CHAPTER I.
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

The Dawn of Modern Science.—The Reformation of Medicine.—Paracelsus—The Sceptics.—The Protestantism of Science.—Influenza.—Legal Recognition of Medicine in England.—The Barber-Surgeons.—The Sweating Sickness.—Origin of the Royal College of Physicians of London.—“Merry Andrew.”—Origin of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital.—Caius.—Low State of Midwifery.—The Great Continental Anatomists.—Vesalius.—Servetus.—ParÉ.—Influence of the Reformation.—The Rosicrucians.—Touching for the Evil.—Vivisection of Human Beings.—Origin of Legal Medicine.

The discovery of America in 1492 fitly typifies the still grander mental world about to disclose its wonders to the newly liberated minds of scientific investigators. The revolt against authority in religion was paralleled by a scientific Protestantism; the mind of man, long held in bondage to absurd and groundless fancies, struggled to set itself free, to investigate, to test and explore on its account, instead of accepting for granted doctrines elaborated in the philosopher’s brains.

The revolt of medicine against the authority of Galen may be compared to the revolt against Aristotle in philosophy. The authority of the Arabian schools was overthrown, the principles of Hippocrates were in the ascendant. The era of the Renaissance was not more an era of Protestantism than an age of Scepticism. Faith had become credulity, and credulity had sunk into imbecility. The power of the printing press, the spread of humanism, the beginning of scientific inquiry, the discovery of the splendid treasure of classic literature, long buried beneath the dust of dark and barbarous ages, the widening of the mental horizon as the world doubled itself before the prows of the discoverers’ vessels—all these factors brought about the new birth of Science. It was the golden age of the medical sciences. Anatomy and surgery awoke, from their long slumber, and Europe entered upon a period of scientific investigation such as the world had never known before. Medicine formed an alliance with what are called its accessory sciences; chemistry liberated from slavery to the alchemist, botany set free from the delusions of the doctrine of “signatures,” pharmacy elevated into a branch of medical science from the kitchen and the confectioner’s store-room, lent their aid, in conjunction with the hydraulics and pneumatics of the natural philosopher, to advance it. All these things meant revolt against the old order, Protestantism against the outworn creeds of Greek and Arabian dogmatists. They meant more than this. Ere the ground could be cleared for the new palace of physical science which the glorious sixteenth century was to rear, scepticism must lend its withering and desolating aid; foul undergrowths must be destroyed; evil germs, bred of the stagnant marshes of the dark ages, must perish under the wholesome, if ruthless, disinfectants of reason and unbelief. There was a stern need of this. The demon theory of disease had lasted from primeval ages up to this dawn of the sixteenth century. From glacial times, through savage ages and religions, and often in beautifully poetic faiths, the disease-demon held its own. Even in the hallowed and renovating pages of the gospels the disease-demon stalks unchallenged save by the thaumaturgist. Now he is to be banished from the mind of civilized man for ever; and to reach this goal atheism was needed. The sixteenth century, so far as medicine and physical science are concerned, opens with the Cabalist Theosophists, Trithemius, Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan, and their followers. Giordano Bruno, the aggressive atheist and martyr of science, Montaigne, the philosophic sceptic, Charron, the opponent of all religion, and Rabelais, the witty scoffer at the gross corruptions of orthodoxy, helped to clear the ground for the work of the scientists. Meanwhile Paracelsus, from his chair at Basel University, having made an auto-da-fe of ancient and dogmatic medicine, lays the foundation-stone of the medicine of the modern era.

An army of savants begins to work for science as well as literature. Linacre has introduced Italian Humanism to the doctors of England; Caius busies himself with the Greek and Latin texts of the great writers on medicine; Gesner, the German Pliny, and Aldrovandi promote the study of natural history. Everywhere men are busy with the beginnings of electricity, chemistry, mineralogy, botany, and the other sciences which are to be the handmaidens of medicine. One clear voice is heard from Basel. It is that of Paracelsus, exhuming physical science: “You Italy, you Dalmatia, you Sarmatia, Athens, Greece, Arabia, and Israel, follow me. Come out of the night of the mind!”

The teacher of Paracelsus, who exercised the greatest influence upon his mental development, was the celebrated Trithemius, the abbot of the Spanheim Benedictines (about 1500), who was so famous a student of chemistry and the occult philosophy that scholars and mighty nobles went on pilgrimages and princes sent ambassadors, to his monastery to gather some fragments of his vast learning. Amongst many works, he published several on magical subjects, and was the first who told the wondrous story of Dr. Faustus, in whose magical doings he was a devout believer.829 His famous library consisted of the rare possession of two thousand volumes. Cornelius Agrippa was his pupil, and in a letter which he sent to his old master, with the manuscript of his Occult Philosophy, we find a passage which throws a light on the studies of the worthy abbot: “We conferred much about chemical matters, magic, cabalism, and other things which at the present time lie hidden as secret sciences and arts.”830

Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus of Hohenheim (1493-1541), “The Reformer of Medicine,” “Luther Alter,” effected a revolution in medicine, and is one of the most remarkable characters, not only in the history of the medical profession, but in that of civilization. There was so much in this great man’s conduct to admire, and so much of which to disapprove, that it is not surprising that he has been either wholly praised or entirely condemned, and by very few considered dispassionately. Perhaps Mr. Browning, in his noble poem Paracelsus, has given the world the truest conception of a man who did for his profession and for humanity the enormous service of liberating medicine from a slavish adhesion to authority, though it must be admitted that he was guilty of extravagances and excesses we may find it difficult to excuse, even though for the most part they were faults common to his country and his age. Paracelsus was born ten years later than Luther, at Einsiedeln, near Zurich. He studied under the abbot Trithemius of Spanheim, who was a great adept in magic, alchemy, and astrology. Under this teacher he acquired a taste for occult studies, and formed a determination to use them for the welfare of mankind. Trithemius was a theosophist. As was the custom of the times, Paracelsus became an itinerant student after his course at the University of Basel. He studied chemistry in the laboratory of the Fuggers at Schwatz, in the Tyrol.

Attached to the armies, he travelled widely as a military surgeon in the Netherlands, the Romagna, Naples, Venice, Denmark. He worked in the mines, that he might acquire a knowledge of metals, working as a common labourer for his bread. In Bohemian fashion he wandered over the world, visiting Spain, Portugal, Egypt, Tartary, and the East. He picked up his scientific knowledge by any means rather than from books. He said, “Reading never made a doctor, but practice is what forms a physician. For all reading is a footstool to practice, and a mere feather broom. He who meditates discovers something.” And so he held converse with the common folk, and talked and drank with boors, shepherds, Jews, gypsies, and tramps, gaining odd scraps of knowledge wherever he could. He had no books. His only volume was Nature, whom he interrogated at first-hand. He would rather learn medicine and surgery from an old country nurse than from an university lecturer. If there was one thing which he detested more than another, it was the principle of authority. He bent his head to no man.

In the year 1525 Paracelsus went to Basel, where he was fortunate in curing Froben, the great printer, by his laudanum, when he had the gout. Froben was the friend of Erasmus, who was associated with Œcolampadius, and soon after, upon the recommendation of Œcolampadius, he was appointed by the city magnates a professor of physics, medicine, and surgery, with a considerable salary; at the same time they made him city physician, to the duties of which office he requested might be added inspector of drug shops. This examination made the druggists his bitterest enemies, as he detected their fraudulent practices; they combined to set the other doctors of the city against him, and as these were exceedingly jealous of his skill and success, poor Paracelsus found himself in a hornet’s nest. We find him a professor at Basel University in 1526. He has become famous as a physician, the medicines which he has discovered he has successfully used in his practice; he was now in the eyes of his patients at least,

He began his lectures at Basel by lighting some sulphur in a chafing dish, and burning the books of his great predecessors in the medical art, Avicenna, Galen, and others, saying: “Sic vos ardebitis in gehennÂ.” He boasted that he had read no books for ten years, though he protested that his shoe-buckles were more learned than the authors whose works he had burned.

It must have been a wonderful spectacle when this new teacher took his place before his pupils. The benches occupied hitherto by a dozen or two of students were crowded with an eager audience anxious for the new learning. Literature had been exhumed many years before, and now it was the turn of Science! Leaving the morbid seclusion of the cloisters, men had given up dreaming for inquiry, and baseless visions for the acquisition of facts. This was the childhood of our science, and its days were bright with the poetry of youth. It is a sight to arouse our enthusiasm to see in the early dawn of our modern science this man standing up alone to pit himself against the whole scientific authority of his day. He rises from the crucibles and fires where his predecessors had been vainly seeking for gold and silver, ever and again pretending to have found them, and always going empty-handed to a deluded world. Henceforth, he says, his alchemy shall serve a nobler purpose than gold seeking; it shall aid in the healing of disease. He casts aside the sacred books of medicine which have been handed down the ages by his predecessors; destroying them, he declares, with an earnestness which is less tinged by arrogance than by conviction, that these men had been blind guides, that he alone has the clue of the maze, and he forsakes all to follow Truth, though she lead him to death. In his generous impulse to serve mankind he has spoken harshly of his opponents. They would not have helped him, any way. He was above them; they could not understand him, so they hated him, and he scorned them. As too often happens to such heroes, he forgot the love of his neighbour in his love for mankind.

Paracelsus found his pupils holding fast by the teachings of the school of Salerno, and there seems no ground for supposing that the healing art had made the slightest progress in Europe from the foundation of that school in 1150, except perhaps in pharmacy. On the day that Paracelsus stood up before his audience at Basel University, he cried, “Away with Ætius, Oribasius, Galen, Rhasis, Serapion, Avicenna, Averroes, and the other blocks!” He had diplomas sent him from Germany, France, and Italy, and a letter from Erasmus.

In 1528 we find him at Colmar, in Alsatia. He has been driven by priests and doctors from Basel.

He had been called to the bedside of some rich cleric who was ill. He cured him, but so speedily that his fee was refused. Though not at all a mercenary man (for he always gave the poor his services gratuitously), he sued the priest; but the judge refused to interfere, and Paracelsus used strong language to him, and had to fly to escape punishment. We must not be too hard upon the canon. Disease was treated with profound respect in those days, and great patients liked to be cured with deliberation and some ceremonial.

The closing scenes of the life of Paracelsus were passed in a cell in the hospital of Salzburg, in the year 1541, when he died at the age of forty-eight, a martyr of science. Recent investigations in contemporary records have proved that he had been attacked by the servants of certain physicians who were his jealous enemies, and that in consequence of a fall he sustained a fracture of the skull, which proved fatal in a few days.

Within a period of time covering fifteen years he had written some 106 treatises on medicine, alchemy, natural history and philosophy, magic, and other subjects. He despised University learning. “The book of Nature,” he declared, “was that which the physician should read, and to do so he must walk over its leaves.” His library consisted of a Bible, St. Jerome on the Gospels, a volume on medicine, and seven manuscripts. His epitaph tells but a part of his honours. “Here lies Philippus Paracelsus, the famous doctor of medicine, who, by his wonderful art, cured bad wounds, lepra, gout, dropsy, and other incurable diseases, and to his own honour divided his possessions among the poor.”

This but feebly expresses what medicine owes to him. He discovered the metal zinc, and hydrogen gas. In place of the elaborate concoctions and filthy messes which were given as medicines in his time, he taught doctors to give tinctures and quintessences of drugs. He invented laudanum, and anticipated our discovery of transfusion of blood. He opposed the barbarous method of reducing dislocations and dealing with fractures, introduced the use of mercury in the treatment of syphilis, and came very near to the discoveries which go under the name of Darwinism. He taught that chemistry was to be employed, not in making gold, but for the preparation of medicines; and he introduced into practice mineral remedies, including mineral baths, iron, sulphur, antimony, arsenic, gold, tin, lead, etc. Amongst the vegetable remedies employed by him was arnica.

Paracelsus used chemical principles, says Sprengel, for the explanation of particular diseases. “Most or all diseases, according to him, arise from the effervescence of salts, from the combustion of sulphur, or from the coagulation of mercury.”831

His Ætiology attributed diseases to five causes:—1. The Ens astrale (a certain power of the stars); this means no more than foul air. 2. The Ens veneni (power of poison), arising from errors of assimilation and digestion. 3. The Ens naturale (power of nature or of the body); diatheses. 4. Ens spirituale (power of the spirit); the disorders which arise from perverted ideas. 5. Ens Dei (power of God); the injuries or causes of disease predetermined by God.832

When Paracelsus came upon the scene of medical history, alchemy had just begun to lose its credit. The true students of science had discovered its deceptions and had abandoned it to the quacks. It has often happened, and happens still, that certain pretended sciences, when cast aside as worthless, are taken from their hiding-places and made to do duty in another and perhaps nobler form. Paracelsus set himself the task of rehabilitating alchemy. The deeper thinkers, the more ardent truth-seekers in religion and science, imbued with philosophy and penetrated by the scholasticism of the age, were quite ready for a new reign of theosophical medicine to take the place of the Arabian polypharmacy.

George Agricola (1494-1555) was a physician who practised in Bohemia, and was the first to raise mineralogy to the dignity of a science. He did so much for it, in fact, that no great advance was made in it from the point at which he left it, till the eighteenth century.

Conrad Gesner (1516-1565), surnamed the German Pliny, was a famous naturalist of vast erudition, and imbued with an enthusiastic love of science. In 1541 he was professor of physics and natural history at Zurich. He wrote several books on ancient medicine and botany. To prepare himself to write his History of Animals, he read 250 authors, travelled nearly all over Europe, and gathered information from every source, even from hunters and shepherds. His medical works show that he was far above the absurd fancies and prejudices of his time.

Andreas CÆsalpinus (1519-1603), the first systematical botanist, and the founder of the work which LinnÆus developed, studied, if he did not also teach, anatomy and medicine at Pisa. He had a clear idea of the circulation of the blood, at least through the lungs, and he was the first to use the term “circulation.” Claims have been made on his behalf as the discoverer of the circulation; but they cannot be substantiated, as he did not know of the direct flow of the blood from the arteries to the veins.

Cardan (1501-1576), a physician and astrologer, was also a half-crazy magician. He was a skilful physician, and visited King Edward VI. to calculate his nativity, and Cardinal Beaton to cure him in his sickness.

Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was an Italian philosopher of the Renaissance, who, from a determination to study the universe for himself, threw off the restraints of the Christian religion and revolted against the authority of Aristotle and tradition. His most popular and characteristic work is the Spaccio. He was not an atheist, as has been asserted, but a pantheist. He considered the soul of man as a thinking monad, and as immortal. He was burnt at the stake for his opinions, which, it must be admitted, were in some respects detrimental to morality as well as to faith.

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), the sceptical founder of a new philosophy, and one of the most delightful of essayists, anticipated the scientific spirit by his minute and critical observation upon the curious facts connected with human nature.

FranÇois Rabelais (c. 1490-1553) entered the faculty of medicine at Montpellier.

Euricus Cordus (1486-1535), who studied medicine at Erfurt, is famous for the following admirable epigram:—

His son, Valerius Cordus (1515-1544), was the discoverer of sulphuric ether.

Antonio Benivieni (c. 1500), a physician of Florence, was the morning star of a new era for surgery, when he insisted that the compilations of the ancients and Arabians ought to be given up for the observation of nature.833 Thus, before the time of Ambroise ParÉ (1509-1590), the way for the reception of the true modern surgery was prepared in Italy by the efforts of those who strove to induce educated and talented men to devote their attention to this branch of the healing art.

Influenza.

A violent and extensive catarrhal fever prevailed in France and Europe generally in 1510. Hecker considers there is evidence that it had its origin in the remotest parts of the East.834 His description of this influenza is as follows: “The catarrhal symptoms, which, on the appearance of disorders of this kind, usually form their commencement, seem to have been quite thrown into the background by those of violent rheumatism and inflammation. The patient was first seized with giddiness and severe headache; then came on a shooting pain through the shoulders and extending to the thighs. The loins, too, were affected with intolerably painful dartings, during which an inflammatory fever set in with delirium and violent excitement. In some the parotid glands became inflamed, and even the digestive organs participated in the deep-rooted malady; for those affected had, together with constant oppression at the stomach, a great loathing for all animal food, and a dislike even of wine. Among the poor as well as the rich many died, and some quite suddenly, of this strange disease, in the treatment of which the physicians shortened life not a little by their purgative treatment and phlebotomy, seeking an excuse for their ignorance in the influence of the constellations, and alleging that astral diseases were beyond the reach of human art.”

Legal Recognition of Medical Practitioners.

The first Act of Parliament dealing with the medical profession in England was passed in the year 1511, and is entitled “An Act for the Appointing of Physicians and Surgeons,” the preamble of which runs as follows:—

“Forasmuch as the science and cunning of Physick and Surgery (to the perfect knowledge of which be requisite both great learning and ripe experience) is daily within this realm exercised by a great multitude of ignorant persons, of whom the greater part have no manner of insight in the same, nor in any other kind of learning; some also can read no letters on the book, so far forth that common artificers, as smiths, weavers, and women, boldly and accustomably take upon them great cures, and things of great difficulty, in the which they partly use sorcery and witchcraft, partly apply such medicines unto the disease as be very noxious, and nothing meet therefore, to the high displeasure of God, great infamy to the faculty, and the grievous hurt, damage, and destruction of many of the king’s liege people; most especially of them that cannot discern the uncunning from the cunning. Be it therefore (to the surety and comfort of all manner of people) by the authority of this present Parliament enacted:—That no person within the city of London, nor within seven miles of the same, take upon him to exercise and occupy as a Physician or Surgeon except he be first examined, approved, and admitted by the Bishop of London, or by the Dean of St. Paul’s, for the time being, calling to him or them four Doctors of Physic, and for Surgeons, other expert persons in that faculty; and for the first examination such as they shall think convenient, and afterwards alway four of them that have been so approved.835 ...

“That no person out of the said city and precinct of seven miles of the same, except he have been (as is aforesaid) approved in the same, take upon him to exercise and occupy as a Physician or Surgeon, in any diocese within this realm; but if he be first examined and approved by the Bishop of the same diocese, or, he being out of the diocese, by his vicar-general; either of them calling to them such expert persons in the said faculties, as their discretion shall think convenient....”836

The Barber-Surgeons.

The occupation of shaving and trimming beards was anciently considered a profession, and was united to that of surgery. In the reign of Louis XIV. of France the hairdressers were formally separated from the Barber-Surgeons, who were incorporated as a distinct medical body.

A London Company of Barbers was formed in 1308, and the first year of the reign of Edward IV. (1462) the barbers were incorporated by a charter which was confirmed by many succeeding monarchs. In 1540 the Company of Barbers, and those who practised purely as Surgeons, were united as “the commonalty of Barbers and Surgeons of London.” It was enacted (32 Hen. VIII.) that “No person using any shaving or barbery in London shall occupy any surgery, letting of blood, or other matter, except only drawing of teeth.” The Surgeons’ corporation in London two years later petitioned Parliament to be exempted from bearing arms and serving on juries, so that they might be free to attend to their practice.837 Their petition was granted, and all medical men are in the enjoyment of these privileges at the present time.

An Act of Parliament was passed in 1540 allowing the United Companies of Barbers and Surgeons to have yearly four bodies of criminals for purposes of dissection. This is supposed to have been the first legislative enactment passed in any country for promoting the study of anatomy.838

Surgery in England in the reign of Henry VIII. was in a deplorable condition. Thomas Gale thus describes the surgeons of the time:—

“I remember when I was in the wars at Montreuil, in the time of that most famous prince, Henry VIII., there was a great rabblement there that took upon them to be surgeons. Some were sow-gelders, and some horse-gelders, with tinkers and cobblers. This noble sect did such great cures that they got themselves a perpetual name; for like as Thessalus’ sect were called Thessalonians, so was this noble rabblement, for their notorious cures, called dog-leeches; for in two dressings they did commonly make their cures whole and sound for ever, so that they felt neither heat nor cold, nor no manner of pain after. But when the Duke of Norfolk, who was then general, understood how the people did die, and that of small wounds, he sent for me and certain other surgeons, commanding us to make search how these men came to their death, whether it were by the grievousness of their wounds or by the lack of knowledge of the surgeons; and we, according to our commandment, made search through all the camp, and found many of the same good fellows which took upon them the names of surgeons; not only the names but the wages also. We asking of them whether they were surgeons or no, they said they were; we demanded with whom they were brought up, and they, with shameless faces, would answer, either with one cunning man, or another, which was dead. Then we demanded of them what chirurgery stuff they had to cure men withal; and they would show us a pot or a box which they had in a budget, wherein was such trumpery as they did use to grease horses’ heels withal, and laid upon scabbed horses’ backs, with verval and such like. And others that were cobblers and tinkers used shoemaker’s wax, with the rust of old pans, and made therewith ‘a noble salve,’ as they did term it. But in the end this worthy rabblement was committed to the Marshalsea, and threatened to be hanged for their worthy deeds, except they would declare the truth—what they were and of what occupations; and in the end they did confess, as I have declared to you before.”

