An Epitome of the History of Medicine

by Roswell Park

Already mention has been made of the enormous number of students congregated during this age in Bologna and in Naples. In the small University of Wettenburg there were, in 1520, only about six hundred students; in Erfurt, three hundred, and this number dwindled two years later to fifteen; in 1500 Leipzig had four hundred students; at the same time there were about seven thousand in the University of Vienna. Students and teachers migrated from one place to another, and faculties were constantly changing. Great teachers were received with great ceremony. Bitter struggles and disputes between teachers sometimes occurred; it is related of Pistorius, who died in 1523, and Pollich, deceased in 1513, that they conceived a violent enmity toward each other because of antagonistic views relative to the epidemic or contagious character of syphilis, and both ultimately left Leipzig for other schools.

Some curious customs prevailed. In teaching anatomy, while the learned teachers explained the parts as exposed, the dissections were left to barbers as being unworthy of an educated medical gentleman. While the cadavers were mainly the corpses of executed criminals, it was thought that before and after each special dissection religious ceremonies were appropriate, and such were often held; it was also believed that all who came in contact with such a corpse would be made disreputable unless it were itself first made reputable; hence the professors first read aloud a decree to that effect from the magistrate, and then, by order of the senate of the faculty, stamped upon the breast of the corpse the seal of the university. The body was next carried into the anatomical hall, and the cover of the box in which it had been transported was returned to the executioner, who remained at some distance for this purpose. If the corpse was one that had been decapitated, during these solemn ceremonies the head was placed between its legs. Finally, an entertainment with music, often furnished by itinerant actors, was given. But this folly was gradually discontinued, and by the second half of the sixteenth century public dissection was performed without recourse to such mummeries. The price of skeletons in those days was high; the University of Hiedelberg, in 1669, paid seventy-two dollars for one.

The practitioners of the sixteenth century were often quite as roving as the students and professors, though those who held positions as State physicians were bound by contract to a fixed residence for a certain time. In 1519 the State physician of Heilbronn received a salary of twenty-one dollars per year and his firewood, but could not leave the city over night without permission of the burgomaster. Medical attendants of the King of Spain were required to kneel down when they felt the king's pulse. There were few physicians who acquired wealth, although Fabricius ab Aquapendente left a fortune of two hundred thousand ducats.

The Reform Period is the name which Renouard has given to the time beginning with the commencement of the seventeenth century,—a time when the domain of natural science was daily enlarged, and when observation had enriched human knowledge with multitudes of new facts, some of which harmonized with, and some of which were in opposition to, prevailing doctrines. Men whose knowledge equaled their genius began to need a radical reform, and by such men intellectual improvement was begun by which the decrepit theories of the schools of the Middle Ages were eradicated and by which there were substituted for them others which harmonized much better with known phenomena. To the period of worship of ancient authority succeeded one characterized by a desire to shake off the yoke of the same, and men now struggled, as it were, to free themselves from the tyranny of the past. As Galileo was the torch-bearer for regeneration of the knowledge of physics, and as Kepler, and others already named, or to be named, did as much for other branches of science, so there were not lacking those who broke away from the restraint of authority in medicine, and began to beat or choose paths for themselves among the facts which experimental science furnished them.

With the approach of the seventeenth century there was evident improvement in both the social and mental status of medical men. While political humiliation and exhaustion were everywhere noted, in the field of literature it was evident that the line had advanced. What may have been the effect of thirty years of religious war, with other political struggles carried on under the hypocritical cloak of religion, may be imagined, if not fully described; the devastation of whole countries by disease, and notably by the plague,—the poverty and hunger consequent upon the ravages of perpetual war (it is stated that even so late as 1792 there were still in Saxony 535 wasted and extinct villages), to say nothing of the barbarity and immorality resulting therefrom,—all combined to make the early part of the seventeenth century a most mournful epoch. It is not strange that, with poverty, superstition and great rudeness of manners prevailed, or that trials for witchcraft and persecutions by the Jesuit Inquisition were common. That any advance should have been made under such circumstances speaks well for the progress of the human mind. That this advance was slight in Germany and central Europe is not strange, though other countries were able to quietly enlarge their scientific borders. Now it was that England, Italy, and the Netherlands, which took but little part in the warlike struggles of the century, acquired leadership in medicine, and were seconded by the French. In Great Britain, science had been fostered by various kings, and particularly by Charles II, who professed to be something of a chemist; in fact, an epidemic of scientific interest fell upon the English court.

