Lastly, there was no rational or logical connection between the disease to be cured and the remedy with which it was treated. Empiricism and superstition to a serious extent dominated medicine, and retarded its progress.
Yet, even during the seventeenth century, original thinkers and men of genius connected with one or other of the universities, struck out a path for themselves which led to brighter things. First was Harvey, then came Wharton, Glisson, Willis, Lower, Mayow, Grew, Charleton, Collins, Sydenham, Morton, Bennet, and Ridley; all these men were students of anatomy and ardent investigators in the field of physiology. It is true that it was long before the labours of these pioneers of scientific medicine resulted in any marked improvement in the actual method of treating disease; it is no less certain that our methods of to-day are based upon the labours of the great scientific investigators of the age we are considering.
Samuel Collins, M.D. (died 1710), was celebrated as an accomplished comparative anatomist, whose work was much praised by Boerhaave and Haller.
William Croone, M.D. (died 1684), was one of the original Fellows of the Royal Society. In 1670 he was appointed lecturer on anatomy at Surgeons’ Hall. He is gratefully remembered as the founder of what is now called the “Croonian Lecture.”
Richard Lower, M.D. (1631-1691), was an anatomist and physiologist, who assisted Willis in his researches, and who wrote a treatise on transfusion of blood, which he practised at Oxford in 1665, and also before the Royal Society. His name is kept in remembrance by anatomists by its association with the study of the heart in the structure known as the “tuberculum Lowerii.”
We must not omit to mention Frère Jacques, who went to Paris in 1697; he was a Franciscan monk, who was a famous operator for the stone. Originally a day labourer, he became so expert a lithotomist that he is said to have cut nearly 5,000 persons in the course of his life. In the height of his success he had no knowledge of anatomy, though he was afterwards induced to learn it. He is for ever celebrated as the inventor of the lateral method in lithotomy.[907]
CHAPTER III.
SKATOLOGICAL MEDICINE AND THE REFORM OF PHARMACOLOGY.
Loathsome Medicines.—Sympathetical Cures.—Weapon-Salve.—Superstitions.
Notwithstanding all the splendid scientific work of the period, the absurdest superstitions about amulets and charms still held their ground. Sir John Harrington, in his Schoole of Salerne, printed in 1624, says: “Alwaies in your hands use eyther Corall or yellow Amber, or a chalcedonium, or a sweet Pommander, or some like precious stone to be worne in a ring upon the little finger of the left hand; have in your rings eyther a Smaragd, a Saphire, or a Draconites, which you shall beare for an ornament; for in stones, as also in hearbes, there is great efficacie and vertue, but they are not altogether perceived by us; hold sometime in your mouth eyther a Hyacinth, or a Crystall, or a Granat, or pure Gold, or Silver, or else sometimes pure Sugar-candy. For Aristotle doth affirme, and so doth Albertus Magnus, that a Smaragd worne about the necke, is good against the Falling-sicknes; for surely the virtue of an hearbe is great, but much more the vertue of a precious stone, which is very likely that they are endued with occult and hidden vertues.”