Ambrose Paré wrote on monsters, simulated diseases, and the art of drawing up medico-legal reports.
In 1621-35 Paulo Zacchia, of Rome, published a work entitled Quæstiones Medico-Legales, which inaugurated a new era in the history of Forensic Medicine. He exhibited immense research in this classical work, the materials for which he collected from 460 authors. Considering that chemistry and physiology were then so imperfectly understood, such a work is a proof of the learning and sagacity of the author.
In 1663 the Danish physician Bartholin proposed the hydrostatic test for the determination of live-birth, the method used to-day in examining the lungs of an infant to discover whether the child was born alive or not, by observing whether they float or sink in water.
CHAPTER II.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
Bacon and the Inductive Method.—Descartes and Physiology.—Newton.—Boyle and the Royal Society.—The Founders of the Schools of Medical Science.—Sydenham, the English Hippocrates.—Harvey and the Rise of Physiology.—The Microscope in Medicine.—Willis and the Reform of Materia Medica.
The seventeenth century is important in the history of medicine as the era of the two greatest discoveries of modern physiology—the circulation of the blood, and the development of the higher animals from the egg (ovum). Both of these are due to Harvey, and both were made in the midst of the troubles of the great Civil War. The history of medicine is so interwoven at this important period with that of science and philosophy in general, that it is necessary to glance awhile at the great factors which were working out the advancement of medical learning.
Amongst the greatest figures on the scientific stage at the beginning and middle of the seventeenth century are the following:—
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was the great leader in the reformation of modern science, and shares with Descartes the glory of inaugurating modern philosophy. His great work, the Novum Organon, was given to the world just as authority and dogmatism had been discarded from scientific thought, and the era of experiment had begun. It was not Bacon’s contributions to science, not his discoveries, which entitle him to the highest place in the reformation of science, but the general spirit of his philosophy and his connected mode of thinking, his insistence upon the need for rejecting rash generalization, and analysing our experience, employing hypothesis, not by guess work, but by the scientific imagination which calls to its assistance experimental comparison, verification, and proof. Bacon’s philosophy of induction was reared upon a foundation of exclusion and elimination. He relegated theological questions to the region of faith, insisting that experience and observation are the only remedies against prejudice and error.[875]
The publication of Bacon’s Novum Organon in 1620 resulted in the formation of a society of learned men, who met together in London in 1645 to discuss philosophical subjects and the results of their various experiments in science. They are described as “inquisitive,” a term which aptly illustrates the temper of the times. Taking nothing upon trust, these men inquired for themselves, and left their books to make experiment, as Bacon had urged students of nature to do. About 1648-9 Drs. Wilkins, Wallis, and others removed to Oxford, and with Seth Ward, the Hon. Robert Boyle, Petty, and other men of divinity and physic, often met in the rooms of Dr. Wilkins at Wadham College, and so formed the Philosophical Society of Oxford, which existed only till 1690. About 1658 the members were dispersed, the majority coming to London and attending lectures at Gresham College. Thus, in the midst of civil war, thoughtful and inquiring minds found a refuge from the quarrels of politicians and the babel of contending parties in the pursuit of knowledge and the advancement of research. The Royal Society was organized in 1660, and on 22nd April, 1662, Charles II. constituted it a body politic and corporate. The Philosophical Transactions began 6th March, 1664-5. 1668 Newton invented his reflecting telescope, and on 28th April, 1686, presented to the Society the MS. of his Principia, which the council ordered to be printed.