was long known as Countess’s Bark and Jesuit’s Bark, and Linnæus gave the name Chinchona [after the viceroy Chinchon] to the genus of plants which produces it.... Various species of this precious tree are found throughout the eastern cordillera of the Andes for a distance of 2,000 miles. We owe guaiacum, sarsaparilla, sassafras, logwood, jalap, seneka, serpentaria, and many other valuable drugs to the same part of the world.
Frezier, in his voyage to the South Sea and along the coasts of Chili and Peru in the years 1712, 1713, and 1714, says concerning Lima: “There is an herb called Carapullo, which grows like a tuft of grass, and yields an ear, the decoction of which makes such as drink it delirious for some days. The Indians make use of it to discover the natural disposition of their children. All the time when it has its operation, they place by them the tools of all such trades as they may follow—as by a maiden, a spindle, wool, scissors, cloth, kitchen furniture, etc.; and by a youth, accoutrements for a horse, awls, hammers, etc.; and that tool they take most fancy to in their delirium, is a certain indication of the trade they are fittest for, as I was assured by a French surgeon, who was an eye-witness to this verity.”
BOOK V.
THE DAWN OF MODERN SCIENTIFIC MEDICINE.
CHAPTER I.
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
The Dawn of Modern Science.—The Reformation of Medicine.—Paracelsus—The Sceptics.—The Protestantism of Science.—Influenza.—Legal Recognition of Medicine in England.—The Barber-Surgeons.—The Sweating Sickness.—Origin of the Royal College of Physicians of London.—“Merry Andrew.”—Origin of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital.—Caius.—Low State of Midwifery.—The Great Continental Anatomists.—Vesalius.—Servetus.—Paré.—Influence of the Reformation.—The Rosicrucians.—Touching for the Evil.—Vivisection of Human Beings.—Origin of Legal Medicine.
The discovery of America in 1492 fitly typifies the still grander mental world about to disclose its wonders to the newly liberated minds of scientific investigators. The revolt against authority in religion was paralleled by a scientific Protestantism; the mind of man, long held in bondage to absurd and groundless fancies, struggled to set itself free, to investigate, to test and explore on its account, instead of accepting for granted doctrines elaborated in the philosopher’s brains.
The revolt of medicine against the authority of Galen may be compared to the revolt against Aristotle in philosophy. The authority of the Arabian schools was overthrown, the principles of Hippocrates were in the ascendant. The era of the Renaissance was not more an era of Protestantism than an age of Scepticism. Faith had become credulity, and credulity had sunk into imbecility. The power of the printing press, the spread of humanism, the beginning of scientific inquiry, the discovery of the splendid treasure of classic literature, long buried beneath the dust of dark and barbarous ages, the widening of the mental horizon as the world doubled itself before the prows of the discoverers’ vessels—all these factors brought about the new birth of Science. It was the golden age of the medical sciences. Anatomy and surgery awoke, from their long slumber, and Europe entered upon a period of scientific investigation such as the world had never known before. Medicine formed an alliance with what are called its accessory sciences; chemistry liberated from slavery to the alchemist, botany set free from the delusions of the doctrine of “signatures,” pharmacy elevated into a branch of medical science from the kitchen and the confectioner’s store-room, lent their aid, in conjunction with the hydraulics and pneumatics of the natural philosopher, to advance it. All these things meant revolt against the old order, Protestantism against the outworn creeds of Greek and Arabian dogmatists. They meant more than this. Ere the ground could be cleared for the new palace of physical science which the glorious sixteenth century was to rear, scepticism must lend its withering and desolating aid; foul undergrowths must be destroyed; evil germs, bred of the stagnant marshes of the dark ages, must perish under the wholesome, if ruthless, disinfectants of reason and unbelief. There was a stern need of this. The demon theory of disease had lasted from primeval ages up to this dawn of the sixteenth century. From glacial times, through savage ages and religions, and often in beautifully poetic faiths, the disease-demon held its own. Even in the hallowed and renovating pages of the gospels the disease-demon stalks unchallenged save by the thaumaturgist. Now he is to be banished from the mind of civilized man for ever; and to reach this goal atheism was needed. The sixteenth century, so far as medicine and physical science are concerned, opens with the Cabalist Theosophists, Trithemius, Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan, and their followers. Giordano Bruno, the aggressive atheist and martyr of science, Montaigne, the philosophic sceptic, Charron, the opponent of all religion, and Rabelais, the witty scoffer at the gross corruptions of orthodoxy, helped to clear the ground for the work of the scientists. Meanwhile Paracelsus, from his chair at Basel University, having made an auto-da-fe of ancient and dogmatic medicine, lays the foundation-stone of the medicine of the modern era.
An army of savants begins to work for science as well as literature. Linacre has introduced Italian Humanism to the doctors of England; Caius busies himself with the Greek and Latin texts of the great writers on medicine; Gesner, the German Pliny, and Aldrovandi promote the study of natural history. Everywhere men are busy with the beginnings of electricity, chemistry, mineralogy, botany, and the other sciences which are to be the handmaidens of medicine. One clear voice is heard from Basel. It is that of Paracelsus, exhuming physical science: “You Italy, you Dalmatia, you Sarmatia, Athens, Greece, Arabia, and Israel, follow me. Come out of the night of the mind!”