Thomas Goulston, M.D. (died 1632), was a distinguished London physician, who was not less famous for his classic learning and theology than for the practice of his profession. He founded what are known as the Goulstonian lectures, which are delivered by one of the four youngest doctors of the Royal College of Physicians, London. “A dead body was, if possible, to be procured, and two or more diseases treated of.”
Thomas Winston, M.D. (born 1575), was professor of physic in Gresham College. His lectures included “an entire body of anatomy,” and were considered, when published, as the most complete and accurate then extant in English.
The Anatomy Lecture at Oxford was first proposed to the University on Nov. 17th, 1623, with an endowment of £25 a year stipend. Out of this the reader had “to pay yearly to a skilful Chirurgeon or Dissector of the body, to be named by the said reader, the sums of and £3 and £2 more by the year towards the ordering and burying of the body.”[883] Dr. Clayton, the King’s Professor of Physic, was the first reader, and the first chirurgeon was Bernard Wright.[884]
Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608-1679), the founder of the Mathematical School of Medicine, which attempted to subject to calculation the phenomena of the living economy, was professor of medicine at Florence. He restricted the application of his system chiefly to muscular motions, or to those which are evidently of a mechanical character. Physiology is exceedingly indebted to this school for many valuable suggestions, and Boerhaave distinctly acknowledged them in his Institutions.[885]
George Joyliffe, M.D. (died 1658), was partly concerned in the discovery of the lymphatics. It is not possible to say precisely to whom the discovery of the lymphatics was due; they seem to have been observed independently about the year 1651 to 1652 by Rudbeck a Swede, by Bartholine a Dane, and by Joyliffe.[886]
A new era in medicine was inaugurated by Thomas Sydenham, M.D. (1624-1689), “the British Hippocrates,” whose only standard was observation and experience, and whose faith in the healing power of nature was unlimited. He studied at Oxford, but he graduated at Cambridge. He was the friend of Locke and of Robert Boyle. He was looked upon by the faculty with disfavour as an innovator, because, in his own words to Boyle, he endeavoured to reduce practice to a greater easiness and plainness. His fame as the father of English medicine was posthumous. It was indeed acknowledged in his lifetime that he rendered good service to medicine by his “expectant” treatment of small-pox, by his invention of his laudanum (the first form of a tincture of opium such as we have it), and for his advocacy of the use of Peruvian bark in agues. Yet his professional brethren were inclined to look upon him as a sectary, and considerable opposition was manifested towards him. Arbuthnot, in 1727, styled him “Æmulus Hippocrates.” Boerhaave referred to him as “Angliæ lumen, artis Phœbum, veram Hippocratici viri speciem.” He did the best he could to cure his patients without mystery and resort to the traditional and often ridiculous dogmas of the medical craft. Many good stories are extant which illustrate this fact. He was once called to prescribe for a gentleman who had been subjected to the lowering treatment so much in vogue in those days. He found him pitifully depressed. Sydenham “conceived that this was occasioned partly by his long illness, partly by the previous evacuations, and partly by emptiness. I therefore ordered him a roast chicken and a pint of canary.” When Blackmore first engaged in the study of medicine, he asked Dr. Sydenham what authors he should read, and was told to study Don Quixote, “which,” he said, “is a very good book; I read it still.” He used to say that there were cases in his practice where “I have consulted my patients’ safety and my own reputation most effectually by doing nothing at all.”
Sydenham, having long attended a rich man for an illness which had arisen and was kept going chiefly by his own indolence and luxurious habits, at last told him that he could do no more for him, but that there lived at Inverness a certain physician, named Robinson, who would doubtless be able to cure him. Provided with a letter of introduction and a complete history of the “case,” the invalid set out on the long journey to Inverness. Arrived at his destination, full of hope and eager expectation of a cure, he inquired diligently for Dr. Robinson, only to learn that there was no such doctor there, neither had there been in the memory of the oldest inhabitant. The gentleman returned to London full of indignation against Sydenham, whom he violently rated for sending him so far on a fool’s errand. “But,” exclaimed Sydenham, “you are in much better health!” “Yes,” replied the patient, “I am now well enough, but no thanks to you.” “No,” answered Sydenham; “it was Dr. Robinson who cured you. I wished to send you a journey with some object and interest in view; in going, you had Dr. Robinson and his wonderful cures in contemplation; and in returning, you were equally engaged in thinking of scolding me.”
The Civil War, which violently upset the speculations and research at Oxford, when, as Antony Wood says, the University was “empty as to scholars, but pretty well replenished with Parliamentary soldiers,” afforded just that stimulus to thought and that upheaval of dogma and prejudice which were eminently favourable to the advance of medical science. Men had learned to treat old doctrines with little respect for their mere antiquity; authority was discredited, it was subjected to test, observation and criticism; men no longer believed those doctrines about God and His counsels which the Fathers and the Church taught them about religion, much less were they inclined to bow to Aristotle and Galen when they dictated to them on medicine. Anciently, when bitten by a mad dog, it was enough for them to believe with the fathers of medicine that it was sufficient for the patient to hold some herb dittany in the left hand, while he scratched his back with the other to ensure his future safety. Men took to thinking for themselves; the spirit of investigation was aroused; men’s minds, in every condition of society, in every town and village, were aroused to activity. There probably never was a time when there was more activity of thought in Oxford than at this period. The stimulus of collision evoked many sparks of genius, and the Civil War produced at our Universities wholesome disturbance, not destruction of any good things. Sydenham, therefore, was distinctly the product of his age. He does not seem to have been a very learned man, neither, on the other hand, was he wholly untaught. There are not many evidences in his works of very wide reading of medical literature, though he was a sincere admirer of Hippocrates, evidently from a sound acquaintance with his works. Sydenham’s first medical work was published in 1666. It consisted of accounts of continued fevers, symptoms of the same, of intermittent fevers and small-pox, and was entitled Methodus Curandi Febres, Propriis observationibus superstructa. In it the author maintains that “a fever is Nature’s engine which she brings into the field to remove her enemy, or her handmaid, either for evacuating the impurities of the blood, or for reducing it into a new state. Secondly, that the true and genuine cure of this sickness consists in such a tempering of the commotion of the blood, that it may neither exceed nor be too languid.”[887]
It was about this period that Peruvian bark was first introduced into European medicine. Perhaps no other drug has ever been so widely and deservedly used as this American remedy for fevers, agues, and debility. The earliest authenticated account of the use of Cinchona bark in medicine is found in 1638, when the Countess of Cinchon, the wife of the Governor of Peru, was cured of fever by its administration. The Jesuit missionaries are said to have sent accounts of its virtues to Europe, in consequence of one of their brethren having been cured of fever by taking it at the suggestion of a South American Indian.
The University of Montpellier, at the time of our great Civil War, was much derided by the Paris Faculty for its laxity in granting degrees in medicine. The enemies of Montpellier said that a three-months’ residence, and the keeping of an act and opponency, sufficed to make a man a Bachelor of Medicine. The professors were accused of neglecting their lectures and selling their degrees; but, worse than all, it was alleged that blood-letting and purging had fallen into disuse, and that the Montpellier treatment was “more expectant than heroic, and more tonic than evacuant.”[888] Friendly historians, on the other hand, say that at this period the medicinal uses of calomel and antimony were better taught there than elsewhere; that museums, libraries, and good clinical teaching flourished, so as to afford the student excellent means of acquiring a sound knowledge of his profession.[889]