Gale says in another place: “I have, myself, in the time of King Henry VIII., helped to furnish out of London, in one year, which served by sea and land, three score and twelve surgeons, which were good workmen, and well able to serve, and all Englishmen. At this present day there are not thirty-four of all the whole company of Englishmen, and yet the most part of them be in noblemen’s service, so that if we should have need, I do not know where to find twelve sufficient men. What do I say? sufficient men? Nay; I would there were ten amongst all the company worthy to be called surgeons.”

In the year 1518 the Barbers and Surgeons were united in one company. The Barbers were restricted from performing any surgical operations, except drawing teeth, and the Surgeons, on their part, had to abandon shaving and trimming beards. Physicians were permitted to practise surgery.

In the year 1542 it became necessary to pass an Act to further regulate the practice of Surgery, the chief points of which are the following: “Whereas in the Parliament holden at Westminster, in the third year of the King’s Most Gracious Reign, amongst other things, for the avoiding of sorceries, witchcrafts, and other inconveniences, it was enacted, That no person within the City of London, nor within seven miles of the same, should take upon him to exercise and occupy as Physician and Surgeon, except he be first examined, admitted, and approved by the Bishop of London, etc.... Sithence the making of which said Act, the Company and Fellowship of Surgeons of London, minding onely their owne lucres, and nothing the profit or ease of the diseased or patient, have sued, troubled, and vexed divers honest persons, as well men as women, whom God hath endueed with the knowledge of the nature, kind and operation of certain herbs, roots and waters, and the using and ministering of them, to such as have been pained with custumable diseases, as women’s breasts being sore, a pin and the web in the eye, uncomes of the hands, scaldings, burnings, sore mouths, the stone, stranguary, saucelin, and morphew, and such other like diseases.... And yet the said persons have not taken anything for their pains or cunning.... In consideration whereof, and for the ease, comfort, succour, help, relief, and health of the King’s poor subjects, inhabitants of this his realm, now pained or diseased, or that hereafter shall be pained or diseased, Be it ordained, etc., that at all time from henceforth it shall be lawful to every person being the King’s subject, having knowledge and experience of the nature of herbs, roots and waters, etc., to use and minister according to their cunning, experience, and knowledge ... the aforesaid statute ... or any other Act notwithstanding.”

The Sweating Sickness.

In 1517 England was visited by a third attack of the Sweating Sickness. Public business was suspended, the King moved his court from place to place, and a panic seized the people. Erasmus, writing to Wolsey’s physician, says: “I am frequently astonished and grieved to think how it is that England has been now for so many years troubled by a continual pestilence, especially by a deadly sweat, which appears in a great measure to be peculiar to your country. I have read how a city was once delivered from a plague by a change in the houses, made at the suggestion of a philosopher. I am inclined to think that this also must be the deliverance for England.” He proceeds to suggest that better ventilation is necessary for dwellings; he remarks that the glass windows admit light, but not air; that such air as does enter comes in as draughts, through holes and corners full of pestilential emanations. The floors laid with clay and covered with rushes, the bottom layer of which was unchanged sometimes for twenty years, harboured expectorations, vomitings, filth, and all sorts of abominations.

He advises that the use of rushes should be given up, that the rooms should be so built as to be exposed to the light and fresh air on two or three sides, and that the windows be so constructed as to be easily opened or closed. He declares that at one time, if he ever entered a room which had not been occupied for some months, he was sure to take a fever. He suggests that the people should eat less, especially of salt meats, and that proper officers be appointed to keep the streets and suburbs in better order. Erasmus was thus our first sanitary reformer.

Aubrey gives839 a selection of the favourite prescriptions in use at this period against the Sweating Sickness:—

“Take endive, sowthistle, marygold, m’oney and nightshade, three handfuls of all, and seethe them in conduit water, from a quart to a pint, then strain it into a fair vessel, then delay it with a little sugar to put away the tartness, and then drink it when the sweat taketh you, and keep you warm; and by the grace of God ye shall be whole.”

“Take half an handful of rew, called herbe grace, an handful marygold, half an handful featherfew, a handful sorrel, a handful burnet, and half a handful dragons, the top in summer, the root in winter; wash them in running water, and put them in an earthen pot with a pottle of running water, and let them seethe soberly to nigh the half be consumed, and then draw aback the pot to it be almost cold, and then strain it into a fair glass and keep it close, and use thereof morn and even, and when need is oftener; and if it be bitter, delay it with sugar candy; and if it be taken afore the pimples break forth, there is no doubt but with the grace of Jesu it shall amend any man, woman or child.”

“Another very true medicine.—For to say every day at seven parts of your body, seven paternosters, and seven Ave Marias, with one Credo at the last. Ye shal begyn at the ryght syde, under the ryght ere, saying the ‘paternoster qui es in coelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum,’ with a cross made there with your thumb, and so say the paternoster full complete, and one Ave Maria, and then under the left ere, and then under the left armhole, and then under the left the [thigh?] hole, and then the last at the heart, with one paternoster, Ave Maria, with one Credo; and these thus said daily, with the grace of God is there no manner drede hym.”

The Royal College of Physicians of London Established.

The Royal College of Physicians of London was founded by Henry VIII. for the repression of irregular and unlearned medical practice. The Letters Patent constituting the College were dated 23rd September, 1518. The king was moved to this by the example of similar institutions in Italy and elsewhere, by the solicitations of Thomas Linacre, one of his own physicians, and by the advice and recommendation of Cardinal Wolsey. Six physicians are named in the Letters Patent as constituting the College, viz., John Chambre, Thomas Linacre, and Ferdinand de Victoria, the king’s physicians; and Nicholas Halsewell, John Francis, and Robert Yaxlery, physicians, “and all men of the same faculty, of and in London, and within seven miles thereof, are incorporated as one body and perpetual community or college.”840

Dr. Chambre was a priest before he became a physician. He was educated at Oxford, studied at Padua, where he graduated in physic.

Dr. Thomas Linacre was a distinguished scholar and physician, who was born A.D. 1460. In 1484 he was elected a fellow of All Souls’, Oxford; the next year he went to Bologna, where he studied under Pulitian; he then went to Florence, where he became acquainted with Lorenzo the Great; from Florence, he went to Rome, and thence to Venice and Padua, which at that time was the most celebrated school of physic in the world, and took the degree of Doctor of Medicine with the highest applause. Linacre founded (1524) two Physic Lectures at Oxford and one at Cambridge, but “they were not performed till divers years after Linacre’s death, on account of the troubles concerning religion.”841

Dr. Andrew Borde, Carthusian monk, physician, wit and buffoon, lived in the reign of Henry VIII. He took his physician’s degree at Montpellier in 1532, and afterwards became one of the court physicians on his return to England. He was a learned, genial, and sensible doctor, but possessed “a rambling head and an inconstant mind,” as Anthony À Wood says. He wrote voluminously. His chief works, the Breviary of Health, The Dietary of Health, and The Book of the Introduction to Knowledge, have been edited by Dr. F.J. Furnivall, and published for the Early English Text Society in a volume which is one of the most entertaining works on medicine ever written. Borde earned his title of “Merry Andrew” (a name which has become a household word) from attending fairs and revels, and conducting himself with the buffoonery which ill became so learned a man. Doubtless, however, it endeared him to his countrymen of the period. His medical works are full of prescriptions for various complaints, and many of them are exceedingly valuable and fully equal to the best treatment followed now.

Thomas Vicary was probably born between 1490 and 1500, was not a trained surgeon, but “a meane practiser” at Maidstone. In 1525 he was junior of the three Wardens of the Barbers’ or Barber-Surgeons’ Company in London. In 1528 he was Upper or First Warden of the Company, and one of the surgeons to Henry VIII., at £20 a year. In 1530 he was Master of the Barber-Surgeons’ Company, and at the head of his profession till his death in 1561 or 1562. As Dr. Furnivall says, he was “the Paget of his great Tudor time.” Soon after the dissolution of the monasteries, Henry VIII., at the request of the City of London, handed over the monastic hospitals, Bartholomew’s and others, to the Corporation of London. He gave to Bartholomew’s a small endowment (nominally £333 odd) out of old houses which he charged with pensions to parsons. The city raised £1000 for repairs and reopened the hospital for one hundred patients, and on 29th September, 1548, appointed Chief-Surgeon Vicary as one of the six new governors of the hospital. The reorganization of the hospital was in a large measure due to this excellent man and intelligent surgeon. In 1548 he published the first English work on Anatomy, The Anatomie of the Body of Man, which was reprinted by the Surgeons of Bartholomew’s in 1577. This text-book held the field for 150 years.842

Those who are interested in the origin of our oldest and greatest hospital in London will find much valuable information in the Truly Christian Ordre of the Hospital of S. Bartholomewes, 1552, published as Appendix XVI. in Dr. Furnivall’s Vicary, p. 291.

Robert Copland in 1547 or 48 published his book called The Hy Way to the Spitt House. This is an important and interesting account of the scamps and rogues who resorted to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, in the time of Henry VIII., after the Statute 22nd Hen. VIII. (1530-1), against vagabonds. At that time the hospital gave temporary lodging to almost all the needy, as well as a permanent home to the deserving poor and sick; and sisters attended to them. Copland learns from the porter all about the ne’er-do-wells and the rascals who sought to impose on the charity.843

The old herbalists were often very patient and devoted investigators, who experimented upon themselves, and by these means accumulated a great number of facts of great use in the art of medicine. Conrad Gesner was one of these; he used to eat small portions of wild herbs, and test their effects on his own person, sitting down in the study with the plants around him.844

Sir William Butts, M.D. (died 1545), was physician to Henry VIII., and was the friend of Wolsey, Cranmer, and Latimer. He was knighted by Henry, and is immortalised in Shakspeare’s play of Henry VIII.

George Owen, M.D. (died 1558), was physician to Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Queen Mary. It has been said that Edward VI. was brought into the world by Dr. Owen, who performed the CÆsarian operation on his mother.

John Caius, M.D. (1510-1573), entered Gonville Hall, Cambridge, 1529. He at first studied divinity, but in 1539 went to Padua to study medicine under Montanus. Whilst at Padua, Caius lodged in the same house with the anatomist Vesalius, devoting no less attention to anatomy than his companion. He took the degree of doctor of medicine at Padua. He was public professor of Greek in that University; in 1543 he visited all the great libraries of Italy, collecting MSS., with the view of giving correct editions of the works of Galen and Celsus. In 1552 he was residing in London, and published an account of the Sweating Sickness which prevailed in 1551. He was physician to Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth. Dr. Caius enlarged and augmented the resources of the college at Cambridge, at which he had been educated; and he rendered eminent service to the College of Physicians by defending its rights against the illegal practices of the surgeons, who interfered with the proper functions of the physicians. His munificent foundation at Cambridge is a claim on the gratitude of the English nation, and ensures him a high place for ever in the annals of our universities. The visitor to Cambridge will not fail to remember that it was he who built the three singular gates at his college, inscribed to Humility, to Virtue and Wisdom, and to Honour. But he has another lasting claim to respect on the grounds that he first introduced the study of practical anatomy into this country, and was the first publicly to teach it, which he did in the hall of the Barber-Surgeons, shortly after his return from Italy. Dr. Caius was a profound classical scholar, and left numerous works on the Greek and Latin medical authors. As a naturalist, linguist, critic, and antiquary, he was no less distinguished than as a physician.

Edward Wotton, M.D. (died 1555), seems to have been the first English physician who applied himself specially to the study of natural history. He made himself famous by his work on this subject, entitled De Differentiis Animalium.

Dr. Geynes (died 1563) was cited before the College of Physicians for impugning the authority of Galen; he recanted and humbly acknowledged his heresy, and was duly pardoned. The circumstance is a curious illustration of the sentiments of the times.845

Simon Ludford was originally a friar who became an apothecary in London, who was admitted by the University of Oxford to the baccalaureate in medicine, although totally ignorant and incompetent. The College reproved the University, and he was compelled to undergo a course of study, when he was ultimately admitted doctor of medicine in Oxford, and Fellow of the College of Physicians in 1563.

William Gilbert, M.D. (born 1540), engaged in experiments relative to the magnet, achieving results which Galileo declared to be “great to a degree which might be envied,” and which induced Galileo to turn his mind to magnetism.846

Thomas Penny, M.D. (practised in London, 1570-1). Gerard styles him “a second Dioscorides, for his singular knowledge of plants.” He was also one of the first Englishmen who studied insects.

Peter Turner, M.D. (died 1614), was physician to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, and one of the greatest botanists of his age.

Thomas Muffet, M.D., the learned friend of distinguished physicians and naturalists, was esteemed in his day the famous ornament of the body of physicians (died 1604).

Berenger of Capri (died 1527) flourished at Bologna (1518). He was a zealous anatomist, and declared that he had “dissected more than one hundred human bodies.” He was the first who recognised the larger proportional size of the male chest than the female, and the converse concerning the pelvis. He discovered the two arytenoid cartilages in the larynx, first accurately described the thymus, and gave a good description of the brain and the internal ear, in which he noticed the malleus and incus. He rectified some of the mistakes of Mondino, but was, like all other anatomists before Harvey, deeply perplexed about the heart and the circulation. He investigated the structure of the valves of the heart.

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The art of midwifery, up to the middle of the sixteenth century, was in the lowest possible condition. In 1521, a doctor named Veites was condemned to the flames in Hamburg, for engaging in the business of midwifery. In the year 1500, the wife of one Jacob Nufer, of Thurgau, a Swiss sow-gelder, being in peril of her life in pregnancy, though thirteen midwives and several surgeons had attempted to deliver her in the ordinary way, it occurred to her husband to ask permission of the authorities, and the help of God, to deliver her “as he would a sow.” He was completely successful, and thus performed the first CÆsarian operation on the living patient, who lived to bear several other children in the natural way, and died at the age of seventy-seven. Another sow-gelder performed the operation of ovariotomy on his own daughter, in the sixteenth century.

FranÇois Rousset (about 1581), physician to the Duke of Savoy, was the first to write upon the CÆsarian operation. The improvement in printing and engraving caused the works of the Greek, Roman, and Arabian writers to be more widely known, and manuals were published for the instruction of midwives. The first book of this kind was by Eucharius Roslein, at Worms, called the Rose Garden for Midwives (1513). Vesalius (1543) rendered great services to the obstetric art by his anatomical teaching; and when Rousset published his treatise, the operation became popular, and was constantly performed on the living subject, sometimes even when it was not absolutely necessary. Pineau, a surgeon of Paris, in 1589, first suggested division of the pubes to facilitate difficult labour.

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In the year 1535 (27 Henry VIII.), Wood says847 that at Oxford “divers scholars, upon a foresight of the ruin of the clergy, had and did now betake themselves to physick, who as yet raw and inexpert would adventure to practise, to the utter undoing of many. The said visitors ordered, therefore, that none should practise or exercise that faculty unless he had been examined by the physick professor concerning his knowledge therein. Which order, being of great moment, was the year following confirmed by the king, and power by him granted to the professor and successors to examine those that were to practise according to the Visitor’s Order.”

Pierre Franco (c. 1560) was a Swiss or French surgeon, and a famous lithotomist, who performed the high operation for the first time in 1560, with success, on a child aged two years. Recognising the dangers of this method, he introduced a new method in the operation known as perineal lithotomy, which was called the lateral method. He preceded ParÉ in improvements in dealing with strangulated hernia by the operation known as herniotomy. He was one of the first to re-introduce into midwifery practice the operation known as “turning,” in difficult labour. The operation was a familiar one amongst the Hindus, and had been known to the later GrÆco-Roman school, but had fallen into disuse until ParÉ, Franco, and Guillemeau devoted themselves to the improvement of this neglected branch of the healing art with great success.

Andrew Libavius (1546-1616), physician at Coburg, is said by Sprengel to have been the person who began to cultivate chemistry; as distinct from all theosophical fancies of his predecessors.

Conrad Gesner, the miracle of learning, whom we have already mentioned, devoted great attention to gynÆcology, and wrote learnedly and without prejudice upon medicine.

Dr. Henry Alkins (born 1558) was one of the principal physicians of James I. While president of the Royal College, the first London Pharmacopoeia was published in 1618.

John Bannister was a voluminous writer on surgery who practised in London, and wrote a treatise on surgery in 1575.

Thomas Gale (1507-1586), the “English ParÉ,” was a military surgeon, under Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, who taught that gun-shot wounds were not poisoned as was commonly supposed, but were to be treated as ordinary wounds.

William Bulleyn (died 1576) was a famous physician and botanist in the reigns of the later Tudors. He wrote The Government of Health (1548), Book of Simples, and other works.

Frescatorius (1483-1553) was the first to publish a description of typhus fever. Dr. Mead says848 that he knew that “consumption is contagious, and is contracted by living with a phthisical person, by the gliding of the corrupted and putrified juices [of the sick] into the lungs of the sound man.” He inferred the microbes which we see.

G. Baillou (1536-1614) was the first to describe clearly the diseases whooping cough and croup.

Alexander Benedetti (died 1525) was an anatomist, who made important observations on gall-stones.

Felix Platter (1536-1614), a professor at Basle, must ever be gratefully remembered for his humane and wise opposition to the cruel treatment of the insane by coercive measures, which unhappily were in fashion up to recent times. He suggested the division of diseases into three classes: (1) Mental disorders; (2) Pains, fevers, etc.; (3) Deformities and defects of secretion.

A book which contains directions for identifying simples and preparing compound medicines is called a Pharmacopoeia. The first work of this character, which was published under Government authority, was that of Nuremberg, in 1512. A student, Valerius Cordus, passing through the city, exhibited a recipe book, which he had compiled from the writings of the most eminent physicians of the town. He was urged to print it for the benefit of the apothecaries. The College of Medicine at Florence issued the Antidotarium Florentinum, somewhat earlier, but merely on its own authority. Dr. A. Foes used the term pharmacopoeia first as a distinct title for his work published at Basle, in 1561.849

Costanzo Varolius of Bologna (1545-1575), one of the greatest of the Italian anatomists, described the optic nerves and many important points in the anatomy of the brain.

Volcher Coiter, of Groningen (1534-1600), was a pupil of Fallopius and Eustachius, who was distinguished for his important researches on the cartilages, bones, nerves, and the anatomy of the foetal skeleton.

Fabricius, of Acquapendente (1537-1619), a pupil of Fallopius, and a distinguished anatomist, made important researches on the structure of animals in general. His famous discovery of the valves of the veins and his investigations concerning their use led Harvey to make the discovery of the circulation of the blood.

Casserius (1561-1616) investigated the anatomy of the vocal organs, discovered the muscles of the ossicles of the ear, and practised bronchotomy, which he had learned from Fabricius. He was professor at Padua, and a teacher of Harvey.

Spigel (1578-1625) made researches on the liver, a lobulus of which bears his name.

Olaus Worm (1588-1654) first described the small bones of the skull, now called “Wormian” bones.

It was not till the sixteenth century that France contributed her quota to the list of great anatomists. Nothing shows more clearly the difficulty with which learning was spread in the times of which we write than the fact that the works of the early Italian anatomists were altogether unknown in France until a hundred years after they were written.

Jacques Dubois (1478-1555) taught anatomy at Paris, and was professor of surgery to the Royal College. He was an irrational admirer of Galen. The carcases of dogs and other animals were the materials from which he taught; it does not appear that it was possible to obtain human subjects for dissection without robbing the cemeteries.

Charles Etienne (1503-64) was the first to detect valves in the orifices of the hepatic veins. He knew nothing of the researches of Achillini concerning the brain, although they were made sixty years before; yet his investigations of the structure of the nervous system were most important, and his demonstration of the existence of a canal running through the whole length of the spinal cord, which had not previously been suspected, entitles him to a high place in the history of anatomy.