The seventeenth century, in contrast to the idealistic sixteenth, witnessed the advent of modern realism in almost all departments of thought. Medicine furnished the first example in what we are accustomed to-day to speak of as the exact method; hence, the century is of great importance, in that physicists and chemists began to be original, instead of mere followers of the past. The most notable feature of medicine was the promulgation of three medical systems: the pietistically colored Paracelsism of Van Hel-mont; the chemical system of Sylvius; and the iatro-cliemical system of the physicist and mechanician, Borelli. This period is, moreover, illumined by the life of one great practitioner, whose name will be imperishable in the history of our art,—namely, Sydenham.

The principal tendency of the time was toward skepticism, which had begun in the preceding century with Montaigne, and was continued by Charron, under the patronage of Queen Marguerite of Navarre; it was the fundamental idea of Pierre Bayle, the author of the great dictionary. Opposed thereto was the supernatural philosophy, or the theosophic, cabalistic, or mystic. The leading exponent of the latter was Boehme, who was a business colleague of the celebrated "Meistersinger," Hans Sachs, in Germany, and of Blaise Pascal and his contemporary.

Malebranche, in France. The doctrine of Lord Bacon, Lord Verulam (1561-1626), a man who showed himself as exalted in mind as he was mean in personal traits, was of great importance Bacon is a landmark in history as the defender and eulogist of modern realism,—i.e., of inductive philosophy. While personally contributing but little to the advance of science, he taught a great method; as Gruen says, he was the philosopher of patents and profit; he recognized the compass, the art of printing, and gunpowder as great inventions, but placed little value on the discovery of Copernicus, having little comprehension of mathematics. Hobbes and Locke went farther into realistic philosophy, and the latter was an exponent later of pure empiricism.

In the seventeenth century, also, zoology and botany were largely extended. In it lived Swammerdam (1637-1680), famous as a naturalist, physiologist, linguist, poet, and savant; there were others, also, whose names are better known in the history of collateral science than in medicine, and who left conclusive demonstrations in accordance with their theories, and made daily use of the microscope, simple as it then was. The term "cell" had been introduced by Hooke in 1667, and Malpighi and Grew were the founders of the cell-doctrine. The astronomical laws discovered by Copernicus changed the course of the world's thought; and now appeared the brilliant Kepler (1571-1630), and Galileo (15641642), the defender of the Copernican system, and the persecuted discoverer of the law of falling bodies, of the thermometer, the telescope, and the movements of Jupiter; also, Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), whose discovery of the laws of gravitation in 1665 marked an era in the history of science. This century, too, gave birth to Romer, who in 1675 calculated the velocity of light; Huyghens (1627-1693), who discovered the polarization of light and the satellites of Saturn; James Gregory, who in 1663 made a reflecting telescope with a metallic concave mirror; Torricelli, who in 1643 measured the weight of the air; Gascoigne, who invented the micrometer in 1639; and Napier, who invented logarithms in 1700.

Now chemistry, having ceased to be alchemy, began to don the dignity of a science per se, and it may be claimed that medicine derived no slight benefit therefrom. Scientific societies and journals arose at this period, and were all of good service to medicine in their way. The church scented danger to the faith in everything which related to natural science, and founded certain secret associations, especially in Italy; the Accademia Degli Lyncei, so called from its seal, which bore the image of a fox or lynx, founded in Rome in 1603, was one of these. Counter-societies, or, rather, societies with opposite purposes, were also started, and the original and private so-called Invisible Society, which was originated mainly by Milton, in 1645, and remodeled by Charles II in 1662, is now the flourishing Royal Society. In France the Academy was founded in 1665 by Colbert, but developed its first real activity thirty-five years later.