"He is no true chirurgien
That cannot show by arte
The nature of every member
Each from other apart.
For in that noble handy work
There doth nothing excell
The knowledge of anatomy
If it be learned well."
In a chapter of this kind, almost needless to say, it is impossible to give any formal account of the surgery of the time. All that I have been able to do is to point out that in every country in Europe surgeons were thinking for themselves and facing most of our modern surgical problems and finding not inept solutions. There is scarcely a phase of our modern surgery from antisepsis and anaesthesia to technical details of various kinds, through plastic surgery, the use of apparatus, manipulation and many forms of instruments, which cannot be found in the surgical text-books of this time. Gurlt in his great "History of Surgery" has taken some 400 pages of a large octavo volume, with the excerpts in rather small type, to tell the story of the surgery of Columbus' Century. Helferich occupies several hundred pages of Puschmann's "Handbook of the History of Medicine" with the details of what was done by the period's surgeons. The specialties developed, and in all of them important contributions were made. The great independent, seeking temper of the era is as noteworthy in surgery as it is in every other department of intellectual effort at this time.
BOOK III
THE BOOK OF THE WORDS
CHAPTER I
LATIN LITERATURE
The Latin literature produced during Columbus' period, or at least the books written in Latin, are literally legion. There has seldom been an age of greater literary productivity, and in every department men wrote in Latin. It was the universal language of scholars. Every educated man understood it; whenever he wrote for educated men he employed it. When scholars of different languages met it was a ready resource. This custom did not begin to lose its hold until after the end of Columbus' Century, though it received a severe shock from Paracelsus' refusal to use anything but the vernacular and was given its death blow by the popularization of even theological subjects in the vernacular during the reformation movement. Latin continued for two centuries after Luther's time to be the medium of communication between scholars, but its use gradually went out in the depths of the degradation of scholarship in the eighteenth century.
There are many who apparently can see only unmixed good in the gradual supersession of Latin by the various vernacular languages, but a universal academic language had many advantages. As a rule, an educated man needed to know only one language besides his own at this time. Practical education for scientific purposes, and above all for law and medicine and philosophy and theology, was very much simplified. Now the student of science must know, as a rule, at least two languages besides his own. In recent years we have come to recognize the need of a universal language, and hence the [{428}] successive waves of interest in newly-invented languages. Latin, however, besides its practical usefulness as a common tongue, rewarded the student of it by opening up to him a precious literature which made it well worth his while to have devoted time and labor to its acquisition.
The most fertile period of modern Latin was undoubtedly the era of the Renaissance from 1450 to 1550, yet of all this Latin writing of Columbus' Century very little endures in the sense of being read for its own sake in our time. The old books have many of them gone up in value, but that is mainly because of their special significance in the history of their particular science or in the development of printing. Books like Vesalius' "Fabrica Humani Corporis" have become classics that every scholarly student of medicine must have seen, though in practical value they have been superseded by later books. Some of the philosophical and theological works of the period and a number of the mystical and spiritual works are still read for their own sake, but with certain exceptions, like Thomas à Kempis' works and others that we shall mention, these are rather curiosities that appeal to the erudition of the special student than real living books to be consulted.
An immense amount of Latin verse was written at this time. Sannazaro, one of the ablest members of the Academy of Naples, wrote a poem comparable in size to Virgil's AEneid on "The Birth of Christ." This is only one instance. There were literally hundreds of scholars at this time who thought because they could write Latin verses in which the rules of grammar and prosody were not violated, and above all if they could use the words that had been employed by their favorite Latin authors and repeat felicitously the expressions of Virgil and Horace and the classic poets generally, that they were making literature at least if not poetry. Men have always had such illusions, have always written what was only of interest for their own time and have had the pleasure and satisfaction derived from the occupation of mind and the anticipations of reputation and glory. None of this Latin poetry has survived, and indeed it is only a very rare specialist in Latin literature, and usually one who has devoted himself to Renaissance Latin, who is likely to know anything about it. Undoubtedly some [{429}] of it was eminently scholarly. There is no doubt either that not a little of it was of fair poetic quality. It was all, however, of distinctly academic character, and it has gone into the limbo of forgotten writing, which now contains such an immense amount of material.
There is probably nothing which shows so clearly that the writer, and above all the poet, is born and not made, that it is originality of thought and not mode of expression that makes for enduring literature, as the fate of so much of the product of these Renaissance writers. On the other hand, there is nothing that better illustrates the value of originality of thought apart from style than the preservation as enduring influences upon mankind of a series of books in which style was probably the last thing that the author thought about, and the mode of expression had almost no place in his mind compared to his desire to set forth his thought effectively.