A new era in the history of anatomy was inaugurated by the appearance of Andrew Vesalius (1514-1564), a Fleming, who pursued the study with the greatest assiduity at Venice, and demonstrated it at Padua before he was twenty-two. He remained there seven years, then went to Bologna and thence to Pisa. He is known as the first author of a systematic and comprehensive view of human anatomy. He recognised the necessity of divesting the science of the current misrepresentations of ignorance and fancy.

Vesalius especially contributed to our knowledge of the circulatory organs; it was he who, by his study of the structure of the heart and the mechanism of its valves, stimulated his pupils and fellow-students to pursue a course of research which ended at last in Harvey’s immortal discovery. Besides these researches on the vascular system, he first accurately described the sphenoid bone and the sternum. He described the omentum, the pylorus, the mediastinum and pleura, and gave the fullest description of the brain which, up to that time, had appeared. Splendid as were his researches, and valuable as were his writings, it was perhaps by the way in which he stimulated inquiry in others that he rendered the greatest services to anatomical science.

Dr. Molony, writing in the British Medical Journal, December 31, 1892, says: “I recently secured possession of his works, entitled AndreÆ Vesalii Invictissimi Caroli V. Imperatoris Medici Opera Omnia. It is a curious work in two immense folio volumes, written in fairly good Latin. It has several plates representing the surgical instruments of the period, dissections, and, it must be added, quadrupeds of all sorts tied up evidently awaiting vivisection.

“The preface consists of a lengthy and appreciative life of Vesalius, from which it seems that he was born in 1514, at Brussels, where his father was court physician. As a boy he seems to have shown a taste for comparative anatomy, ‘puer animalium penetralia nudare atque viscera inspicere soleret.’ His anatomical studies were at all times pursued under difficulties. He obtained the bodies of criminals by bribing the judges, ‘corpora nactus eorum, in cubicula vexit, suosque in usus per tres et ultra septimanas asservavit. Horretne legenti animus? O juvenilis ardor, repagula eluctatur ferrea! Tali opus erat ingenio, artibus bis, at nobile conderet opus.’ He does not seem to have been married, if we may judge from the following extract: ‘Aetate vero integra, uxore, liberis, rei familiaris omni cura liber, totum se immersit in anatomicis.’

“Vesalius was an enthusiastic surgeon, and apparently looked down upon the physicians of the period: ‘Jocatus medicos reliquos syrupis prÆscribendis unice occupari.’ His success aroused the jealousy of his contemporaries. Among others he came into collision with Sylvius of Paris, Eustachius of Rome, and Fallopius of Padua. Mention is also made of ‘Joannis Caji Medici Celebris Britanni.’ It would be interesting to ascertain who this was. [No doubt it was Caius.]

“The end of Vesalius was tragic enough. ‘Hispanum curabat nobilem petiit ab amicis defuncti corpus aperire ut mortis scrutaretur causam. Quo concesso, visum cor in aperto jam pectore adhuc palpitans.’ The punishment ordered for this was a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. On his return voyage he was wrecked on the island of Zacinthus. ‘Inops, in loco solitario, omnique carens subsidio miserabiliter vitam finivit 1564.’”

“Vesalius,” says Portal, “appears to me one of the greatest men who ever existed. Let the astronomers vaunt their Copernicus, the natural philosophers their Galileo and Torricelli, the mathematicians their Pascal, the geographers their Columbus, I shall always place Vesalius above all their heroes. The first study for man is man. Vesalius has this noble object in view, and has admirably attained it; he has made on himself and his fellows such discoveries as Columbus could only make by travelling to the extremity of the world. The discoveries of Vesalius are of direct importance to man; by acquiring fresh knowledge of his own structure, man seems to enlarge his existence; while discoveries in geography or astronomy affect him but in a very indirect manner.”

The zeal of Vesalius and his fellow-students of anatomy often led them to weird adventures. Hallam says:850 “they prowled by night in charnel-houses, they dug up the dead from the graves, they climbed the gibbet, in fear and silence, to steal the mouldering carcase of the murderer; the risk of ignominious punishment, and the secret stings of superstitious remorse, exalting no doubt the delight of these useful but not very enviable pursuits.” Vesalius, as has been said above, was once absurdly accused of dissecting a Spanish gentleman before he was dead. He only escaped the punishment of death by undertaking a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, during which he was shipwrecked, and died of famine in one of the Greek islands.851

Gabriel Fallopius (1523-1562) was a prominent pupil of Vesalius who studied the anastomoses (the blending together) of the blood-vessels. His researches in the anatomy of the bones and the internal ear greatly advanced anatomical knowledge. He discovered the tubes connected with the womb, called after him the “Fallopian tubes.” Fallopius is described as a savant distinguished by his sense of justice, his modesty and gentleness; yet Dr. Baas says,852 “the fact that even Fallopio did not shrink from accepting the gift of some convicts, and then poisoning them—indeed, when the first experiment proved a failure, he tried it again with better success—is characteristic of the zeal of the age in the investigation of the human body, and of the barbarous idea that might makes right towards those guilty before the law!”

Eustachius was a contemporary of Vesalius. He divides with him the honour of having created the science of human anatomy. His name is perpetuated by the tube in the internal ear, called the “Eustachian tube.” His researches on the anatomy of the internal part of the organ of hearing, his studies in the anatomy of the teeth, in which he was the pioneer, his famous Anatomical Engravings, and his labours in connection with the intimate structure of the organs of the body, taken in connection with their relative anatomy, prove that he laboured for the advancement of the knowledge of the structure of the human frame with the utmost assiduity and success.

J. C. Aranzi (1530-1589), of Bologna, gave the first correct account of the anatomy of the foetus, and his description of that of the brain is exceedingly minute and lucid. He named the hippocampus, described the choroid plexus, and the fourth ventricle under the name of the cistern of the cerebellum.

Columbus (died 1559) was a pupil of Vesalius, whom he succeeded in the chair of anatomy at Padua. He had a glimpse of how the blood passes from the right to the left side of the heart, but he had no true knowledge of the circulation.

Michael Servetus (1511-1553) was either a pupil or fellow-student of Vesalius, who, in 1553, described accurately the pulmonary circulation. He recognised that the change from venous into arterial blood took place in the lungs, and not in the left ventricle. He was a pioneer in physiological science by his great discovery of the respiratory changes in the lungs.

Levasseur (about 1540), says Hallam,853 appears to have known the circulation of the blood through the lungs, the valves of the veins, and their direction and purpose.

Gaspare Tagliacozzi (1546-1599) was a professor at Bologna, whose name is famous in the history of surgery from his skill in performing “plastic operations.” Rhinoplastic operation is a term in surgery sometimes synonymous with the Taliacotian operation, which is a process for forming an artificial nose. It consists in bringing down a piece of flesh from the forehead, and while preserving its attachment to the living structures, causing it to adhere to the anterior part of the remains of the nose. Tagliacozzi, himself, to replace the lost substance employed the skin of the upper part of the arm, as Branca did previously. Patients flocked to him from all parts of Europe. The world was, as usual, ungrateful; the great surgeon was considered to have presumptuously interfered with the authority of Providence. Noses and lips which the Divinity had destroyed as a punishment for the sins of men had been restored by this daring man. After his death some nuns heard voices in their convent crying for several weeks: “Tagliacozzi is damned!” By the direction of the clergy of Bologna his corpse was taken from the grave and re-interred in unconsecrated ground.854 We are not in a position to sneer at this, for the preachers of the nineteenth century said something very similar of the use of chloroform in midwifery only a few years ago. In 1742 the Faculty of Paris declared Tagliacozzi’s operation impossible; but the English journals, in 1794, discovered that such a method of surgical procedure had been in use in India from ancient times, and then the scientific world tried the experiment and succeeded perfectly.

Ambroise ParÉ, “the father of French surgery” (1509-1590), availed himself of the opportunities offered him in military surgery during the campaign of Francis I. in Piedmont. It was the practice of the time to treat gunshot wounds with hot oil—a treatment which ParÉ revolutionized by using merely a simple bandage.

In 1545 he attended the lectures of Sylvius at Paris, and became prosector to that great anatomist. His book on Anatomy was published five years later. By his employment of the ligature for large arteries, he was able so completely to control hÆmorrhage that he was able to practise amputation on a larger scale than had before been attempted. ParÉ is considered as the first who regularly employed the ligature after amputation. He declares in his Apologie that the invention was due to the ancients, and he explains their use of it, although he ascribes to inspiration of the Deity his own first adoption of the practice.

The philosopher Ramus in 1562 urged Charles IX. of France to establish schools for clinical teaching, such as already existed at Padua.

Robert Fludd, M.D., or in the Latin style he affected, Robertus de Fluctibus, was born in 1574; he was an ardent supporter of the Rosicrucian philosophy. He had a strong leaning towards chemistry, but had little faith in orthodox medicine. His medical ideas consisted of a mysterious mixture of divinity, chemistry, natural philosophy, and metaphysics.

In 1573, Harrison, in his unpublished Chronologie, remarks that “these daies the taking in of the smoke of the Indian herb called tabaco, by an instrument like a little ladell, is gretly taken up and used in England against rewmes.”

It was not till 1576 that croup was well understood. LaËnnec thinks it was quite unknown to the Greek and Arabian physicians; but Forbes says that it was known to Hippocrates and AretÆus, although its pathology was not understood. Ballonius was the first who accurately described the false membrane, which is a characteristic of the disease.855

At the Reformation in England under Elizabeth, some of the Catholic priests who refused to conform to the new religion sought in other professions the means of living. In a curious old book, Tom of all Trades, or the Plaine Pathway to Preferment, by Thomas Powell (printed 1631), there is a story which no doubt was founded in fact. “And heere I remember me of an old tale following, viz., At the beginning of the happy raigne of our late good Queene Elizabeth, divers Commissioners of great place, being authorized to enquire of, and to displace, all such of the Clergie as would not conforme to the reformed Church, one amongst others was Conuented before them, who being asked whether he would subscribe or no, denied it, and so consequently was adiudged to lose his benefice and to be deprived his function; wherevpon, in his impatience, he said, ‘That if they (meaning the Commissioners) held this course it would cost many a man’s life.’ For which the Commissioners called him backe againe, and charged him that he had spoke treasonable and seditious words, tending to the raysing of a rebellion or some tumult in the Land; for which he should receive the reward of a Traytor. And being asked whether hee spake those words or no, he acknowledged it, and tooke vpon him the Iustification thereof; ‘for, said he, ‘yee have taken from me my liuing and profession of the Ministrie; Schollership is all my portion, and I have no other meanes now left for my maintenance but to turn Phisition; and before I shalbe absolute Master of that Misterie (God he knowes) how many mens lives it will cost. For few Phisitions vse to try experiments vpon their owne bodies.’

“With vs, it is a Profession can maintaine but a few. And diuers of those more indebted to opinion than learning, and (for the most part) better qualified in discoursing their travailes than in discerning their patients malladies. For it is growne to be a very huswiues trade, where fortune prevailes more than skill.”

A writer in Hood’s Every-Day Book, on the date February 25, says that the monks knew of more than three hundred species of medicinal plants which were used in general for medicines by the religious orders before the Reformation. The Protestants, the more efficiently to root out Popery, changed the Catholic names of many of these. Thus the virgin’s bower of the monastic physician was changed into flammula Jovis; the hedge hyssop into gratiola; St. John’s wort became hypericum; fleur de St. Louis was called iris; palma Christi became ricinus; Our Master wort was christened imperatona; sweet bay they called laurus; Our Lady’s smock was changed into cardamine; Solomon’s seal into convallaria; Our Lady’s hair into trichomanes; balm into melissa; marjoram into origanum; herb Trinity into viola tricolor; knee holy into rascus; rosemary into rosmarinus; marygold into calendula; and a hundred others. But the old Catholic names cling to the plants of the cottage garden, and Star of Bethlehem has not quite given place to ornithogalum; Star of Jerusalem to goat’s beard; nor Lent lily to daffodil.

The gullibility of mankind has never been exhibited in a clearer light than Johann Valentin AndreÆ (1586-1654) succeeded in showing in his elaborate joke of the Society of the Rosy-Cross. In 1614 a famous but entirely fabulous secret society set the scholars of Europe discussing the pretensions of the Rosicrucians, who were said to have derived their origin from one Christian Rosenkreuz, two hundred years previously. This philosopher, it was said, had made a pilgrimage to the East, to learn its hidden wisdom, of which the art of making gold was a portion. The character of the society was Christian, but anti-Catholic, and its ostensible objects were the study of philosophy and the gratuitous healing of the sick. Its device was a cross, with four red roses. AndreÆ was a learned man, but jocular withal; for no sooner had the public eagerly swallowed his story, than he confessed the whole was pure invention, and that he had originated the idea with the view of ridiculing the alchemists and Theosophists, whose opinions were dominating European society. The public, however, liked the idea so well that it developed and flourished, and a society was established called Fraternitas RosÆ Crucis. The most celebrated followers of the Rosicrucians were Valentine Wiegel, Jacob Boehm, Egidius Gutman, Michael Mayer, Oswald Crollius, and Robert Fludd.856

De Quincey has traced the connection between the Rosicrucians and Freemasons. “Rosicrucianism,” he says, “it is true, is not Freemasonry, but the latter borrowed its form from the first.”857

Scrofula was anciently treated in a superstitious manner by the sovereigns of England and France by imposition of hands. This ceremony is said to have been first performed by Edward the Confessor (1042-1066). A special “Service of Healing” was used in the English Church in the reign of Henry VIII. (1484-1509).

The ceremonies of blessing cramp-rings on Good Friday, called the Hallowing of the Cramp-Rings, is described by Bishop Percy in his Northumberland Household Book,858 where we have the following account:—

“And then the Usher to lay a Carpett for the Kinge to Creepe to the Crosse upon. And that done, there shal be a Forme sett upon the Carpett, before the Crucifix, and a Cushion laid upon it for the King to kneale upon. And the Master of the Jewell Howse ther to be ready with the Booke concerninge the Hallowing of the Crampe Rings, and Amner (Almoner) muste kneele on the right hand of the Kinge, holdinge the sayde booke. When that is done the King shall rise and goe to the Alter, wheare a Gent. Usher shall be redie with a Cushion for the Kinge to kneele upon; and then the greatest Lords that shall be ther to take the Bason with the Rings and beare them after the Kinge to offer.”

In the Harleian Manuscripts there is a letter from Lord Chancellor Hatton to Sir Thomas Smith, dated Sept, 11th, 158-, about a prevailing epidemic, and enclosing a ring for Queen Elizabeth to wear between her breasts, the said ring having “the virtue to expell infectious airs.”859

Andrew Boorde, in his Introduction to Knowledge (1547-48), says: “The Kynges of England by the power that God hath gyuen to them, dothe make sicke men whole of a sickeness called the kynges euyll. The Kynges of England doth halowe euery yere crampe rynges, the whyche rynges, worne on ones fynger, dothe helpe them the whyche hath the crampe.”860

Concerning the king’s evil, which Boorde explains is an “euyl sickenes or impediment,” he advises: “For this matter let euery man make frendes to the Kynges maiestie, for it doth pertayne to a Kynge to helpe this infirmitie by the grace the whiche is geuen to a Kynge anoynted.”861

In Robert Laneham’s letter862 about Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Kenilworth Castle, it is told how on July 18th, 1575, her Majesty touched for the evil, and that it was “a day of grace.” “By her highnes accustumed mercy and charitee, nyne cured of the peynfull and daungerous diseaz, called the kings euill; for that Kings and Queenz of this Realm withoout oother medsin (saue only by handling and prayerz) only doo cure it.”

Sir John Fortescue, in his defence of the House of Lancaster against that of York, argued that the crown could not descend to a female because the Queen is not qualified by the form of anointing her to cure the disease called the king’s evil. On this account, and more especially after the excommunication of Elizabeth by the Pope in 1570, it must have been eminently comforting to all concerned to find that the power to cure disease by the royal touch had not been affected by the change of religion or any other cause. The practice was at its height in the reign of Charles II.863

Lord Braybrooke says,864 “In the first four years after his restoration he ‘touched’ nearly 24,000 people.” We find that Dr. Johnson was touched by Queen Anne. “The Office for the Healing” continued to be printed in the Book of Common Prayer after the accession of the House of Hanover.

The custom evidently arose from the fact that Edward the Confessor was a saint as well as a king. William of Malmesbury gives the origin of the royal touch in his account of the miracles of Edward: “A young woman had married a husband of her own age, but having no issue by the union, the humours collecting abundantly about her neck, she had contracted a sore disorder, the glands swelling in a dreadful manner. Admonished in a dream to have the part affected washed by the king, she entered the palace, and the king himself fulfilled this labour of love, by rubbing the woman’s neck with his fingers dipped in water. Joyous health followed his healing hand; the lurid skin opened, so that worms flowed out with the purulent matter, and the tumour subsided. But as the orifice of the ulcers was large and unsightly, he commanded her to be supported at the royal expense till she should be perfectly cured. However, before a week was expired, a fair new skin returned, and hid the scars so completely, that nothing of the original wound could be discovered; and within a year becoming the mother of twins, she increased the admiration of Edward’s holiness. Those who knew him more intimately, affirm that he often cured this complaint in Normandy; whence appears how false is their notion, who in our times assert, that the cure of this disease does not proceed from personal sanctity, but from hereditary virtue in the royal line.”865

Many other miracles of healing were attributed to St. Edward. Jeremy Collier866 maintains that the scrofula miracle is hereditary upon all his successors. The curious fact, however, is that the hereditary right of succession was repeatedly interrupted, yet the power remained. In connection with this royal touching, pieces of gold were given by the sovereigns to be worn by the patients as amulets. They were called “touching pieces,” and though not absolutely requisite for the cure, some persons declared that the disease returned if they lost the coins. We can only account for the great efficacy which in some cases seemed to have attended the royal treatment, by the confidence and exalted expectation awakened in the sufferers by the ceremony, which acted as a tonic to the system, and roused the patients’ imagination to contribute to their own cure.867

Chips and handkerchiefs dipped in the blood of King Charles I. are said to have been efficacious in curing sick persons in hundreds of cases.

The College of Physicians of Edinburgh was created by the king’s letters patent in 1581, one year after the foundation of Edinburgh University by James VI.

In the reign of Elizabeth, when physicians rode on horseback, they were seated sideways; many of them carried muffs, to keep their fingers warm when they had to feel their patient’s pulse. Twice a year everybody was bled—a system which must have caused many disorders.

Fifteen centuries after the age of Celsus, with the revival of learning and science came the revival of human vivisection. Vesalius, as above mentioned, is known to have vivisected men; and in the Storia Universale of Cesare CantÙ there is an account of the Duke of Florence giving a man for vivisection to Fallopius. This incident has been disputed; but the following series of cases, extracted by Professor Andreozzi from the Criminal Archives of Florence, and published by him in his book Leggi Penali degli antichi e Cinesi, are beyond question. Cosmo de Medici seems to have taken the anatomists of Pisa under his special favour, and to have sent them the miserable convicts from the prisons at his option. The following examples are a selection from the cases extracted by Signor Andreozzi from the Archivio Criminale:—

“1. January 15th, 1545.—Santa di Mariotto Tarchi di Mugello, wife of Bastiano Lucchese, was condemned to be beheaded for infanticide. Under the sentence is written, ‘Dicta Santa, de mente Excell^mi Ducis, fuit missa Pisis, de ea per doctores fieret notomia.’[No notice to be found of any execution of the woman, such as would have appeared had she been put to death before she was sent to Pisa.]

“2. December 14th, 1547.—Giulio Mancini Sanese was condemned for robbery and other offences. Sent to Pisa to be anatomised. ‘Ducatur Pisis, pro faciendo de eo notomia.’

“3. In the record of prisoners sent away, dated September 1st, 1551, occurs this entry:—‘Letter to the Commissioner of Castrocaro, that Maddalena, who is imprisoned for killing her son, should be sent here, if she be likely to recover, as it pleases S.E. that she should be reserved for anatomy. Of this nothing is to be said, but she is to be kept in hopes. If she is not likely to recover, the executioner is to be sent for to decapitate her.’ The end of the horrible extract is,—‘Went to Pisa, to be made an anatomy.’

“4. December 12th, 1552.—A man named Zuccheria, accused of piracy, was reserved from hanging, with his comrade, and sent to Pisa, ‘per la notomia.’

