[69] Niccolò Leonico (I give his Latin name in the text as Ueberweg gives it) seems to have been a spirited and effective philosophical lecturer of Hellenist and critical qualities, and of much charm both of style and character. He is not to be confounded with his elder contemporary, Nicolaus Leonicenus, of Vicenza and Ferrara, professor of medicine and an elegant latiner, who translated the aphorisms of Hippocrates; and whose friend Linacre, in translating parts of Galen, did a like service to medicine and letters in England.
[70] Not only of the circulation of the blood. In his treatise De generatione Harvey disposed of the belief in spontaneous generation (so far as regards visible creatures, its abolition we owe to Pasteur), yet Bacon (N. O. ii. 41) accepts it, perhaps as fully as did Sir Thomas Browne. The De generatione however was not actually published till 1651, some 30 years after the Novum Organon.
[71] Galileo and Kepler had proved the validity of terrestrial physics and mathematics in astronomy. Aristotle of course was the first to apply physics to astronomy, but wrong physics.
[72] With which Malpighi was in close association.
[73] The Consilia medica, or Consultations, were published records, either of particular cases or of diseases in a more general sense, which seem to have been instituted by Thaddæus of Florence in the thirteenth century, were abundant in the fifteenth, and were continued into the sixteenth, and even later. In the fifteenth century these records have a considerable historical value, and no little clinical interest, as the questions to the patient and the records of symptoms are often orderly and graphic, and enable the modern reader to revise the diagnoses, many of them grotesque enough. These Consilia make a great bulk of matter, and one which has not been thoroughly explored. A general account of the Consilia may be read in any good history of medicine, but perhaps the most interesting is to be found in the chapters on medieval medicine in Daremberg’s “Histoire et Doctrines” (e.g. tom. 1. p. 334 et seq.).
[74] Originally by Fracastorius, Montanus and others, in the former half of the sixteenth century. Caius in England, Mercado in Spain, Baillou in Paris, if not bedside teachers, had done good clinical work, in Consilia and otherwise, in the same century. What Fracastorius did for syphilis, Caius did for the sweating sickness, and Mercado for petechial typhus. Baillou was too dependent upon the letter of tradition.
[75] Even Descartes has some share with Hegel in the profound error that whatsoever is clearly and definitely conceived is true. The inference if true for formal logic, is not true for natural processes; for instance, Descartes’ well-known attribution of the soul to the pineal gland, because all other parts of the brain are double, and the soul is single!
[76] “The share of Servetus was small”; that is, the effect of his remarkable discovery was small, for it was buried in a theological work of which but a few copies were rescued from the burning; namely “Christianismi restitutio. Viennæ Allobrogum, 1553.” (Haeser gives the reference to pp. 170-177, De Trinitate divina.) The work was reprinted at Nuremberg in 1790.
Quæ, simul æthereos animo conceperat ignes, Ore dabat vero carmina plena dei. Ovid, Fasti i, 473.