At last, in the year 1505, barbers were dignified with the name of surgeons. Their instructions were delivered in their vernacular tongue, until the university again interfered, and ordered that lectures should be delivered in Latin; once more closing alma-mater against illiterate shavers, who were, however, obliged to give a smattering of classical education to their sons destined to wield alternately the razor and the lancet. In 1655, surgeons and barber-surgeons were incorporated in one college; a union which was further confirmed, in 1660, by royal ordonnance, under some limitations, whereby the barbers should not assume the title of licentiates, bachelors, or professors, nor be allowed to wear the honourable gown and cap that distinguished the higher grades of learning. Red caps were in former times given by each barber to his teacher on his being qualified, and gloves to all his fellow-students.
Thus we find that the high state of perfection which the surgical art has attained is solely due to the efforts of industry to free itself from the ignoble trammels of bigotry and prejudice. Intellectual progress has invariably been opposed in every country by those powerful and interested individuals who derived their wealth and influence from the ignorance of society. Corporate bodies monopolizing the exercise of any profession will invariably retard instruction and shackle the energies of the student. It is, no doubt, indispensable that the practice of medicine in all its branches should only be allowed to such persons as are duly qualified; but whenever pecuniary advantages are derived from the grant of the permission, abuses as dishonourable as they are injurious to society will infallibly prevail. In Great Britain the period of study required in medical candidates is by no means sufficient. Five or six years is the very lowest period that should be insisted on; and, when duly instructed, degrees and licences should be conferred without fee, on all applicants, by a board of examiners unprejudiced and disinterested. This mode of granting licences would add to the respectability of the profession, while it would ensure proper attendance to the public. Physicians and surgeons would then become (what to a certain extent the latter are at present, though illegally as far as the laws of the college go), general practitioners, and society would no longer be infested by the swarms of practising apothecaries, who, from the very nature of their education, can only be skilled in making up medicines, or who must have obtained experience in the lessons taught by repeated failures in their early practice, unless perchance they have stepped beyond the usual confined instruction of their class. The consequences that arise from this fatal system are but too obvious. These men live by selling drugs, which they unmercifully supply, to the material injury of the patient’s constitution. If, after ringing all the changes of their materia medica without causing the church-bell to toll, they find themselves puzzled and bewildered, a physician or a surgeon is called in, and too frequently these practitioners are bound by tacit agreement not to diminish the revenue that the shop produces. If it were necessary to prove the evils that result from the monopolizing powers vested in corporate institutions, the proof might be sought and found in the virulence and jealousy which they evince in resisting reform, from whatever quarter it may be dreaded; and it may be said that too many of the practising apothecaries of the present day stand in the same relative situation in the medical profession as the barbers of olden times.
This faculty of exercising every branch of the profession, however qualified, is of olden date, and we find on the subject the following lines in the writings of Alcuin in the time of Charlemagne:
Accurrunt medici mox Hippocratica tecta:
Hic venas findit, herbas hic miscet in olla;
Ille coquit pultes, alter sed pocula perfert.
ON DREAMS.
Philosophical ingenuity has long been displayed in the most learned disquisitions in an endeavour to account for the nature of these phenomena. The strangeness of these visionary perturbations of our rest—their supposed influence on our destinies—their frequent verification by subsequent events—have always shed a mystic prestige around them; and superstition, ignorance, and craft, have in turns characterized them as the warnings of the Divine will, or the machinations of an evil spirit.
Macrobius divided them into various categories. The first, the mere dream, somnium, he considers a figurative and mysterious representation that requires to be interpreted. Dion Cassius gives an example of this in the case of Nero, who dreamt that he saw the chair of Jupiter pass into the palace of Vespasian, which was considered as emblematical of his translation to the empire.
The second distinction he terms a vision, visio, or a foreboding of future events. The third he deemed oracular, oraculum, and this was the case when a priest, or a relative, a deity, a hero, or some venerable person, denounced what was to happen, or warned us against it. As an example of this inspiration, for such it was considered, an anecdote of Vespasian is related. Having heard that a man in Achaia had dreamt that a person unknown to him had assured him that he should date his prosperity from the moment that Nero should lose a tooth,—a tooth just drawn from that emperor being shown to him the following day, he foresaw his destinies: soon after Nero died, Galba did not long survive him, and the discord that reigned between Otho and Vitellius ultimately placed the diadem on his brow. These inspirations were considered by Cicero, and various philosophers, as particularly appertaining to the shrine of the gods; those who sought that heavenly admonition were therefore recommended to lie down in temples. The Lacedæmonians sought slumber in the temple of Pasithea; Brizo, the goddess of sleep and dreams, was worshipped at Delos, and her votaries slept before her altars with their heads bound with laurel, and other fatidical symbols; hence divination by dreams was called Brizomantia. Supplications were offered up to Mercury for propitious visions, and a caduceus was placed for that purpose at the feet of beds; hence was it called ἑρμῖες.
Diodorus informs us that dreams were regarded in Egypt with religious reverence, and the prayers of the devout were often rewarded by the gods with an indication of appropriate remedies. But the confidence in supernatural agency and the power of magic, was only deemed a last resource, when human skill had been baffled. Some persons promised a certain sum of money for the maintenance of sacred animals, consecrated to the divinity whose aid they implored. In the case of infants, a certain portion of their hair was cut off and weighed, and when the cure was effected an equal quantity of gold was given to the successful intermediator.