“5. December 22nd, 1552.—A certain Ulivo di Paolo was condemned by the Council of Eight to be hanged for poisoning his wife. Sentence changed—to be sent for anatomy. Was sent to Pisa on January 13th.

“6. November 14th, 1553.—Marguerita, wife of Biajio d’Antinoro, condemned to be beheaded for infanticide.... December 20th, ‘she was released from the fetters and consigned to a familiar, who took her to Pisa to the Commissario, who gave her, as usual, to the anatomist, to make anatomy of her; which was done’ (‘che la consegni, secondo il solito, al notomista, per farne notomia, come fu fatto’).”

“Several other cases, from 1554 to 1570, are recorded, with equally unmistakable exactitude. In one instance the condemned man’s destiny was mitigated, and after having been ordered to be sent to Pisa for the Commissario to consign to the anatomist, ‘when he should ask for him, and at his pleasure,’ he was mercifully sentenced to be hanged at once at Vico, ‘by direction of Sua Excellenza Illustrissima.’ Two unfortunate thieves, Paoli di Giovanni and Vestrino d’Agnolo, were sent together by the Council of Eight to be anatomised; the Duke having written to say ‘that they wanted in Pisa a subject for anatomy.’”

After the date 1570 no more cases occur in the Archives.

Francis I. invited the Italian anatomist Vidus Vidius to his royal college at Paris.

Several new medicines were introduced about this period.

Lemon juice was first spoken of as a remedy for scurvy in 1564. Its use was discovered by some Dutch sailors whose ship was laden with lemons and oranges from Spain.868

The virtues of sassafras as a medicine for scurvy were discovered, according to Cartier, in 1536, on a voyage to explore the coast of Newfoundland and the St. Lawrence. The natives advised the sailors afflicted with the malady to use the wood of the tree ameda, which was thought to have been sassafras.869

Sarsaparilla was first brought to Europe by the Spaniards, in the middle of the sixteenth century, from Peru and Brazil.

Guaiacum was introduced into Europe in 1509, and in 1519 its use became common.

Holinshed complained870 that estimation and credit given to compound medicines made with foreign drugs in his time was one great cause of the prevailing ignorance of the virtues and uses of “our own simples,” which he held to be fully as useful as the “salsa parilla, mochoacan, etc.,” so much in request. “We tread those herbs under our feet, whose forces, if we knew and could apply them to our necessities, we would honour and have in reverence.—Alas! what have we to do with such Arabian and Grecian stuff as is daily brought from those parts which lie in another clime?—The bodies of such as dwell there are of another constitution than ours are here at home. Certes, they grow not for us, but for the Arabians and Grecians.—Among the Indians, who have the most present cures for every disease of their own nation, there is small regard of compound medicines, and less of foreign drugs, because they neither know them nor can use them, but work wonders even with their own simples.”

Carlo Ruini, of Bologna, published in 1598 a work on the anatomy of the horse, in which Ercolani has found evidence that he, to some extent, anticipated Harvey’s discovery.871

Nicholas Houel (1520-1585) was born at Paris, 1520. He was a famous and learned pharmacien, who devoted the fortune which he acquired by his industry and skill to philanthropic and scientific purposes. He founded a great orphanage in Paris, and the School of Pharmacy of that city owes its origin to him. He wrote a Treatise on the Plague, and one on the Theriacum of Mithridates, both published in 1573. It is to his enlightened and charitable suggestion that dispensaries arose in Paris. His “Garden of Simples” inspired the creation of the Jardin des Plantes.872

Even at the close of the sixteenth century careful and sober men, as Mr. Henry Morley says,873 believed in the miraculous properties of plants and animals and parts of animals. When the century commenced, the learned and unlearned alike believed in the influences of the stars and the interferences of demons with diseases, and in the mysteries of magic. The reason why students of such sciences as existed were punished and persecuted was the dread which men had that the knowledge of the occult powers of nature would afford the learner undue and mysterious power over them.

Legal Medicine.

That most important branch of medical science known as Medical Jurisprudence, or Forensic Medicine, first took its rise in Germany, and, later, was recognised as a necessary branch of study in England. Briefly this science may be described as “that branch of State medicine which treats of the application of medical knowledge to the purposes of the law.” It embraces all questions affecting the civil or social rights of individuals, and of injuries to the person. Although we find traces of the first principles of this science in ancient times, especially in connection with legitimacy, feigned diseases, etc., it is by no means certain that even in Rome the law required any medical inspection of dead bodies. The science dates only from the sixteenth century. The Bishop of Bamberg, in 1507, introduced a penal code requiring the production of medical evidence in certain cases. In 1532, Charles V. induced the Diet of Ratison to adopt a code in which magistrates were ordered to call medical evidence in cases of personal injuries, infanticide, pretended pregnancy, simulated diseases, and poisoning. The actual birth of forensic medicine, however, did not take place until the publication, in Germany, in 1553, of the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina.874 The difficulties which the infant science had to contend against may be estimated from the fact that a few years later a physician named Weiker, who declared that witches and demoniacs were simply persons afflicted with hypochondriasis and hysteria, and should not be punished, was with difficulty saved from the stake by his patron, William, Duke of Cleves.

Ambrose ParÉ wrote on monsters, simulated diseases, and the art of drawing up medico-legal reports.

In 1621-35 Paulo Zacchia, of Rome, published a work entitled QuÆstiones Medico-Legales, which inaugurated a new era in the history of Forensic Medicine. He exhibited immense research in this classical work, the materials for which he collected from 460 authors. Considering that chemistry and physiology were then so imperfectly understood, such a work is a proof of the learning and sagacity of the author.

In 1663 the Danish physician Bartholin proposed the hydrostatic test for the determination of live-birth, the method used to-day in examining the lungs of an infant to discover whether the child was born alive or not, by observing whether they float or sink in water.

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CHAPTER II.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

Bacon and the Inductive Method.—Descartes and Physiology.—Newton.—Boyle and the Royal Society.—The Founders of the Schools of Medical Science.—Sydenham, the English Hippocrates.—Harvey and the Rise of Physiology.—The Microscope in Medicine.—Willis and the Reform of Materia Medica.

The seventeenth century is important in the history of medicine as the era of the two greatest discoveries of modern physiology—the circulation of the blood, and the development of the higher animals from the egg (ovum). Both of these are due to Harvey, and both were made in the midst of the troubles of the great Civil War. The history of medicine is so interwoven at this important period with that of science and philosophy in general, that it is necessary to glance awhile at the great factors which were working out the advancement of medical learning.

Amongst the greatest figures on the scientific stage at the beginning and middle of the seventeenth century are the following:—

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was the great leader in the reformation of modern science, and shares with Descartes the glory of inaugurating modern philosophy. His great work, the Novum Organon, was given to the world just as authority and dogmatism had been discarded from scientific thought, and the era of experiment had begun. It was not Bacon’s contributions to science, not his discoveries, which entitle him to the highest place in the reformation of science, but the general spirit of his philosophy and his connected mode of thinking, his insistence upon the need for rejecting rash generalization, and analysing our experience, employing hypothesis, not by guess work, but by the scientific imagination which calls to its assistance experimental comparison, verification, and proof. Bacon’s philosophy of induction was reared upon a foundation of exclusion and elimination. He relegated theological questions to the region of faith, insisting that experience and observation are the only remedies against prejudice and error.875

The publication of Bacon’s Novum Organon in 1620 resulted in the formation of a society of learned men, who met together in London in 1645 to discuss philosophical subjects and the results of their various experiments in science. They are described as “inquisitive,” a term which aptly illustrates the temper of the times. Taking nothing upon trust, these men inquired for themselves, and left their books to make experiment, as Bacon had urged students of nature to do. About 1648-9 Drs. Wilkins, Wallis, and others removed to Oxford, and with Seth Ward, the Hon. Robert Boyle, Petty, and other men of divinity and physic, often met in the rooms of Dr. Wilkins at Wadham College, and so formed the Philosophical Society of Oxford, which existed only till 1690. About 1658 the members were dispersed, the majority coming to London and attending lectures at Gresham College. Thus, in the midst of civil war, thoughtful and inquiring minds found a refuge from the quarrels of politicians and the babel of contending parties in the pursuit of knowledge and the advancement of research. The Royal Society was organized in 1660, and on 22nd April, 1662, Charles II. constituted it a body politic and corporate. The Philosophical Transactions began 6th March, 1664-5. 1668 Newton invented his reflecting telescope, and on 28th April, 1686, presented to the Society the MS. of his Principia, which the council ordered to be printed.

Rene Descartes (1596-1650), the philosopher, applied himself to the study of physics in all its branches, but especially to physiology. He said that science may be compared to a tree; metaphysics is the root, physics is the trunk, and the three chief branches are mechanics, medicine, and morals,—the three applications of our knowledge to the outward world, to the human body, and to the conduct of life.876 He studied chemistry and anatomy, dissecting the heads of animals in order to explain imagination and memory, which he believed to be physical processes.877 In 1629 he asks Mersenne to take care of himself, “till I find out if there is any means of getting a medical theory based on infallible demonstration, which is what I am now inquiring.”878 Descartes embraced the doctrine of the circulation of the blood as discovered by Harvey, and he did much to popularise it, falling in as it did with his mechanical theory of life. He thought the nerves were tubular vessels which conduct the animal spirits to the muscles, and in their turn convey the impressions of the organs to the brain. He considered man and the animals were machines. “The animals act naturally and by springs, like a watch.”879 “The greatest of all the prejudices we have retained from our infancy is that of believing that the beasts think.”880 Naturally such a monstrous theory did much to encourage vivisection, a practice common with Descartes.881 “The recluses of Port Royal,” says Dr. Wallace,882 “seized it eagerly, discussed automatism, dissected living animals in order to show to a morbid curiosity the circulation of the blood, were careless of the cries of tortured dogs, and finally embalmed the doctrine in a syllogism of their logic: no matter thinks; every soul of beast is matter, therefore no soul of beast thinks. He held that the seat of the mind of man was in that structure of the brain called by anatomists the pineal gland.”

Malebranche (1638-1715) was a disciple of Descartes, who thought his system served to explain the mystery of life and thought. In his famous Recherche de la Verite he anticipated later discoveries in physiology, e.g., Hartley’s principle of the interdependence of vibrations in the nervous system and our conscious states.

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), as a natural philosopher, rendered great services to science. The account of his experiments, written in 1662, on the equilibrium of fluids, entitles him to be considered one of the founders of hydrodynamics. His experiments on the pressure of the air and his invention for measuring it greatly assisted to advance the work begun by Galileo and Torricelli. Not only in the great work done, but in those which were undertaken in consequence of his inspiration, we recognise in Pascal one of the most brilliant scientists of a brilliant age.

Hobbes (1588-1679), the famous author of the Leviathan, endeavoured to base all that he could upon mathematical principles. Philosophy, he said, is concerned with the perfect knowledge of truth in all matters whatsoever. If the moral philosophers had done for mankind what the geometricians had effected, men would have enjoyed an immortal peace.

Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677), the philosopher, had some medical training. His spirit has had a large share in moulding the philosophic thought of the nineteenth century. Novalis saw in him not an atheist, but a “God-intoxicated man.” His philosophy indeed was a pure pantheism; the foundation of his system is the doctrine of one infinite substance. All finite things are modes of this substance.

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), the greatest of natural philosophers, in the years 1685 and 1686—years for ever to be remembered in the history of science—composed almost the whole of his famous work, the Principia.

Robert Boyle (1626-1691), one of the great nature philosophers of the seventeenth century, and one of the founders of the Royal Society, published his first book at Oxford, in 1660, entitled New Experiments, Physico-Mechanical, touching the Spring of Air, and its Effects. He was at one time deeply interested in alchemy. He was the first great investigator who carried out the suggestions of Bacon’s Novum Organon. He was a patient researcher and observer of facts.

Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), the author of the celebrated Historical and Critical Dictionary, was a sceptic, of a peculiar turn of mind. He knew so much concerning every side of every subject which he had considered, that he came to the conclusion that certainty was unattainable.

Van Helmont (1578-1644) was one of the most celebrated followers of Paracelsus. He learned astronomy, astrology, and philosophy at Rouvain, then studied magic under the Jesuits, and afterwards learned law, botany, and medicine; but he became disgusted with the pretensions of the latter science when it failed to cure him of the itch. He became a mystic, and attached himself to the principles of Tauler and Thomas À Kempis. Then he practised medicine as an act of charity, till, falling in with the works of Paracelsus, he devoted ten years to their study. He married, and devoted himself to medicine and chemistry, investigating the composition of the water of mineral springs. Few men have ever formed a nobler conception of the true physician than Van Helmont, or more earnestly endeavoured to live up to it. Notwithstanding his mysticism, science owes much to this philosopher, for he was an acute chemist. We owe to him the first application of the term “gas,” in the sense in which it is used at present. He discovered that gas is disengaged when heat is applied to various bodies, and when acids act upon metals and their carbonates. He discovered carbonic acid. He believed in the existence of an Archeus in man and animals, which is somewhat like the soul of man after the Fall; it resides in the stomach as creative thought, in the spleen as appetite. This Archeus is a ferment, and is the generative principle and basis of life. Disease is due to the Fall of Man. The Archeus influus causes general diseases; the Archei insiti, local diseases: dropsy, for example, is due to an obstruction of the passage of the kidney secretion by the enraged Archeus. Van Helmont gave wine in fevers, abhorred bleeding, and advocated the use of simple chemical medicines.

Francis de la BoË (Sylvius), (1614-1672) was a physician who founded the Medico-Chemical Sect amongst doctors. Health and disease he held to be due to the relations of the fluids of the body and their neutrality, diseases being caused by their acidity or alkalinity.

Thomas Goulston, M.D. (died 1632), was a distinguished London physician, who was not less famous for his classic learning and theology than for the practice of his profession. He founded what are known as the Goulstonian lectures, which are delivered by one of the four youngest doctors of the Royal College of Physicians, London. “A dead body was, if possible, to be procured, and two or more diseases treated of.”

Thomas Winston, M.D. (born 1575), was professor of physic in Gresham College. His lectures included “an entire body of anatomy,” and were considered, when published, as the most complete and accurate then extant in English.

The Anatomy Lecture at Oxford was first proposed to the University on Nov. 17th, 1623, with an endowment of £25 a year stipend. Out of this the reader had “to pay yearly to a skilful Chirurgeon or Dissector of the body, to be named by the said reader, the sums of and £3 and £2 more by the year towards the ordering and burying of the body.”883 Dr. Clayton, the King’s Professor of Physic, was the first reader, and the first chirurgeon was Bernard Wright.884

Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608-1679), the founder of the Mathematical School of Medicine, which attempted to subject to calculation the phenomena of the living economy, was professor of medicine at Florence. He restricted the application of his system chiefly to muscular motions, or to those which are evidently of a mechanical character. Physiology is exceedingly indebted to this school for many valuable suggestions, and Boerhaave distinctly acknowledged them in his Institutions.885

George Joyliffe, M.D. (died 1658), was partly concerned in the discovery of the lymphatics. It is not possible to say precisely to whom the discovery of the lymphatics was due; they seem to have been observed independently about the year 1651 to 1652 by Rudbeck a Swede, by Bartholine a Dane, and by Joyliffe.886

A new era in medicine was inaugurated by Thomas Sydenham, M.D. (1624-1689), “the British Hippocrates,” whose only standard was observation and experience, and whose faith in the healing power of nature was unlimited. He studied at Oxford, but he graduated at Cambridge. He was the friend of Locke and of Robert Boyle. He was looked upon by the faculty with disfavour as an innovator, because, in his own words to Boyle, he endeavoured to reduce practice to a greater easiness and plainness. His fame as the father of English medicine was posthumous. It was indeed acknowledged in his lifetime that he rendered good service to medicine by his “expectant” treatment of small-pox, by his invention of his laudanum (the first form of a tincture of opium such as we have it), and for his advocacy of the use of Peruvian bark in agues. Yet his professional brethren were inclined to look upon him as a sectary, and considerable opposition was manifested towards him. Arbuthnot, in 1727, styled him “Æmulus Hippocrates.” Boerhaave referred to him as “AngliÆ lumen, artis Phoebum, veram Hippocratici viri speciem.” He did the best he could to cure his patients without mystery and resort to the traditional and often ridiculous dogmas of the medical craft. Many good stories are extant which illustrate this fact. He was once called to prescribe for a gentleman who had been subjected to the lowering treatment so much in vogue in those days. He found him pitifully depressed. Sydenham “conceived that this was occasioned partly by his long illness, partly by the previous evacuations, and partly by emptiness. I therefore ordered him a roast chicken and a pint of canary.” When Blackmore first engaged in the study of medicine, he asked Dr. Sydenham what authors he should read, and was told to study Don Quixote, “which,” he said, “is a very good book; I read it still.” He used to say that there were cases in his practice where “I have consulted my patients’ safety and my own reputation most effectually by doing nothing at all.”

Sydenham, having long attended a rich man for an illness which had arisen and was kept going chiefly by his own indolence and luxurious habits, at last told him that he could do no more for him, but that there lived at Inverness a certain physician, named Robinson, who would doubtless be able to cure him. Provided with a letter of introduction and a complete history of the “case,” the invalid set out on the long journey to Inverness. Arrived at his destination, full of hope and eager expectation of a cure, he inquired diligently for Dr. Robinson, only to learn that there was no such doctor there, neither had there been in the memory of the oldest inhabitant. The gentleman returned to London full of indignation against Sydenham, whom he violently rated for sending him so far on a fool’s errand. “But,” exclaimed Sydenham, “you are in much better health!” “Yes,” replied the patient, “I am now well enough, but no thanks to you.” “No,” answered Sydenham; “it was Dr. Robinson who cured you. I wished to send you a journey with some object and interest in view; in going, you had Dr. Robinson and his wonderful cures in contemplation; and in returning, you were equally engaged in thinking of scolding me.”

The Civil War, which violently upset the speculations and research at Oxford, when, as Antony Wood says, the University was “empty as to scholars, but pretty well replenished with Parliamentary soldiers,” afforded just that stimulus to thought and that upheaval of dogma and prejudice which were eminently favourable to the advance of medical science. Men had learned to treat old doctrines with little respect for their mere antiquity; authority was discredited, it was subjected to test, observation and criticism; men no longer believed those doctrines about God and His counsels which the Fathers and the Church taught them about religion, much less were they inclined to bow to Aristotle and Galen when they dictated to them on medicine. Anciently, when bitten by a mad dog, it was enough for them to believe with the fathers of medicine that it was sufficient for the patient to hold some herb dittany in the left hand, while he scratched his back with the other to ensure his future safety. Men took to thinking for themselves; the spirit of investigation was aroused; men’s minds, in every condition of society, in every town and village, were aroused to activity. There probably never was a time when there was more activity of thought in Oxford than at this period. The stimulus of collision evoked many sparks of genius, and the Civil War produced at our Universities wholesome disturbance, not destruction of any good things. Sydenham, therefore, was distinctly the product of his age. He does not seem to have been a very learned man, neither, on the other hand, was he wholly untaught. There are not many evidences in his works of very wide reading of medical literature, though he was a sincere admirer of Hippocrates, evidently from a sound acquaintance with his works. Sydenham’s first medical work was published in 1666. It consisted of accounts of continued fevers, symptoms of the same, of intermittent fevers and small-pox, and was entitled Methodus Curandi Febres, Propriis observationibus superstructa. In it the author maintains that “a fever is Nature’s engine which she brings into the field to remove her enemy, or her handmaid, either for evacuating the impurities of the blood, or for reducing it into a new state. Secondly, that the true and genuine cure of this sickness consists in such a tempering of the commotion of the blood, that it may neither exceed nor be too languid.”887

It was about this period that Peruvian bark was first introduced into European medicine. Perhaps no other drug has ever been so widely and deservedly used as this American remedy for fevers, agues, and debility. The earliest authenticated account of the use of Cinchona bark in medicine is found in 1638, when the Countess of Cinchon, the wife of the Governor of Peru, was cured of fever by its administration. The Jesuit missionaries are said to have sent accounts of its virtues to Europe, in consequence of one of their brethren having been cured of fever by taking it at the suggestion of a South American Indian.

