[30] It is curious to trace how old are the traditions on which some of these old stories, that must now be rejected, are founded. I have come upon the story with regard to Basil Valentine and the antimony and the monks in an old French medical encyclopedia of biography, published in the seventeenth century, and at that time there was no doubt at all expressed as to its truth. How much older than this it may be I do not know, though it is probable that it comes from the sixteenth century, when the kakoëthes scribendi attacked many people because of the facility of printing, and when most of the good stories that have so worried the modern dry-as-dust historian in his researches for their correction became a part of the body of supposed historical tradition. It is probably French in origin because in that language antimoine is a tempting bait for that pseudo-philology which has so often led to false derivations.
[31] There is in the New York Academy of Medicine a thick 24mo volume in which three of the classics of older medicine are bound together. They are Kerckringius's "Commentary on the Triumphal Chariot of Antimony," published at Amsterdam, 1671; Steno's "Dissertation on the Anatomy of the Brain," published in Leyden in 1671, and Father Kircher's "Scrutinium Physico Contagiosae Luis quae dicitur Pestis" (Physico-medical Discussions of the Contagious Disease which is called Pest). This was published at Leipzig in 1659. Just how the three works came to be bound together is hard to say. Very probably they belonged to some old-time scholar, though there is nothing about the books to tell anything of the story. The fact that all three of the authors were ecclesiastics of the Catholic Church, Valentine a Monk, Steno a Bishop, and Kircher a Jesuit, would seem to be one common bond and perhaps a reason for the binding of these rather disparate treatises together. In that case it is probable that the book came from an old monastic library dispersed after the suppression of the order by some government. It seems not unlikely that the volume belonged at some time to an old Jesuit library, for they have suffered the most in that way. That these three classics of medicine should have been republished in handy volume editions within practically ten years shows an interest in medical literature that has not existed again until our own time, for during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there was almost utter neglect of them.
[32] Paper read before the first meeting of the American Guild of St. Luke.
[33] Published by Putnams, New York, 1909.
[34] Dublin, 1882.
[35] The material for this chapter was gathered for a paper read before the Medical Improvement Society of Boston in the spring of 1911. In nearly its present form it was published in The Popular Science Monthly for May, 1911, and thanks are returned to the editor of that magazine for permission to reprint it here. The additions that have been made refer particularly to the estimation of Aristotle in the Middle Ages.
[36] New York, Putnam, 1908.
[37] "De Cœlo et Mundo," 1, tr. iv., x.