On Medicine and Anatomy.
Revival of Greek medicine. 8. The revival of classical literature had an extensive influence where we might not immediately anticipate it, on the science of medicine. Jurisprudence itself, though nominally and exclusively connected with the laws of Rome, was hardly more indebted to the restorers of ancient learning than the art of healing, which seems to own no mistress but nature, no code of laws but those which regulate the human system. But the Greeks, among their other vast superiorities above the Arabians, who borrowed so much, and so much perverted what they borrowed, were not only the real founders, but the best teachers of medicine; a science which in their hands seems, more than any other, to have anticipated the Baconian philosophy; being founded on an induction proceeding by select experience, always observant, always cautious, and ascending slowly to the generalities of theory. But instead of Hippocrates and Galen, the Arabians brought in physicians of their own, men doubtless of considerable, though inferior merit, and substituted arbitrary or empirical precepts for the enlarged philosophy of the Greeks. The scholastic subtilty also obtruded itself even into medicine; and the writings of the middle ages on these subjects are alike barbarous in style and useless in substance. Pharmacy owes much to this oriental school, but it has retained no reputation in physiological or pathological science.
Linacre and other physicians. 9. Nicolas Leonicenus, who became professor at Ferrara before 1470, was the first restorer of the Hippocratic method of practice. He lived to a very advanced age, and was the first translator of Galen from the Greek.[848] Our excellent countryman, Linacre, did almost as much for medicine. The College of Physicians, founded by Henry VIII. in 1518, venerates him as its original president. His primary object was to secure a learned profession, to rescue the art of healing from mischievous ignorance, and to guide the industrious student in the path of real knowledge, which at that time lay far more through the regions of ancient learning than at present. It was important not for the mere dignity of the profession, but for its proper ends, to encourage the cultivation of the Greek language, or to supply its want by accurate versions of the chief medical writers.[849] Linacre himself, and several eminent physicians on the continent, Cop, Ruel, Gonthier, Fuchs, by such labours in translation, restored the school of Hippocrates. That of the Arabians rapidly lost ground, though it preserved through the sixteenth century an ascendancy in Spain; and some traces of its influence, especially the precarious empiricism of judging diseases by the renal secretion, without sight of the patient, which was very general in that age, continued long afterwards in several parts of Europe.[850]
[848] Biogr. Univ. Sprengel, Hist. de la Médecine (traduit par Jourdan), vol. ii.
[849] Johnson’s Life of Linacre, p. 207, 279. Biogr. Britann.
[850] Sprengel, vol. iii. passim.
Medical innovators. 10. The study of Hippocrates taught the medical writers of this century to observe and describe like him. Their works, chiefly indeed after the period with which we are immediately concerned, are very numerous, and some of them deserve much praise, though neither the theory of the science, nor the power of judiciously observing and describing, was yet in a very advanced state. The besetting sin of all who should have laboured for truth, an undue respect for authority, made Hippocrates and Galen, especially the former, as much the idols of the medical world, as Augustin and Aristotle were of theology and metaphysics. This led to a pedantic erudition, and contempt of opposite experience, which rendered the professors of medicine an inexhaustible theme of popular ridicule. Some, however, even at an early time, broke away from the trammels of implicit obedience to the Greek masters. Fernel, one of the first physicians in France, rejecting what he could not approve in their writings, gave an example of free inquiry. Argentier of Turin tended to shake the influence of Galen by founding a school which combated many of his leading theories.[851] |Paracelsus.| But the most successful opponent of the orthodox creed was Paracelsus. Of his speculative philosophy, or rather the wild chimæras which he borrowed or devised, enough has been said in former pages. His reputation was originally founded on a supposed skill in medicine; and it is probable that, independently of his real merit in the application of chemistry to medicine, and in the employment of very powerful agents, such as antimony, the fanaticism of his pretended philosophy would exercise that potency over the bodily frame, to which disease has, in recent experience, so often yielded.[852]
[851] Sprengel, iii. 204. “Argentier,” he says, “was the first to lay down a novel and true principle, that the different faculties of the soul are not inherent in certain distinct parts of the brain.”
[852] Sprengel, vol. iii.
Anatomy. 11. The first important advances in anatomical knowledge since the time of Mundinus were made by Berenger of Carpi, in his commentary upon that author, printed at Bologna in 1521, which it was thought worth while to translate into English as late as 1664, and in his Isagogæ Breves in Anatomiam, Bologna, 1522. |Berenger.| He followed the steps of Mundinus in human dissection, and thus gained an advantage over Galen. Hence we owe to him the knowledge of several specific differences between the human structure and that of quadrupeds. Berenger is asserted to have discovered two of the small bones of the ear, though this is contested on behalf of Achillini. Portal observes, that though some have regarded Berenger as the restorer of the science of anatomy, it is hard to strip one so much superior to him as Vesalius of that honour.[853]