The University of Montpellier, at the time of our great Civil War, was much derided by the Paris Faculty for its laxity in granting degrees in medicine. The enemies of Montpellier said that a three-months’ residence, and the keeping of an act and opponency, sufficed to make a man a Bachelor of Medicine. The professors were accused of neglecting their lectures and selling their degrees; but, worse than all, it was alleged that blood-letting and purging had fallen into disuse, and that the Montpellier treatment was “more expectant than heroic, and more tonic than evacuant.”888 Friendly historians, on the other hand, say that at this period the medicinal uses of calomel and antimony were better taught there than elsewhere; that museums, libraries, and good clinical teaching flourished, so as to afford the student excellent means of acquiring a sound knowledge of his profession.889

William Harvey, M.D., the famous discoverer of the circulation of the blood, and the greatest physiologist the world has ever seen, was born at Folkestone, 1578. He entered Caius College, Cambridge, 1593. Having taken his degree, he travelled through France and Germany, and then visited Padua, the most celebrated school of medicine of that time. Fabricius ab AquÂpendente was then professor of anatomy, Minadous professor of medicine, and Casserius professor of surgery. In 1615 Harvey was appointed Lumleian lecturer, and he commenced his course of lectures in the following year—the year of Shakespeare’s death.

In this course he is supposed to have expounded his views on the circulation of the blood, which rendered his name immortal. His celebrated work, Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis, was published in 1628; but he says in that work that for more than nine years he had confirmed and illustrated his opinion in his lectures, by arguments which were founded on ocular demonstration. He was appointed physician extraordinary to James I. in 1618. He was in attendance on King Charles I. at the battle of Edgehill. The king had been an enlightened patron of Harvey’s researches, and had placed the royal deer parks at Hampton Court and Windsor at his disposal. In 1651 Harvey’s Exercitationes de Generatione was published.

Aristotle knew but little of the vessels of the body, yet he traced the origin of all the veins to the heart, and he seems to have been aware of the distinction between veins and arteries. “Every artery,” he says, “is accompanied by a vein; the former are filled only with breath or air.”890

Aristotle thought that the windpipe conveys air into the heart. Although Galen understood the muscles very well, he knew little of the vessels. The liver he held to be the origin of the veins, and the heart of the arteries. He knew, however, of their junctions or anastomoses.891

Mondino, the anatomist of Bologna, who dissected and taught in 1315, had some idea of the circulation of the blood, for he says that the heart transmits blood to the lungs.892 The great Italian anatomists diligent students as they were of the human frame, all missed the great discovery. Servetus, who was burnt by Calvin as a heretic in Geneva in 1553, is the first person who distinctly describes the small circulation, or that which carries the blood from the heart to the lungs and back again to the heart. He says:893 “The communication between the right and left ventricles of the heart is made, not as is commonly believed, through the partition of the heart, but by a remarkable artifice the blood is carried from the right ventricle by a long circuit through the lungs; is elaborated by the lungs, made yellow, and transferred from the vena arteriosa into the arteria venosa.” Still, his theories are full of fancies about a “vital spirit, which has its origin in the left ventricle,” and are accordingly unscientific to that extent. Servetus was, however, certainly the true predecessor of Harvey in physiology; this is universally admitted.894

Realdus Columbus895 is thought by some writers to have had a still greater share than Servetus in the discovery of the circulation. He denies the muscularity of the heart, yet correctly teaches that the blood passes from the right to the left ventricle, not through the partition in the heart but through the lungs. Harvey quotes Columbus, but does not refer to Servetus. It must be remembered that when the unfortunate Servetus was burnt at the stake, his work was destroyed with him, and only two copies are known to have escaped the flames.896

The discovery of the valves of the veins by Sylvius and Fabricius897 undoubtedly was the chief factor in the preparation for Harvey’s discovery of the circulation. It was he who first appreciated their significance, and grasped the full meaning of the pulmonary circulation. CÆsalpinus, in his QuÆstiones PeripateticÆ (1571), is another claimant for the honours due to Harvey; he had certain confused ideas of the general circulation, and he made some experiments which enabled him to understand the pulmonary circulation, but he certainly did not know the circulation of the blood as a whole; he knew no more of it, in fact, than he gathered from Galen and Servetus.898

Even Harvey, splendid as was the work he did, could not entirely demonstrate the complete circulation of the blood. He was not able to discover the capillary vessels by which the blood passes from the arteries to the veins. This, the only missing point, was reserved for Malpighi to discover. In 1661 this celebrated anatomist saw in the lungs of a frog, by the aid of the newly invented microscope, the blood passing from one set of vessels to the other.

Harvey began his investigations by dissecting a great number of living animals. He examined in this way dogs, pigs, serpents, frogs, and fishes. He did not disdain to learn even from slugs, oysters, lobsters, and insects, and the chick itself while still in the shell. He observed and experimented upon the ventricles, the auricles, the arteries, and the veins. He learned precisely the object of the valves of the veins—to favour the flow of the blood towards the heart; and it was to this latter observation, and not the vivisection, that he attributed his splendid discovery.

“I remember,” says Boyle, “that when I asked our famous Harvey what were the things that induced him to think of a circulation of the blood, he answered me, that when he took notice that the valves in the veins of so many parts of the body were so placed, that they gave a free passage to the blood towards the heart, but opposed the passage of the venal blood the contrary way, he was incited to imagine that so provident a cause as Nature had not placed so many valves without design; and no design seemed more probable than that the blood should be sent through the arteries, and return through the veins, whose valves did not oppose its cause that way.” What clear views of the motions and pressure of a fluid circulating in ramifying tubes must have been held by Harvey to enable him to deduce his discovery from a contemplation of the simple valves! It was observation, experience, which led him to this. “In every science,” he says,899 “be it what it will, a diligent observation is requisite, and sense itself must be frequently consulted. We must not rely upon other men’s experience, but our own, without which no man is a proper disciple of any part of natural knowledge.”

Dr. J.H. Bridges, of the Local Government Board, delivered the Harveian oration on October 20th, 1892, at the Royal College of Physicians. Dr. Bridges said: “In his discovery William Harvey employed every method of biological research, direct observation, experiment, above all the great Aristotelian method of comparison to which he himself attributes his success. His manuscript notes show how freely he used it. They show that he had dissected no less than eighty species of animals. It is sometimes said that experimentation on living animals was the principal process of discovery. This I believe to be an exaggerated view, though such experiments were effective in convincing others of the discovery when made. It need not be said that no ethical problem connected with this matter was recognised in Harvey’s time. The first to recognise such a problem was that great and successful experimenter, deep thinker, and humane man, Sir Charles Bell. What were the effects of Harvey’s discovery? It was assuredly the most momentous event in medical history since the time of Galen. It was the first attempt to show that the processes of the human body followed or accompanied each other by laws as certain and precise as those which Kepler and Galileo were revealing in the solar system or on the earth’s surface. Henceforth it became clear that all laws of force and energy that operated in the inorganic world were applicable to the human body.”

The case for Harvey’s originality is well put by the author of the article on Harvey in the Dictionary of National Biography. “The modern controversy as to whether the discovery was taken from some previous author is sufficiently refuted by the opinion of the opponents of his views in his own time, who agreed in denouncing the doctrine as new; by the laborious method of gradual demonstration obvious in his book and lectures; and lastly, by the complete absence of lucid demonstration of the action of the heart and course of the blood in CÆsalpinus, Servetus, and all others who have been suggested as possible originals of the discovery. It remains to this day the greatest of the discoveries of physiology, and its whole honour belongs to Harvey.”

“That there is one blood stream, common to both arteries and veins, that the blood poured into the right auricle passes into the right ventricle, that it is from there forced by the contraction of the ventricular walls along the pulmonary artery through the lungs and pulmonary veins to the left auricle, that it then passes into the left ventricle to be distributed through the aorta to every part of the animal body; and that the heart is the great propeller of this perpetual motion, as in a circle. This is the great truth of the motion of the heart and blood, commonly called the circulation, and must for ever remain the glorious legacy of William Harvey to rational physiology and medicine in every land.”900

Harvey explains how he was led to his great discovery: “When I first gave my mind to vivisections as a means of discovering the motions and uses of the heart, and sought to discover these from actual inspection, and not from the writings of others, I found the task so truly arduous, so full of difficulties, that I was almost tempted to think with Frascatorius, that the motion of the heart was only to be comprehended by God. For I could neither rightly perceive at first when the systole and when the diastole took place, nor when and where dilatation and contraction occurred, by reason of the rapidity of the motion, which in many animals is accomplished in the twinkling of an eye, coming and going like a flash of lightning; so that the systole presented itself to me now from this point, now from that; the diastole the same; and then everything was reversed, the motions occurring, as it seemed, variously and confusedly together. My mind was therefore greatly unsettled, nor did I know what I should myself conclude, nor what believe from others. I was not surprised that Andreas Laurentius should have written that the motion of the heart was as perplexing as the flux and reflux of Euripus had appeared to Aristotle. At length, and by using greater diligence and investigation, making frequent inspection of many and various animals, and collating numerous observations, I thought that I had attained to the truth, that I should extricate myself and escape from this labyrinth, and that I had discovered what I so much desired, both the motion and the use of the heart and arteries.”901

John Locke (1632-1704). The great philosopher was a thoroughly educated physician engaged in the practice of medicine. He was the friend of Sydenham, whose principles he defended and whose works are doubtless permeated with the thoughts of the author of the famous treatise on the Human Understanding. In a letter of Locke’s to W. Molyneux he says: “You cannot imagine how far a little observation carefully made by a man not tied up to the four humours [Galen], or sal, sulphur, and mercury [Paracelsus], or to acid and alkali [Sylvius and Willis], which has of late prevailed, will carry a man in the curing of diseases, though very stubborn and dangerous; and that with very little and common things, and almost no medicine at all.” Locke declared that we have no innate ideas, but that all our knowledge is derived from experience. The acquirement of knowledge is due to the investigation of things by the bodily senses.

Surgery about this period began to flourish in England. Richard Wiseman (1625-1686), the “Father of English Surgery,” was in the royal service from Charles I. to James II. His military experience greatly assisted him in his profession. He treated aneurism by compression, practised “flap-amputation,” and laid down rules for operating for hernia.

James Primrose, M.D. (died 1659), was a voluminous writer who opposed the teaching of Harvey on the circulation of the blood.

Baldwin Hamey, jun., M.D., was the most munificent of all the benefactors of the London College of Physicians. He was lecturer on Anatomy at the College in 1647, and a voluminous writer, though he published little or nothing.

Francis Glisson, M.D. (died 1677), was one of the first of the group of anatomists in England who, incited by Harvey’s example, devoted themselves to enthusiastic research. His account of the cellular envelope of the portal vein in his work De Hepate, published in 1654, has immortalised his name in the designation “Glisson’s capsule.” He wrote a work on rickets, De Rachitide seu Morbo Puerili. Glisson ascribed to the lymphatic vessels the function of absorption.

Jonathan Goddard, M.D. (died 1674), frequented the meetings which gave birth to the Royal Society. He was a good chemist, and invented the famous volatile drops known on the Continent as the GuttÆ AnglicanÆ. He made the first telescope ever constructed in this country.

Daniel Whistler, M.D. (died 1684), wrote an essay on “The Rickets,” which is the earliest printed account we have of that disease.

Thomas Wharton, M.D. (died 1673), was a very distinguished anatomist, who remained in London during the whole of the plague of 1666. He was the author of the most accurate work on the glands of the body and their diseases which up to that time had appeared.

Raymond Vieussens in 1684 published a great work on the anatomy of the brain, spinal cord, and nerves. He investigated the sympathetic nerve and the structure of the heart.

Leeuwenhoeck (1632-1723) discovered the corpuscles in the blood and the spermatozoa.

Marcello Malpighi (1628-1694), by his microscopical researches, first explained the organization of the lung and the terminations of the bronchial tubes. He traced the termination of the arteries in the veins, and thus completed the discovery of the circulation of the blood; by his researches in the deeper layer of the cuticle, and certain bodies in the spleen and kidney, he has given his name to these structures.

The invention of the MICROSCOPE in 1621 was of the utmost importance to the study of minute anatomy and physiology.

Pierre Dionis (died 1718), a famous French surgeon, published a work on the anatomy of man, which was translated into Chinese at the emperor’s request. He also wrote on rickets in relation to the pelvis, and advanced the study of dentistry. He explained the circulation, and wrote a monograph on catalepsy.

Thomas Bartholin (1619-1680), professor of anatomy at Copenhagen, made important investigations on the lacteals and lymphatic vessels.

Caspar Assellius (1581-1626) discovered the chyliferous vessels in the dog; Fabrice de Peiresc (1580-1637), dissecting a criminal two hours after execution, discovered them in man; Van Horne (1621-1670), in 1652, first demonstrated the vessels in man. (It has, however, been claimed that George Jolyffe discovered the lymphatics in 1650.)

Jean Pecquet (1622-1674), a French physician, published, in 1651, his New Anatomical Experiments, in which he made known his discovery of the receptacle of the chyle, till then unknown, and described the vessel which conveys the chyle to the subclavian vein.

Olaus Rudbeck (1630-1702), a Swedish surgeon, shares with Jolyffe the honour of the discovery of the termination of the lymphatic vessels. He demonstrated them in the presence of Queen Christina, and traced them to the thoracic duct, and the latter to the subclavian vein.

Gerard Blaes (died 1662) made numerous discoveries in connection with the glands.

Antony Nuck (1650-1692) first injected the lymphatics with quicksilver, rectified various errors in the work of his predecessors, and by his own researches did much to complete the anatomy of the glands.

Paul Sarpi (1552-1623), of Venice, was a monk of whom La Courayer said, “Qu’il Était Catholique en gros et quelque fois Protestant en dÉtail.” He was the friend of Galileo, and, though he did not invent the telescope, was the first who made an accurate map of the moon. It is not true that he anticipated Harvey in his discovery of the circulation, though he was a great physiologist, and discovered the contractility of the iris.

Nathanael Highmore (1613-1685) was a physician and anatomist who is chiefly remembered for his description of the cavity in the superior maxillary bone which bears his name. It had, however, been previously described by CassØrius. He demonstrated the difference between the lacteals and the mesenteric veins.

George Wirsung (died 1643) was a prosector to Vesalius. He discovered the excretory duct of the pancreas.

Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723) was the first to suggest the injection of medicines into the veins.

Thorbern, a Danish peasant, about this time invented an instrument for amputating the elongated uvula.

Jan Swammerdam (1637-1686) was the first to prove that the queen bee was a female.

Thomas Millington (circ. 1676) pointed out the sexual organs of plants.

Felix Vicq d’Azyr (1748-1794) was one of the zoologists whose researches exercised an important influence on the progress of anatomy. He investigated the origin of the brain and nerves, and the comparative anatomy of the vocal organs.

Sir Thomas Browne, M.D., of Norwich (1605-1682), the author of the immortal Religio Medici, studied medicine at Montpellier, Padua, and Leyden. He was a man who, in his own words, could not do nothing. Though he wrote a famous work on Vulgar Errors, he could not rise superior to the commonest one of his time—the belief in witchcraft.

Thomas Willis, M.D. (1621-1675), was celebrated for his researches in the anatomy and pathology of the brain. Unfortunately he neglected observation for theorising.

Dr. Freind said of Willis that he was the first inventor of the nervous system. Willis taught that the cerebrum is the seat of the intellectual faculties, and the source from which spring the voluntary motions. He consigned the involuntary motions to the cerebellum; these go on in a regular manner, without our knowledge and independently of our will. He supposed that the nerves of voluntary motions arise chiefly from the cerebrum, and those of the involuntary motions from the cerebellum or its appendages.902

Willis deserves to be gratefully remembered in medical history as the great reformer of pharmacology. Having been led to consider how it is that medicines act on the various organs of the body, he reflected that there was usually very little relationship between the means of cure and the physiological and pathological processes to be influenced. Medicines were given at random. Mineral poisons, such as antimony, were recklessly prescribed, to the destruction, not of the disease only, but too frequently of the patient also. “So heedlessly,” says Willis, “are these executioners in the habit of sporting with the human body, while they are led to prepare and administer these dangerous medicines, not by any deliberation, nor by the guidance of any method, but by mere hazard and blind impulse.”903

The object of Willis was to establish a direct and reasonable relationship between the physiological and morbid conditions of the body on the one hand, and the indications for cure and the therapeutic means by which these were to be brought about on the other.904 It was a great task, and Willis did not wholly succeed; but his method was the right one, however grievously he failed to carry it into practice, for he prescribed blood, the human skull, salt of vipers, water of snails and earthworms, millipeds, and other things which he ought to have known could have no effect on any disease.905 We must not be too severely critical, for Willis was the first to attempt the reformation of this degraded state of Materia Medica.

The state of Materia Medica (or the drugs and chemicals used by the physician) during the end of the seventeenth and the earlier part of the eighteenth century, was remarkable, says Dr. Thomson,906 for four circumstances.

First, there was a great number of remedies strongly recommended for the cure of diseases; but many of them were inert and useless, and thus the practitioner was perplexed and confused.

Secondly, the popular confidence in all these medicines was irrational and extreme.

Thirdly, it was the custom to combine in one prescription a great number of ingredients. The Pharmacopoeias of the period contain formulÆ which embraced in some instances from twenty-four up to as many as fifty-two ingredients. Sydenham is the first who exhibits any tendency to greater simplicity in his prescriptions.

Lastly, there was no rational or logical connection between the disease to be cured and the remedy with which it was treated. Empiricism and superstition to a serious extent dominated medicine, and retarded its progress.

Yet, even during the seventeenth century, original thinkers and men of genius connected with one or other of the universities, struck out a path for themselves which led to brighter things. First was Harvey, then came Wharton, Glisson, Willis, Lower, Mayow, Grew, Charleton, Collins, Sydenham, Morton, Bennet, and Ridley; all these men were students of anatomy and ardent investigators in the field of physiology. It is true that it was long before the labours of these pioneers of scientific medicine resulted in any marked improvement in the actual method of treating disease; it is no less certain that our methods of to-day are based upon the labours of the great scientific investigators of the age we are considering.

Samuel Collins, M.D. (died 1710), was celebrated as an accomplished comparative anatomist, whose work was much praised by Boerhaave and Haller.

William Croone, M.D. (died 1684), was one of the original Fellows of the Royal Society. In 1670 he was appointed lecturer on anatomy at Surgeons’ Hall. He is gratefully remembered as the founder of what is now called the “Croonian Lecture.”

Richard Lower, M.D. (1631-1691), was an anatomist and physiologist, who assisted Willis in his researches, and who wrote a treatise on transfusion of blood, which he practised at Oxford in 1665, and also before the Royal Society. His name is kept in remembrance by anatomists by its association with the study of the heart in the structure known as the “tuberculum Lowerii.”

We must not omit to mention FrÈre Jacques, who went to Paris in 1697; he was a Franciscan monk, who was a famous operator for the stone. Originally a day labourer, he became so expert a lithotomist that he is said to have cut nearly 5,000 persons in the course of his life. In the height of his success he had no knowledge of anatomy, though he was afterwards induced to learn it. He is for ever celebrated as the inventor of the lateral method in lithotomy.907

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CHAPTER III.
SKATOLOGICAL MEDICINE AND THE REFORM OF PHARMACOLOGY.

Loathsome Medicines.—Sympathetical Cures.—Weapon-Salve.—Superstitions.

Notwithstanding all the splendid scientific work of the period, the absurdest superstitions about amulets and charms still held their ground. Sir John Harrington, in his Schoole of Salerne, printed in 1624, says: “Alwaies in your hands use eyther Corall or yellow Amber, or a chalcedonium, or a sweet Pommander, or some like precious stone to be worne in a ring upon the little finger of the left hand; have in your rings eyther a Smaragd, a Saphire, or a Draconites, which you shall beare for an ornament; for in stones, as also in hearbes, there is great efficacie and vertue, but they are not altogether perceived by us; hold sometime in your mouth eyther a Hyacinth, or a Crystall, or a Granat, or pure Gold, or Silver, or else sometimes pure Sugar-candy. For Aristotle doth affirme, and so doth Albertus Magnus, that a Smaragd worne about the necke, is good against the Falling-sicknes; for surely the virtue of an hearbe is great, but much more the vertue of a precious stone, which is very likely that they are endued with occult and hidden vertues.”

Materia Medica.

Amongst those who, after Willis, laboured to reform pharmacology may be mentioned—

John Zwelfer, a learned physician of Vienna, who published in 1651 a greatly improved Pharmacopoeia, which rejected many useless and improper medicines.

Daniel Ludwig in 1671 published a dissertation on useless and unsatisfactory drugs. He denied the virtues of earthworms, toads, and the like.

Moses Charas (1618-1698) was a pharmacist of Paris, who founded the historical establishment known as the VipÈres d’or of that city. Seventeenth-century pharmacy owed much to this man, who was “one of the last of the Arabian polypharmacists, one of the last of the adepts of expiring alchemy, and the immediate precursor of the epoch of Lemery.”908 He studied pharmacy at Montpellier. He was acquainted with natural history.

No history of medicine would be complete without reference to the immense number of loathsome and filthy substances which from the remotest times, even up to the present, have been used as medicines. This subject has been treated in a very complete form by Captain Bourke in his work on Skatological Rites of all Nations, an important section of which is devoted to “Skatological Medicine.”909 The theory underlying the use of disgusting remedies seems to be this: Nearly all medicines which have any efficacy are unpleasant to take; a bitter infusion of tonic leaves or roots is not usually agreeable; many good medicines are very nasty, but their efficacy is universally acknowledged. Ignorant persons argue that the nastiness is the sign of the efficacy; that the more disgusting the potion or pill, the more good it will do. Even at the present day pauper and hospital patients of the lower classes have no faith in medicines which are not dark in colour and rich in sediment; elegant pharmacy would soon destroy the best East-End practice. The most repulsive sediment in a mixture is readily swallowed, and is usually considered highly “nourishing.” Now from nasty herbal medicines to filthy animal excretions is but a short step. Pliny gives hundreds of instances of skatological remedies in his Natural History, and the ancient writers frequently prescribe them. They consist of such things as the dung and urine of various animals, not excepting those of man, of the catamenial and lochial discharges, of the sweat of athletes, of the parasites of human and animal bodies, of ear wax, human blood, etc.

“Xenocrates of Aphrodisias (about A.D. 70) introduced disgusting filth as medicines; e.g., ear wax, catamenial fluid, human flesh, bats’ blood, etc.”910

“Asclepiades Pharmacion (about A.D. 100) recommended even animal excrement as a medicine.”911

Quintus Serenus Samonicus (died A.D. 211) prescribed mouse dung in poultices; goats’ urine internally for stone in the bladder; earth and dung from a wagon rut for colic, externally.912

Marcellus Empiricus, physician to Theodosius (345-395), prescribed natural pills of rabbit’s dung. Dr. Baas declares that this remedy is in use on the Rhine at the present day, as a cure for consumption.913

Culpeper, in his translation of the Pharmacopoeia (1653), ridicules the remedies enumerated in that work. Thus the College of Physicians employ “the fat, grease, or suet of a duck, goose, eel, bore, heron, thymallos (‘if you know where to get it,’ says Culpeper), dog, capon, bever, wild cat, stork, hedgehog, hen, man, lyon, hare, kite, or jack (if they have any fat, I am persuaded ’tis worth twelve pence the grain), wolf, mouse of the mountains (if you can catch them), pardal, hog, serpent, badger, bear, fox, vulture (if you can catch them), album grÆcum, east and west benzoar, stone taken out a man’s bladder, viper’s flesh, the brain of hares and sparrows, the rennet of a lamb, kid, hare, and a calf and a horse too (quoth the colledg) [they should have put the rennet of an ass to make medicine for their addle brains], the excrement of a goose, of a dog, of a goat, of pidgeons, of a stone horse, of swallows, of men, of women, of mice, of peacocks,” etc., etc.

There was, says Southey,914 a water of man’s blood which in Queen Elizabeth’s day was a new invention, “whereof some princes had very great estimation, and used it for to remain thereby in their force, and, as they thought, to live long.” They chose a strong young man of twenty-five, dieted him for a month on the best meats, wines and spices, and at the month’s end they bled him in both arms as much as he could “tolerate and abide.” They added a handful of salt to six pounds of this blood, and distilled it seven times, pouring water upon the residuum after every distillation. An ounce of this was to be taken three or four times a year. As the life was thought to be in the blood, it was believed it could thus be transferred.

Dr. O. MÖller says that in Denmark, even now in some few places, human excrements are not entirely obsolete as epispastic applications in inflammation of the breast.915

Dr. Baas says916 that urine is taken in the Rhine provinces in fevers instead of quinine. This was recommended by the surgical writer Schmidt in 1649. In the seventeenth century the old pharmacies of Germany contained, amongst other disgusting remedies, frog-spawn water, mole’s blood, oil of spiders, snake’s tongue, mouse dung, spirits of human brain, urine of a new-born child, etc.917 The dung of screech-owls was prescribed for melancholy, as also was the dung of doves and calves boiled in wine, ox-dung, etc. Dog-dung and fleas boiled with sage was a medicine for gout, and death-sweat was used as a cure for warts.918

Mould from the churchyard is used in some parts of Ireland and in Shetland medicinally. Clay or mould from a priest’s grave boiled with milk is given as a decoction for the cure of disease.919 The dew collected from the grave of the last man buried in a churchyard has been used as a lotion for goitre. It is so employed at Launceston.920 In Shetland a stitch in the side was treated by applying mould dug from a grave and heated, the mould was to be taken from and returned to the grave before sunset.921 In Lincolnshire a portion of a human skull taken from the grave was grated and given to epileptics for the cure of fits. A similar custom prevailed in Kirkwall, at Caithness, and the Western islands—the patient was made to drink from a suicide’s skull.922

In the year 1852 I saw amongst the more precious drugs in the shop of a pharmaceutical chemist at Leamington a bottle labelled in the ordinary way with the words, “Moss from a Dead-Man’s Skull.” This has long been used superstitiously, dried, powdered, and taken as snuff, for headache and bleeding at the nose.923

Sympathetical Cures.

A curious chapter in the history of surgery is found in the popular belief in “sympathetical cures,” which prevailed in the reigns of James I. and Charles I. Sir Kenelm Digby professed to have introduced a method of curing wounds by the “powder of sympathy.” Dr. Pettigrew,, in his Superstitions of Medicine and Surgery, says that a Mr. James Howel, endeavouring to part some friends who were fighting a duel, received a severe wound in his hand. The king sent one of his own surgeons to attend him; but as the wound did not make good progress, application was made to Sir Kenelm Digby, who first inquired if the patient had any article which had the blood upon it. Mr. Howel sent for the garter with which his hand had been bound; then a basin of water having been brought, Sir Kenelm dissolved therein some powder of vitriol, and immersed the bloody garter in the solution. The patient was instructed to lay aside all his plasters and keep the wound clean and in a moderate temperature. All the while the garter lay in the solution of vitriol. The patient did well; probably if it had been applied to the injured part it would have made it worse. In the course of five or six days the wound was cicatrized and a cure effected. Sir Kenelm professed to have learned the secret from a Carmelite friar. It was communicated to the king’s physician, Dr. Mayerne, and before long every country barber knew of it. Sir Kenelm Digby discoursed on the matter before an assembly of nobles and learned men at Montpellier in France, and endeavoured to explain the action of his powder by all sorts of conjectures, as emanation of light, the action of impinging rays, etc. He tried to prove that the spirit which emanated from the vitriol became incorporated with the blood, and there met the exhalation of hot spirits from the inflamed part.

Infinitely simpler, however, was the process of cure. Nature, left to herself, did the whole of the work. It seemed, as Dr. Pettigrew says, that it had hitherto been the practice of surgeons to place every obstacle in the way of the union of severed parts of the body. What with ointments and various more or less filthy applications, the edges of the wound were kept apart, and so the healing process was retarded.

Of a kindred character to the “powder of sympathy” was the “weapon salve” of the period. Instead of anointing the wound, the knife, axe, or other instrument which caused it was smeared with ointment and the weapon was then carefully wrapped up and put away. Dryden refers to this same “weapon salve” in the “Tempest,” Act V. sc. 1. Dr. Pettigrew says that the practice was at one time very general.924

The principle underlying the doctrine of sympathetic powders was explained by Sir Kenelm thus: “In time of common contagion they use to carry about them the powder of a toad, and sometimes a living toad or spider shut up in a box; or else they carry arsenic, or some other venomous substance, which draws unto it the contagious air, which otherwise would infect the party; and the same powder of toad draws unto it the poison of a pestilential cold. The scurf or farcy is a venomous and contagious humour within the body of a horse; hang a toad about the neck of the horse in a little bag, and he will be cured infallibly; the toad, which is the stronger poison, drawing to it the venom which was within the horse.”925

The same author says that persons of ill breath can be cured by holding their mouths open at a cesspool, the greater stink having the power to draw away the less.926

In the reign of Charles II. a gentleman named Valentine Greatrakes, of a good family and education, “felt an impulse that the gift of curing the king’s evil was bestowed upon him.” He published an account of his cures of this and other diseases, ague, epilepsy, and palsy, and some other complaints more or less connected with the nervous system, in a letter to the Hon. Robert Boyle. He seems to have performed his cures, which were by some persons considered miraculous, by a kind of massage, or “by the Stroaking of the Hands.” The cures were simply the effect of an excited imagination.927

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CHAPTER IV.
BATHS AND MINERAL WATERS.

Miraculous Springs.—The Pool of Bethesda.—Herb-baths.

Especially in Germany mineral waters achieved great popularity in the treatment of diseases in the seventeenth century.

In ancient times, according to Pliny, Paulus Ægineta, and others, mineral waters were recognised as possessing curative effects, and the temples of health were frequently erected in contiguity to these powerful aids to treatment. Savages are everywhere fully aware of the value of such medicinal waters, and avail themselves of their benefits. Hot springs, wherever they occur, are highly esteemed by the natives. Humboldt states that on Christianity being introduced into Iceland, the natives refused to be baptized in any but the waters of the geysers.928 Hooker tells us that in the hot springs of Yeuntong, which burst from the bank of the Lachen, in the Himalayas, the natives remain three days at a time, bathing in the saline and slightly sulphuretted waters. No better treatment for certain forms of skin diseases could be followed.929 Such a course of treatment is carried out now at the baths of Leuk, in Switzerland, amongst other places. There the patients take their meals and play cards, chess, draughts, etc., while up to their necks in the warm medicinal waters. Hooker tells us, again, of the use of hot baths amongst the Sikkim Bhoteeas. The bath consists of a hollowed prostrate tree trunk, the water of which is heated by throwing in hot stones with bamboo tongs. They can raise the temperature to 114°, the patient submitting to this at intervals for several days, never leaving till wholly exhausted.930

Dr. Mead931 thinks that the Pool of Bethesda, spoken of in the Gospel of St. John, chap, v., was a medicinal bath, whose virtues principally resided in the mud which settled at the bottom. It was necessary, therefore, that the pool should be “troubled,” that is to say, stirred up, so that the person bathing therein might derive benefit from the metallic salts, “perhaps from sulphur, alum, or nitre,” which settled at the bottom. Celsus and Pliny recommend medicinal baths for nervous disorders. Pliny particularly advises aluminous baths for paralytics, and adds that “They use the mud of those fountains with advantage, especially if, when it is rubbed on, it be suffered to dry in the sun.”932

Many curious instances of the superstitious uses made of holy wells in the treatment of disease, in which customs the elements of magic ritual are not difficult to discover, are given in Gomme’s Ethnology in Folklore, pp. 97-99.

Eight miles from Munich lies the village of Heilbrunn (healing spring); tradition says it is the oldest medicinal spring in Bavaria. Near the spring was a monastery, said to have been destroyed and the well choked with the dÉbris in 935 A.D. In 1509 the monks made some excavations, and the source of the spring was discovered; at the same time flames burst forth over it, the phenomena being of course attributed to a miracle. The reputation of the medicinal waters brought the Elector’s wife to the spot in 1659; she derived such benefit from the visit that the spring was named after the princess—Adelheid’s Quelle. It became famous amongst the country people for the cure of scrofulous and other diseases. In 1825 Dr. A. Vogel, of Munich, analysed the waters, and found them to contain iodine in important quantity. This led to the deepening and improvement of the spring, and in the course of the operations one of the workmen brought a lighted candle close to the surface of the water; the gas, escaping in bubbles, at once caught fire, and the miracle of 1509 was explained. The fact is that a considerable amount of carburetted hydrogen floats over the surface of the water, and will readily take fire when in contact with a light. Recent analysis of the water shows that it contains bromine, iodine, and chloride of sodium, sulphate of soda, carbonates of soda, lime, magnesia, and iron. It is altogether one of the most remarkable of the medicinal springs, and its composition explains its value in calming and soothing the mucous membrance of the stomach and other organs. Its curative effects have been proved in scrofula, glandular swellings, bronchial affections, mesenteric and female disorders.933

Baths impregnated with vegetable extracts and odours have long been in use. Pine-leaves are at present largely employed, and baths of conium, lavender, hyssop, etc., are still used as sedatives. Anciently baths of this kind were as complicated in character as the medicines administered internally.

Here is an ancient prescription for a medicinal bath:—

The Makyng of a Bathe Medicinable.934

George Herbert, in his Priest to the Temple, enumerates the duties of the parson’s wife, and extols the virtues of these homely remedies. “For salves, his wife seeks not the city, but prefers her gardens and fields before all out-landish gums; and surely hyssop, valerian, mercury, adder’s tongue, melilot, and St. John’s wort, made into a salve, and elder, comphrey, and smallage, made into a poultice, have done great and rare cures.”

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CHAPTER V.
WITCHCRAFT AND MEDICINE.

Comparative Witchcraft.—Laws against Sorcery.—Magic in Virgil and Horace.—Demonology.—Images of Wax and Clay.—Transference of Disease.—Witchcraft in the Koran.—White Magic and Black.—Coral and the Evil Eye.—“Overlooking” People.—Exorcism in the Catholic Church.

Comparative Witchcraft.

“Witches and impostors,” said Bacon, “have always held a competition with physicians.” The History of Medicine, therefore, demands some notice of the strange delusions which have exerted the most terrible influence over the minds of men in all ages and in all stages of civilization. Nothing in the history of the human species is older than the belief in magic, and it will be found that the practices of the savage in this connection have their analogies amongst ourselves at the present day. Gipsy craft, fortune telling, dream interpretation, spiritualism, the miracles of the theosophists, may all be traced in the customs and practices of savage tribes. They are survivals which will not be got rid of probably for centuries to come. Education, so far from delivering us from the bondage, has curiously enough in many cases served but to rivet the chains more firmly. In the chapters on the demon theory of disease, much light has been thrown on the origin of our belief in the influence of spirits good and bad. Trials in England connected with witchcraft were most numerous in the seventeenth century. The most interesting is that of the Suffolk witches, when Sir Matthew Hale was the judge and Sir Thomas Browne the medical expert witness. This excellent and learned physician testified that certain children, said to have been bewitched, suffered from fits, heightened to great excess by the subtlety of the devil co-operating with the witches. The report alleges that after conviction of the accused the children immediately recovered.

While condemning the cruelty and severity of the laws against witchcraft, and reflecting on the injustice and ignorance with which they were enforced, we must remember that in many cases sorcerers and other dabblers in black magic have added to their supposed supernatural methods the very real and serious arts of the poisoner, and the not less real, though purely mental influences of terror and alarm. To know that an evil-minded person was compassing one’s death or was busied in bringing about, by diabolical influences, some dreadful sickness or other injury to one’s person, was quite sufficient, in ignorant and superstitious times, to effect all the evil which it was in the mind of the magician or witch to induce. But probably there never was a regular professional sorcerer who did not use the actual weapons of poison, or deleterious drugs of some kind or other, to assist his evil intentions. In the case of the trial of the Countess of Somerset, in 1616, a charge of witchcraft was joined with the charge of poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury.949 Witchcraft and murder were combined in the Master of Orkney’s case. The last case ever brought before the “Chambre Ardente” in France resulted in the condemnation, in 1680, of a woman named Voisin, for sorcery and poisoning, in connection with the Marquise de Brinvilliers. But even apart from considerations of material injury, the mental impressions are often fatal enough; thus, in the Pacific Islands, to quote but one instance, magical arts have been proved effective through the patient’s own imagination. “When he knows or fancies that he has been bewitched, he will fall ill, and he will actually die unless he can be persuaded that he has been cured. Thus, wherever sorcery is practised with the belief of its victims, some system of exorcism or some protective magical art becomes, not only necessary, but actually effective—a mental disease being met by a mental remedy to match it.”950 Hearne, when travelling in North America, was entreated by an Indian to give him a charm against an enemy (savages and primitive folk are great believers in white men as magicians). Hearne complied, and for fun, drew on a sheet of paper some circles, signs, and words. The Indian took care to let his victim know that he had “medicine” against him, and the poor wretch fell sick immediately, and shortly afterwards died. Cockayne quotes from Wier an account of a woman who wore an amulet to cure bad eyes, which were made worse by her constantly flowing tears. Some one who hated sorceries induced her to open and examine the charm. When unfolded, the paper showed nothing but these words: “May the devil scratch thine eyes out, and—— in the holes.” As soon as the woman saw how she had been deceived, she lost faith, took to crying again, and her eyes became as bad as ever.951

Law against Sorcery.

At the accession of James I. of England, a law against witchcraft was passed, which continued in force for more than a century. We quote it in full (1 Jac. i. c. 12):—

“If any person or persons shall use, practise, or exercise any invocation or conjuration of any evil and wicked spirit, or shall consult, covenant with, entertain, employ, feed, or reward any evil and wicked spirit, to or for any intent or purpose, or take up any dead man, woman, or child out of his, her, or their grave, or any other place where the dead body resteth, or the skin, bone, or any part of any dead person, to be employed or used in any manner of witchcraft, sorcery, charm, or enchantment, or shall use, practise, or exercise any witchcraft, enchantment, charm, or sorcery, whereby any person shall be killed, destroyed, wasted, consumed, pined, or lamed in his or her body or any part thereof, every such offender is a felon without benefit of clergy.”

Magic and Medicine.

Pliny says that the art of magic first originated in medicine, and that under the guise of promoting health it insinuated itself among mankind as a higher and more holy branch of the medical art. Then it added the religious element, and lastly incorporated with itself the astrological art, and so enthralled the senses of man by a three-fold bond.952

Magic in Virgil and Horace.

The sorceress of Virgil is a witch whose ancestry we shall have no difficulty in tracing anthropologically. We can discover her lineage from the parent witches of savage tribes, and we detect her offspring in the sorceress of our own times. She burns vervain and frankincense, chaunts a solemn lay, binds the victim’s image with fillets of three colours, and in binding the knots makes the attendant say, “Thus do I bind the fillets of Venus.” One wax and one clay image are placed before the fire, and as the clay image hardens, so does the heart of Daphnis harden towards his new mistress; and as the wax softens, so is the heart of Daphnis made tender towards the sorceress. She buries the relics of what had belonged to Daphnis beneath her threshold; bruises poisonous plants from Pontus to enable him to transform himself into a wolf, and orders her attendant to cast the ashes of these herbs over her head into a running stream, at the same time taking care not to glance behind her.953 Horace also describes the concoction of a charm in a perfectly orthodox style whose family history is intelligible enough to the student of comparative sorcery. There is nothing in the classic witchcraft which does not exist to-day in the islands of savage peoples, and the methods of medicine-men in primitive forests.

Images of Wax, etc., in Sorcery.

A very widespread and ancient method of compassing a person’s death by witchcraft is that of making a figure in wax, or other plastic material, to represent the victim of the incantation. The object seems to be the concentration of will-power to effect the wishes of the user of the charm. There is an innate belief that words are creative symbols; it may be derived from the perception of the power of man to effect that which he desires earnestly to effect, so that “whenever a good or evil wish,” as Dr. Tylor says, “is uttered in words, it becomes a blessing or curse.” This idea lies at the root of what is called “Christian science healing,” i.e. healing by good wishes. In its evil form we have an ancient example in Ovid’s sorceress:954—

King James, in his DÆmonology, says that “The devil teacheth how to make pictures of wax or clay, that by roasting thereof the persons that they bear the name of may be continually melted or dried away by continual sickness.”

So the Governor-General of a Chinese province recently issued a proclamation, whereby it was declared unlawful to bring about the death of others by incantations. “You are forbidden,” said Governor Wang, “if you have a grudge against any one, to practise the magic called ‘Striking the Bull’s Head,’ that is to say, writing a man’s name and age on a scrap of paper, and laying it before the bull-headed idol, and then buying an iron stamp and piercing small holes in this paper, and finally throwing it at the man on the sly, with the intention of compassing his death.”955

“So recently,” says the authoress of Wanderings in China, “as December, 1883, a case was tried at the Inverness police court, in which the cause of offence was the discovery of a clay image with pins stuck through it in order to compass the death of a neighbour, a discovery which resulted in an assault. Many similar cases have been discovered both in England and Scotland.”956

“The demon-priests of Ceylon,” says Gomme,957 “make use of images of wax or wood, which represent the person to be injured. They drive nails into the points which represent the heart, the head, etc., mark the name of the intended victim on it, and bury it where he is likely to pass over it.” Plato alludes to the same practice as obtaining amongst the Greeks of his period.958

There are very similar Scotch practices.

It was anciently believed that diseases could be transferred from one person to another. Says Pliny,959 “Take the parings of the toe-nails and finger-nails of a sick person and mix them up with wax, the party saying that he is seeking a remedy for a tertian, quartan, or quotidian fever, as the case may be; then stick this wax, before sunrise, upon the door of another person. Such is the prescription they give for these diseases.”

Gomme says960 that St. Tegla’s well, about half-way between Wrexham and Ruthin, is resorted to for the cure of epilepsy. The patient offers a cock, or if a woman, a hen. The bird is carried in a basket, first round the well, and then round the church. The patient enters the church, creeps under the altar, and remains there till morning. Having made an offering, he leaves the cock and departs. If the bird dies, it is supposed that the disease has been transferred to it, and the man or woman consequently cured.

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The use of wax figures in enchantments is, as we have shown, very ancient, and it has lasted up to the present time. Simoetha in Theocritus says: “As I melt this wax by the help of the goddess, so may Myndian Delphis be presently wasted by love.”961 And Horace refers to it:—

“Lanea et effigies evat, altera cerea.”

(Lib. i., Sat. 8, l. 30.)

Paracelsus advises the patient afflicted with St. Vitus’ dance to make an image of himself in wax or resin, and by an effort of mind to concentrate all his blasphemies and sins in it, “without the intervention of any other person, to set his whole mind and thoughts concerning these oaths on the image.” Having done this, he was to destroy the image by fire.962

Pliny says963 that abrotonum (which was probably southernwood), “if put beneath the pillow, will act as an aphrodisiac, and that it is of the very greatest efficacy against all those charms and spells by which impotence is produced.” As an antaphrodisiac he recommends the tamarisk, mixed in a drink or in food with the urine of an ox.964

Amongst the Tamils of Ceylon there is a ceremony performed with the skull of a child, with the design of producing the death of the person against whom the incantation is directed. Cabalistic figures are drawn upon the skull after it has been duly prepared. The name of the person to be destroyed by the charm is also written on the skull. Then a paste is composed with his saliva, some of his hair, and a little earth on which he has imprinted his footsteps, and this is spread upon a plate, and taken with the skull to the cemetery of the place, where for forty nights the evil spirits are invoked to destroy the denounced person. The natives believe that as the paste dries on the plate, the victim of the charm will waste and die.965

“Both Greeks and savages,” says Mr. A. Lang,966 “have worshipped the ghosts of the dead. Both Greeks and savages assign to their gods the miraculous powers of transformation and magic, which savages also attribute to their conjurors or shamans. The mantle (if he had a mantle) of the medicine-man has fallen on the god; but Zeus, or Indra, was not once a real medicine-man.”

In the Kalevala the hero of the poem wounds himself with an axe. The wound can only be healed by one who knows the mystic words that hold the secret of the birth of iron. Iron is the bane of warlike men; when the wizard curses the iron as a living thing, the hero is healed.967

Knots.

Justin Martyr says that the Jews used magic ties or knots in their exorcisms. The Babylonians did the same. When the god Marduk writes to soothe the last moments of a dying man, Hea says, “Take a woman’s linen kerchief, bind it round thy right hand; loose it from the left hand, knot it with seven knots; do so twice.”968

The 113th chapter of the Koran was written by Mohammed when he was suffering from an illness of a rheumatic character, and he believed that it was caused by some evil person who had bewitched him. The chapter runs thus:—

“Say, I fly for refuge unto the Lord of the daybreak, that he may deliver me from the mischief of those things which he hath created; and from the mischief of the night when it cometh on; and from the mischief of woman blowing on knots; and from the mischief of the envious, when he envieth.” Sales’ notes on this chapter explain the singular expression about knots; he says: “That is, of witches, who used to tie knots in a cord, and to blow on them, uttering at the same time certain magical words over them, in order to debilitate the person they had a mind to injure.” Wizards in the north who pretend to sell mariners a wind do something similar, and the French NouËr l’aiguillete is of the same character. This bewitchment by the knot was called by the Romans Nodus and Obligamentum. Mr. Cockayne says969 the Saxons translated it into lyb, drug, f??a???. It was believed that a man might lose his power by being put under a knot, and there are cures for this injury in the Leechbook. We find protections “contra maleficium ligaturÆ ut vocant.” Priests are warned not to make any alterations in the mode of conducting the marriage service by any reason of these knots.970

Of course, as in all other kinds of witchcraft, actual poisons often had much to do with the magic.

White Magic.

As there is White Magic, which according to popular belief is beneficent, and Black Magic, which is diabolical and hurtful, so there are white witches and black ones. The white can help, but not hurt. Cotta says:971 “The mention of witchcraft doth now occasion the remembrance in the next place of a sort of practitioners whom our custome and country doth call wise men and wise women, reputed a kind of good and harmless witches or wizards, who by good words, by hallowed herbes, and salves, and other superstitious ceremonies, promise to allay and calme divels, practices of other witches, and the forces of many diseases.” The last lingering remains of such wise women may be found in the poorer quarters of all our great towns as well as in country places; they sell herbs, and always have a special ointment or salve which cures everything. This is called “Old Maids’ Salve,” or some such name, and the sellers may often be known by the pile of little chip or willow boxes displayed in a shop or front window in back streets. “White” as they are, they often, it is suspected, give improper advice to women.

A third species of witch was recognised—a mixture of white and black, called grey witches, who could help and hurt.972

Blaise Pascal, when an infant a year old, was supposed to have been bewitched by an old woman, who ultimately confessed that she had in fact so influenced his health.

Black Magic.

The following “revelation” of the proceedings of sorcerers is from the Mysteries of Magic by Waite,973 and was taken by him from the works of Eliphas LÉvi.974

“They procure either some of the hair or garments of the person whom they wish to curse; then they choose an animal which they consider the symbol of that person by means of the hair or garments; they place this animal in magnetic rapport with the individual; they give it his name, then they slay it with one blow of the magic knife, open its breast, tear out the heart, which they envelop while still palpitating in the magnetised object, and for three days they hourly pierce this heart with nails, red-hot pins, or long thorns, pronouncing maledictions at the same time on the name of the bewitched person. They are then convinced (and often rightly) that the victim of their infamous manoeuvres experiences as many torments as if he had himself been probed to the heart with every one of the points. He begins to waste away, and at the end of a certain time dies of an unknown complaint.” Another proceeding is to take a large toad, “baptism is administered to it, and it is given the name and surname of the person whom it is desired to curse; it is made to swallow a consecrated host whereon the formulÆ of execration have been pronounced; then it is enveloped in the magnetised objects, bound with the hair of the victim, on which the operator has previously spat, and the whole is buried either beneath the threshold of the bewitched person’s door or in a place which he is bound to pass daily.”975

The most important part of the body of a person to be bewitched is a tooth, but the hair or blood will answer fairly well.

The Evil Eye.

The use of red coral for warding off the evil eye is at least as old as the times of the ancient Romans; they used coral necklaces for their babies as we do now, but not for ornament so much as for protection from supernatural danger. In Italy, especially in the parts round Naples, red coral charms in the shape of a partly closed hand, or pieces of coral the shape of a tiny carrot, are worn for the purpose of protecting the wearer from being bewitched by the mal occhio.

The last-named charm is evidently phallic.

The belief in witchcraft which still exists not only amongst the ignorant and degraded, but also amongst cultivated and intelligent persons, has recently been illustrated by two cases reported in the press, which it may be well to quote in this connection.

“Extraordinary Superstition.

“An inquest was held yesterday at Lufton, a village near Yeovil, on the body of Mary Jane Saunders, aged twenty-two, who died under peculiar circumstances. The evidence of the sister of the deceased showed the latter took to her bed last October. A doctor attended her, and in November she went into Yeovil hospital. Deceased had not had her reason for the last six weeks. Her father and mother called in a herbalist, who remained one day and night. Her mother thought her daughter was suffering from a ‘bad wish,’ and that it was in consequence of that she was ill. Her mother had heard that the herbalist had cured two people at Montacute of ‘bad wishes,’ and that was why they went to him. The herbalist made some herb tea for deceased to get rid of the ‘bad wish.’ Her father and mother thought the deceased had been ‘overlooked.’ The father told the coroner he was ‘overlooked’ when he was a baby, and had a spell on him, and some one did him good. The herbalist who visited deceased said he thoroughly believed one person could put a spell on another. It was in the Bible, but it was a pity it should be so. The mother of deceased said they thought some one had cast a ‘bad wish’ over the deceased, and they tried to get it taken away. They paid 11s. for the herbalist’s medicine to remove the ‘bad wish.’ Dr. Walters said deceased died of inflammation and softening of the brain, and a verdict in accordance with that opinion was returned.”976

The Daily Telegraph of November 21st, 1892, has the following:—

“Trial for Witchcraft.

”Berlin, Nov. 20.—The Court of Eichstaett in Bavaria has just given judgment in the action for slander arising out of the extraordinary case of exorcism which occurred some months ago in Bavaria, when a certain Father Aurelian exorcised a boy named Zilk in his parish, who was said to be possessed of a devil.

“Father Aurelian declared that the evil spirit entered the boy’s body through the witchcraft of a Protestant woman named Herz, and the latter accordingly instituted proceedings against him for slander. The ceremony of exorcism was performed in presence of a Capuchin friar. named Wolf, and other persons, and Father Aurelian, in the report which he drew up of the case, declared that the devil only quitted the boy after long resistance.

“Friar Wolf, who was one of a long list of witnesses called for the defence, confirmed the correctness of the defendant’s report as to the circumstances under which the exorcism had been performed.

“Father Pruner, the Provost of the Cathedral, who was called to give evidence as to the theological aspects of the matter, testified that, according to the teaching of the Church, the possibility of demoniac possession was indisputable; and he gave an account of the doctrine concerning demons and evil spirits. He declared that Father Aurelian had recognised the signs of possession as taught by the Schools, and had acted as he ought to have done under the circumstances. After pointing out that even the Civil Law recognised the possibility of covenants between mankind and the devil, he went on to affirm that the Church could compel the devil to speak the truth. This was to support the line of defence set up by Father Aurelian that before quitting the body of the boy the devil himself, speaking through the possessed, had informed him that Frau Herz had bewitched the boy by means of some fruit which she had given him.

“Prior Schneider, who was summoned as an expert in demonology, also explained his views on the spirit world.

“Herr Straub, the Public Prosecutor, said the question before the Court was not whether Father Aurelian had transgressed the law in exorcising the boy, but whether he had slandered the plaintiff. This, he maintained, the defendant had done, and he demanded damages to the extent of fifty marks, asking this small sum because it was not contended that Frau Herz had suffered any material loss through the allegations made against her.

“Frau Herz, in evidence, denied having bewitched the boy, and declared that the fruit had not been given to Zilk by her, but by a maidservant. Her own children had also partaken of the fruit without suffering any ill effects. Ever since the slander spread by Father Aurelian, however, she had been called ‘A witch’ by the whole neighbourhood, and her children had been called ‘Witch-children’ by their comrades in school.

“Ultimately the Court gave judgment in accordance with the Public Prosecutor’s demand, finding that Father Aurelian had uttered the slander, and imposing upon him a fine of fifty marks with costs, or five days’ imprisonment.”

How little power any cultivation of the mind, except that which is purely scientific, has against this degrading superstition!

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CHAPTER VI.
MEDICAL SUPERSTITIONS.

Death and the Grave.—Sorcerer’s Ointment.—Teeth-worms.-Disease Transference.—Doctrine of Signatures.

Superstitions connected with Death and the Grave.

There is a very common saying amongst ignorant persons, when they suddenly shudder without reason, that some one is walking over their grave. In New England it is believed that cramp in the feet can be cured by walking over a grave. Earth taken at midnight from a newly made grave is believed in some parts of England to have a curative effect. Crawling round newly made graves is thought useful in sickness in Devonshire. Churchyard grass has been used (as what has not?) as an antidote to hydrophobia. Even in Afghanistan graves have a reputation for curing diseases.977

“In the middle ages the necromancers profaned tombs and compounded philtres and ointments with the grease and blood of corpses; they mixed aconite, belladonna, and poisonous fungi therewith; then they boiled and skimmed these frightful mixtures over fires composed of human remains and crucifixes stolen from churches; they added the dust of dried toads and the ashes of consecrated hosts; then they rubbed their foreheads, hands, and stomachs with the infernal ointment, drew the satanic pentacle, and evoked the dead beneath gibbets or in desecrated cemeteries.”978

Baptista Porta gives the recipe for the sorceress’ ointment in his Natural Magic. By means of this charm the witches were carried to their Sabbath. It was composed of children’s fat, of aconite boiled with poplar leaves, and some other drugs; soot must be mixed with these, and the bodies of the sorceresses rubbed all over with the compound as they went to the Sabbath naked. Another recipe from the works of the same author runs thus:—

Recipe—Suim, acorum vulgare, pentaphyllon, vespertillionis sanguinem, solanum somniferum et oleum, the whole to be well boiled and stirred to the consistence of an ointment.979

Bits of the rope and chips from the gallows after the hanging of a criminal have long had a reputation in England as cures for headache and ague. The touch of a dead man’s hand at the place of execution was formerly considered very efficacious for some complaints.

Dyer says that between Suffolk and Norfolk a favourite remedy for whooping-cough is to put the head of the suffering child into a hole made in a meadow for a few minutes. It must be done in the evening, with only the father and mother to witness it.980

A knife that has killed a man is an amulet worn against disease in China. A piece of skin taken with a black-handled knife from a male corpse which has been buried nine days is an Irish love charm.981

People in North Hampshire sometimes wear a tooth taken from a corpse, kept in a little bag, and hung round the neck, as a remedy for toothache. Bones from churchyards have from old times been used as charms against disease. Coffin water is considered good for warts, and the water with which a corpse has been washed has been recently given to a man in Glasgow as a remedy for fits.982

Teeth Worms.

A very curious remedy for toothache is founded on the idea that the disease is caused by a worm, and that henbane seed roasted will extract the worm. The Englishman’s Doctor; or the School of Salerne, an English translation of a book published in 1607, has a few lines on this superstition which run thus:—

Every druggist even at the present day sells henbane seed for the same purpose; it is used by sprinkling it on hot cinders. The heat causes the seed to sprout, and an appearance similar to a maggot is produced, which is ignorantly supposed by the purchaser of the drug to have dropped from the tooth to which the smoke is applied. Very strangely this belief that toothache is caused by a worm is found all over the world.984

That dental caries is actually caused by an organism (the Leptothrix buccalis), which is found in teeth slime, and the threads of which penetrate the tissue of the teeth after the enamel has been eaten away by acids generated by the fermentation of the food, is not of course known to peasants and ignorant persons; they seem, however, to have in this instance anticipated a discovery in bacteriology.

Disease Transference.

When primitive folk found that diseases could be communicated from one person to another, that contagious and infectious complaints spread through a district with terrible rapidity and fatal effects, they began to argue that it must be possible to transfer diseases to other creatures than man. And so we find stomach-ache transferred from the patient to a puppy or a duck.985 Hooping-cough is transmitted to dogs by hairs of the patient given between slices of bread-and-butter. Ague and scarlet-fever are transmitted to the ass on which the sufferer sits; toothache is passed on to a frog by spitting in its mouth. Even trees are considered able to relieve patients of ague. Mr. Tylor says: “In Thuringia it is considered that a string of rowan berries, a rag, or any small article touched by a sick person, and then hung on a bush beside some forest path, imparts the malady to any person who may touch this article in passing, and frees the sick man from the disease. This gives great probability to Captain Burton’s suggestion, that the rags, locks of hair, and what not hung on trees near sacred places, by the superstitious, from Mexico to India, and Ethiopia to Ireland, are deposited there as actual receptacles for transference of disease.”986

Innumerable transference superstitions are met with concerning warts, and these have doubtless arisen from the very remarkable manner in which they sometimes disappear. In some cases what are taken to be warts by those not skilled in skin diseases are merely a papular eruption of a fugitive kind, which suddenly appears on the back of the hands and as suddenly vanishes. As real warts, however, often arise from constitutional causes, they will naturally disappear with improved general health; and this fact has been the fruitful parent of a host of superstitions.

Mr. Black gives several of these. He says: “Lancashire wise men tell us for warts to rub them with a cinder, and this tied up in paper, and dropped where four roads meet (i.e., where the roads cross), will transfer the warts to whoever opens the parcel. Another mode of transferring warts is to touch each wart with a pebble, and place the pebbles in a bag, which should be lost on the way to church; whoever finds the bag gets the warts.”987

A common Warwickshire custom is to rub the warts with a black snail, stick the snail on a thorn bush, and then, say the folk, as the snail dies so will the wart disappear.

Antidotes.

Another old medical superstition is that every natural poison carries within itself its own antidote. Galen, Pliny, and Dioscorides say that the poison of Spanish fly exists in the body, and the head and wings contain the antidote. “A hair of the dog that bit you,” is the ancient way of stating a belief that the hairs of a rabid dog are the true specific for hydrophobia. The fat of the viper was long regarded as the remedy for its bite. In black-letter books on Demonology we learn that “three scruples of the ashes of the witch, when she has been well and carefully burnt at a stake, is a sure catholicon against all the evil effects of witchcraft.”988

The Doctrine of Signatures.

By nothing have the annals of medicine been more disgraced than by the absurd and preposterous “Doctrine of Signatures.” Dr. Paris, in his Pharmacologia, describes it as the belief that “every natural substance which possesses any medicinal virtues, indicates, by an obvious and well-marked external character, the disease for which it is a remedy or the object for which it should be employed.” Thus the plant which is common in our woods, called “Lungwort” (Pulmonaria officinalis), was anciently considered good for chest complaints, because its leaves bear a fancied resemblance to the surface of the lungs. The root of the “mandrake,” from its supposed resemblance to the human form, was a very ancient medicine for barrenness, and was so esteemed by Rachel (Genesis xxx. 14).

Pliny, Dioscorides, and other writers attribute peculiar virtues to the mineral Lapis Ætites, or eagle-stone, because the nodule within the stone rattles when it is shaken. “Ætites lapis agitatus sonitum edit, velut ex altero lapide prÆgnans.” The yellow drug turmeric was held to be a cure for jaundice because it is yellow. Poppies have their capsules shaped somewhat like a skull, therefore they were considered appropriate to relieve diseases of the head. Euphrasia, our eye-bright, was a famous application for eye diseases, because its flowers are somewhat like the pupil of the eye. Nettle-tea by the same rule is a country remedy for nettle-rash (urticaria). The petals of the red rose bear the “signature” of the blood, the roots of rhubarb and the flowers of saffron those of the bile.

A person who believes himself bewitched by execration and the interment of a toad, should carry about him a living toad.

Southey says,989 “The signatures [were] the books out of which the ancients first learned the virtues of herbs—Nature—having stamped on divers of them legible characters to discover their uses.” Every healing plant, it was thought, bears in some part of its structure the type or signature of its peculiar virtue. Oswald Crollius is supposed to have been “the great discoverer of signatures.” Some of these strange fancies are as fantastic as those of Swedenborg. Walnuts were considered to be the perfect signature of the head, the shell as the skull and the convolutions of the kernel as those of the two hemispheres of the brain, the outer skin would represent the scalp. So the signature doctors used the husks for scalp wounds, the inner peel for disorders of the dura mater, and the kernel was “very profitable for the brain and resists poisons.” The peony when in bud being something like a man’s head was “very available against the falling sickness.” Poppy-heads for the same reason were used “with success” in general diseases of the head. Lilies-of-valley were known by signature to cure apoplexy; as Coles says, “for as that disease is caused by the dropping of humours into the principal ventricles of the brain, so the flowers of this lily hanging on the plants as if they were drops, are of wonderful use herein.”

Capillary herbs naturally announced themselves as good for diseases of the hair. The stone crop “hath the signature of the gums,” and so was used for scurvy. The scales of pine-cones were used for the toothache, because they resemble the front teeth. Prickly plants like thistles and holly were used for pleurisy and stitch in the side. Saxifrage was good for the stone; kidney beans ought to have been useful for kidney diseases, but seem to have been overlooked except as articles of diet.

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CHAPTER VII.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

The Sciences accessory to Medicine.—The great Schools of Medical Theory.—Boerhaave and his System.—Stahl.—Hoffman.—Cullen.—Brown.—Hospitals.—Bichat and the New Era of Anatomy.—Mesmer and Mesmerism.—Surgery.—The Anatomists, Physiologists, and Scientists of the Period.—Inoculation and Vaccination.

The medical history of the eighteenth century affords but a meagre result, notwithstanding the brilliant talents and indefatigable industry of the famous men who devoted their energies to the healing art. Their great aim was to create systems of medicine which should be philosophical and complete.

It is not only in what is strictly the art of healing that the members of the medical profession have ever been amongst the greatest benefactors of the world, but in what are known as the accessory sciences many of the most distinguished, enlightened, and self-sacrificing of the heroes of science have been affiliated to the profession of medicine. Not only the heroes, but the martyrs of medicine, crowd the scientific calendar. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were fertile in the efforts to apply the results of discoveries in the physical sciences to the relief of human suffering. If these efforts were but partially successful, so far as medicine—considered apart from surgery—was concerned, it was not in consequence of less industry in that department, but because speculation and theorising about the causes of disease monopolised the attention which, if devoted to observation of facts, would have been fertile in result. Schools, Systems, and Sects were the chief product of the medical activity of the eighteenth century. Although not perhaps of much direct benefit to medicine, indirectly the study of the sciences accessory to it must have been of considerable benefit as an educational factor in the training of the intellect of physicians.

The Great Schools of Medical Theory.

Whewell, in his History of Scientific Ideas,990 classifies the successive biological hypotheses under the heads: (1) The Mystical School; (2) The Iatro-Chemical School; (3) The Iatro-Mathematical School; (4) The Vital-Fluid School; (5) The Psychical School.

The Mystical School found its most distinguished representative in Paracelsus; it derived its doctrine of the Macrocosm and the Microcosm from the Neoplatonists, and was largely imbued with alchemy and magic, the doctrines of the Cabala and the fanciful interpretations of the Bible. Later Paracelsists, Rosicrucians, and other speculators of the same character, such as Sir Kenelm Digby, brought the Mystical School of Medicine down to the seventeenth century. Our modern Theosophists are striving to restore much of the mystical teaching of Paracelsus and his followers. Again we meet the “astral bodies,” “the elementary spirits,” the cabalistic interpretations of the Bible, and the astrological absurdities of a pre-scientific period.

The Iatro-Chemical School really arose from Paracelsus, who amongst many absurdities held much important truth. Sprengel indicates Libavius of Saxony as the person who first cultivated chemistry apart from theosophy, and he names Angelus Sala as his successor. Lemery, in the middle of the seventeenth century, began to reform pharmaceutical chemistry. After Paracelsus chemistry became an indispensable study to every physician. Our word tartar, the scale which forms on the teeth, is of Paracelsian origin. He taught that the basis of all diseases was a thickening of the juices and the formation of earthy matter, which he called Tartarus, because it burns like the fire of hell. After Paracelsus we have Van Helmont, a true chemical discoverer who sought in chemistry a theory of disease of which his doctrine of fermentation in the body holds an important place. Next we have Sylvius, with his doctrine of the opposition of acid and alkali. Digestion he considered a process of fermentation or effervescence of the acid of the saliva and pancreatic juice with the alkali of the gall. When either the acid or the alkali predominated, disease was supposed to follow. The human body was regarded as a laboratory, the stomach as a sort of test tube. Boyle made objections to the doctrines of this school, and Herman Conring taught that the proper place of chemistry was not in physiology and pathology, but in pharmacy.

Viridet of Geneva endeavoured to prove that the fluids of the body are either acid or alkaline by experiment. Raimond Vieussens declared that he had discovered an acid in the blood and a ferment in the stomach. Hecquet opposed him, and said that digestion was not a process of fermentation, but of trituration. Pitcairn in England, Bohn and Hoffman in Germany, and Boerhaave in Holland opposed the iatro-chemists, and proved by observation that digestion is not fermentation, and that the acid and alkali theories of disease supported by Sylvius were false. By the influence and authority of these eminent physicians, the reign of the chemical school of physiology was overturned. The great fault of the iatro-chemists was their neglect of the effect of the solids of the animal body; they assimilated the work of the physician, as Whewell says, to that of the vintner or the brewer.

The Iatro-Mathematical or Mechanical School attacked, defeated, and superseded the iatro-chemists. According to this sect, the human body is a mere machine. Whewell explains that the Mechanical Physiologists came into existence in consequence of the splendid results obtained by the schools of Galileo and Newton. It was not so much the exposure of the weaknesses of the chemical physiology as the effects produced upon the world by the explanation of so many of the phenomena of the external universe by the men who had revolutionized astronomy by their discoveries; it was naturally hoped that that which served to explain the great world of matter might also elucidate the little world of man. Whewell divides the school into two parts—the Italian and the Cartesio-Newtonian sect. The Italian calculated and analysed the properties of the animal body which are undoubtedly purely mechanical, the Cartesio-Newtonians went much further than this and introduced many baseless hypotheses. The Italians occupied themselves with such calculations as the force of muscles and the hydraulics of the animal fluid. Borelli was the first great investigator on these lines; his work De Motu Animalium (Rome, 1680), treats of the forces and action of the bones and muscles. John and Daniel Bernouelli and Henry Pemberton pursued the same line of research. The principles of hydrostatics were brought to bear on the questions of the blood pressure and the breath. Keill endeavoured to estimate the velocity of the blood. The other school occupied itself with the corpuscular hypothesis in physiology. The organs were considered as a species of sieves. Both Newton and Descartes sought to explain physiology on a theory of round particles passing through cylindrical tubes, pyramidal ones through pores of a triangular shape, cubical through square openings. The diameter and curves of the different vessels formed subjects of calculations, and Bellini, Donzellini, and Guglielmini in Italy, Perrault and Dodart in France, Cole, Keill, and Jurin in England, devoted themselves to their study.991

The investigation of the size and shape of the particles of the fluids, and the diameter and form of the invisible vessels, formed a large part of the physiology of the beginning of the eighteenth century. Cheyne thought that fevers of the acute sort arise from glandular obstruction; and Mead, the royal physician and friend of Newton, explained the action of poisons on mechanical principles. The error of this school, as Whewell explains, lay in considering the animal frame as a lifeless compound of canals, cords and levers; the physicians, to its adherents, were merely hydraulic engineers. Some iatro-mathematicians were, in fact, at the same time teachers both of engineering and medicine.992

The Vital-Fluid School. The mechanical explanation of the motions of the animal body may satisfy some observers up to a certain point; there, however, they must confess their theory fails them. How does motion originate in the living frame? Friedrich Hoffman, of Halle (b. 1660), assumed a principle, material, yet of a higher kind than the adherents of the mechanical sect were inclined to recognise. This principle is exceedingly subtle, and is endued with great energy. It is the ether diffused through all nature, and which has its seat in the brain of animals and acts upon the body through the nerves. This vital fluid operates by laws which at one time were explained on the principles of a higher mechanics, of which we know little, and at another on metaphysical grounds, of which we know less. Naturally the discoveries connected with electricity imported a new element into these speculations. The vital principle was then held to be a modification of the electric fluid. John Hunter discerned it in the blood. Cuvier believed the vital fluid to be nervous. The objections to the doctrine of a vital fluid “as one uniform material agent pervading the organic frame,” are many. If the vital principle be the same in every part of the body, how does it happen that the secretions are all so different? How does the blood under the same influence furnish all the different fluids produced by the glands? How is it the liver secretes bile, the kidneys their peculiar fluid, the lachrymal gland the tears? The hypothesis of a vital fluid really explains nothing.

The Psychical School held the doctrine of an immaterial vital principle. This is at least as old as Aristotle,993 who attributes the cause of motion to the soul. According to that philosopher the soul has different parts: the nutritive or vegetative, the sensitive, and the rational. Stahl, the great discoverer in chemistry, opposed the physiological theories of Hoffman, and declared that there is something in living bodies which cannot be accounted for by mechanics or chemistry. “All motion,” according to him, “is a spiritual act.” Nutrition and secretion belong to the operations of the soul; but he overlooked the fact that these are not peculiar to animals, but are characteristics of vegetables, which have no soul. Cheyne and Mead, Paterfield and Whytt in England inclined to Stahl’s views. Boissier de Sauvages defended them in France. Hoffman and afterwards Haller opposed them, the latter inventing the theory of Irritability.

Boerhaave (1668-1738), professor of medicine at Leyden, was a man of varied and profound erudition, conversant with the teaching of the ancient philosophers and the Greek and Arabian physicians; he was in addition fully conversant with all the discoveries connected with the healing art down to his own time. Beyond this he was a natural philosopher, chemist, botanist, and anatomist, and an indefatigable experimentalist. In teaching medicine he simplified its study as much as possible by rejecting the absurd and useless speculations which encumbered it, and putting in their place the facts which he believed his own experience and observation had enabled him to ascertain. He published his system of medicine in two volumes, one entitled the Instructions or Theory and the other the Aphorisms or Practice of Medicine. “These short treatises,” says Dr. Thomson,994 “which gave to medicine a more systematic form than it had previously exhibited, are remarkable for brevity, perspicuity, and elegance of style, for great condensation of ideas, and for the number of important facts which they contain relative to the healthy and diseased states of the human economy.” The genius of Boerhaave raised the medical school of Leyden to the highest distinction. Princes in all countries sent him pupils; Peter the Great took lessons in medicine from him, and so great was his reputation that when a Chinese mandarin directed a letter to him, “To the illustrious Boerhaave, physician in Europe,” it was duly delivered. He held the study of Mind to form an important part of physiology. He taught that the change produced upon the extremity of the sentient nerve must be transmitted by the nerve to the brain before sensation can be produced. He considered the nerves to be hollow undulatory canals. He also held that each of the senses has its distinct seat in the common sensory or brain. His lectures on the mental faculties are full of varied and curious information. Considering the human body as a combination of various machines arranged in one harmonious whole, he endeavoured to explain its phenomena in health and disease on the principles of natural philosophy and chemistry to the almost entire exclusion of vital forces, which, however, he did not reject. He denied that all medical phenomena are to be explained upon mechanical principles. He lamented that “physiological subjects are usually handled either by mathematicians unskilful in anatomy, or by anatomists who are not versed in mathematics.” Yet his system of physiology embraced but a poor conception of the mystery of life. He says, “Let anatomy faithfully describe the parts and structure of the body; let the mechanician apply his particular science to the solids; let hydrostatics explain the laws of fluids in general, and hydraulics their actions, as they move through given canals; and lastly, let the chemist add to all these whatever his art, when fairly and carefully applied, has been able to discover; and then, if I am not mistaken, we shall have a complete account of medical physiology.”

It is to Boerhaave that we owe the peculiar chemical idea of affinity, that mutual virtue by which one chemical substance loves, unites with, and holds the other (amat, unit, retinet). He called it love. “We are here to imagine, not mechanical action, not violent impulse, not antipathy, but love, at least if love be the desire of uniting.” It is to Boerhaave, therefore, we are indebted for a view of chemical affinity which enables us to comprehend all chemical changes.995

The idea of affinity as marriage naturally leads to analysis as divorce. Thus affinity, imperfectly understood before the time of Boerhaave, made analysis possible. One of the first to express this conviction was Dr. Mayow, who published his Medico-Physical Tracts in 1674. He shows how an acid and an alkali lose their properties by combination, a new substance being formed not at all resembling either of the ingredients. He explains that, “although these salts thus mixed appear to be destroyed, it is still possible for them to be separated from each other, with their power still entire.”996

George Ernest Stahl (1660-1734), chemist, was professor of medicine at Halle (1694) and physician to the King of Prussia (1716). He opposed materialism, and substituted “animism,” explaining the symptoms of disease as efforts of the soul to get rid of morbid influences. Stahl’s “anima” corresponds to Sydenham’s “nature” in a measure, and has some relationship to the Archeus of Paracelsus and Van Helmont. Stahl was the author of the “phlogiston” theory in chemistry, which in its time has had important influence on medicine. Phlogiston was a substance which he supposed to exist in all combustible matters, and the escape of this principle from any compound was held to account for the phenomenon of fire. According to Stahl, diseases arise from the direct action of noxious powers upon the body; and from the reaction of the system itself endeavouring to oppose and counteract the effects of the noxious powers, and so preserve and repair itself.997 He did not consider diseases, therefore, pernicious in themselves, though he admitted that they might become so from mistakes made by the soul in the choice, or proportion of the motions excited to remove them, or the time when these efforts are made. Death, according to this theory, is due to the indolence of the soul, leading it to desist from its vital motions, and refusing to continue longer the struggle against the derangements of the body.998 Here we have the “expectant treatment” so much in vogue with many medical men. “Trusting to the constant attention and wisdom of nature,” they administered inert medicines as placebos, while they left to nature the cure of the disease. But they neglected the use of invaluable remedies such as opium and Peruvian bark, for which error it must be admitted they atoned by discountenancing bleeding, vomiting, etc.999 Stahl’s remedies were chiefly of the class known as “Antiphlogistic,” or antefebrile.

De Sauvages (1706-1767), the French physicist, was a disciple of Stahl, and adopted his theory of soul as the cause of the mechanical action of the body. He invented a system of classifying diseases under the title of Nosologia Methodica, founded on the principles of natural history.

Friedrich Hoffman (1660-1742) was a fellow-student with Stahl at Jena. He was the author of a system of medicine in some respects original. He distinguished in the human economy three principal agents: Nature, or the Organic Body; the Sentient Soul; and the Rational Soul; corresponding to the classification of the Scripture of body, soul, and spirit—a classification which originated doubtless in Indian philosophy. Hoffman did not admit with Stahl that the organic functions of the human body depend on the agency of an intelligent soul or any immaterial agent whatsoever, but are merely mechanical and chemical properties of the elements which compose our bodies. The functions most essential to life he considered to be the circulatory, secretory, and excretory motions, and these seemed to him to depend upon the dilating and contracting powers of the muscular fibres of the vascular system. These powers then he held to be the cause of the organic functions which depend on the animal spirits, an ethereal fluid contained in the nerves and the blood.1000

Hoffman first made known the virtues of the Seidlitz waters; he also invented a nostrum which was popular for a long time, and called “Hoffman’s Anodyne Liquor.”

Physicians.

Archibald Pitcairn, M.D. (1652-1713), was a famous physician of Edinburgh. In 1692 he occupied a professor’s chair at Leyden with great distinction. Among his pupils were Mead and Boerhaave, who both attributed much of their skill to his tuition. On his return to Edinburgh he greatly interested himself in improving the teaching of anatomy. He begged the Town Council to permit the dissection of the bodies of paupers; and though the chief surgeons of the place did all they could to oppose his efforts, they were successful, and Pitcairn had the credit of laying the foundation of the great Edinburgh school of medicine. He insisted on the strict adherence to Bacon’s method of attending to facts of experience and observation. “Nothing,” he said, “more hinders physic from being improved than the curiosity of searching into the natural causes of the effects of medicines. The business of men is to know the virtues of medicines; but to inquire whence they have that power is a superfluous amusement, since nature lies concealed. A physician ought therefore to apply himself to discover by experience the effects of medicines and diseases, and reduce his observations into maxims, and not needlessly fatigue himself by inquiring into their causes, which are neither possible nor necessary to be known. If all physicians would act thus, we should not see physic divided into so many sects.” In his Dissertations (1701) he discusses the application of geometry to physic, the circulation of the blood, the cure of fevers by purgation, and the effects of acids and alkalis in medicine. A learned and skilful physician, an accomplished mathematician, and a thorough classical scholar, he was not discreet in his political utterances. His library was purchased by Peter the Great of Russia.

John Radcliffe, M.D. (1650-1714), was famous for “his magnificent regard for the advancement of learning and science.” The Radcliffe infirmary and observatory at Oxford were built from funds bequeathed by him.

Sir Hans Sloane, M.D. (1660-1753), was a physician whose noble museum and library were the foundation of the British Museum.

Sir Richard Blackmore, M.D. (1650-1729), wrote on inoculation for small-pox, on consumption, gout, rheumatism, scrofula, diabetes, jaundice, etc.

Walter Needham, M.D. (died 1691), made important investigations in the anatomy of the foetus, and the changes of the pregnant uterus.

Clopton Havers, M.D. (died 1702), was the author of a standard work on the bones, certain canals of which were called after him Haversian canals.

James Douglas, M.D. (1675-1742), was an excellent anatomist, who was one of the first to demonstrate from anatomy that the high operation for stone might be safely performed. He was a skilful accoucheur, an accomplished botanist, and a man of letters. Pope mentions him in the Dunciad, and in a note describes him as a physician of great learning and no less taste. He wrote several works, the most famous of which is MyographiÆ ComparatÆ Specimen; or a comparative description of all the muscles in a man and in a quadruped; added is an account of the muscles peculiar to a woman. London, 1707.

William Cullen, M.D. (1710-1790), was the first professor in Great Britain to deliver his lectures in the English language.1001 He was appointed lecturer on chemistry at Glasgow University in 1746, and in 1751 was chosen regius professor of medicine. In 1756 he became professor of chemistry in the University of Edinburgh; in 1760 he was made lecturer on materia medica. Dr. Cullen earned great distinction as a lecturer on medicine; he opposed the teaching of Boerhaave and the principles of the humoral pathology, founding his own teaching on that of Hoffman. His system was to a great extent based on the new physiological doctrine of irritability as taught by Haller.

He attached great importance to nervous action in the induction of disease, considering even gout as a neurosis.

His First Lines of the Practice of Physic was long exceedingly popular, but his fame as a medical writer rests on his Nosology, or Classification of Diseases. In all his labours Dr. Cullen aimed at the practical rather than the theoretical. “My business is not,” he remarks,1002 “so much to explain how this and that happens, as to examine what is truly matter of fact.” “My anxiety is not so much to find out how it happens as to find out what happens.” Cullen invented no ingenious hypothesis, rather he new-modelled the whole practice of medicine; “he defined and arranged diseases with an unrivalled accuracy, and reduced their treatment to a simplicity formerly unknown.”1003

James Gregory, M.D. (1758-1822), exercised the greatest influence on the progress of medicine in England. As the successor of Cullen, and as the author of the famous Conspectus MedicinÆ TheoreticÆ, the name of Gregory, borne by many ornaments of British science, became still more distinguished.

Sir Gilbert Blane, M.D. (born 1747), rendered important medical services to the State by his researches on the diseases incident to seamen. He banished scurvy from the fleet by his arrangements for provisioning ships on foreign stations, particularly by making lemon juice a regular ingredient of diet.

Sir William Watson, M.D. (1715-1787), was a devoted botanist and student of electricity. His electrical researches raised him to a position of European fame. He was the first in England who succeeded in igniting spirit of wine by electricity; he was the first to note the different colour of the spark, as drawn from different bodies; and his researches in the power and accumulation of electricity, the nature of its conductors, etc., qualified him to take part in the experiments carried out in 1747 and 1748, by which the “electric current was extended to four miles in order to prove the velocity of its transmission.”1004 The doctor’s house in Aldersgate Street was long the resort of the most distinguished men of science in Europe. He was not less the benign and generous friend to the poor and suffering, than the ardent investigator of the secrets of Nature. His work Experiments and Observations on Electricity is quite a remarkable production considering the age in which it was published (1768).

Robert Willan, M.D. (1757-1812), was the founder of the science of skin diseases in England. His attention was directed in 1784 to the elementary forms of eruption, and on this basis he erected his magnum opus, The Description and Treatment of Cutaneous Diseases (1798).

John Brown (1735-1788), was a systematizer of medicine, whose popularity was even continental. He endeavoured to explain the processes of life and disease and the principles of cure upon one simple idea, the property of “excitability.” The “exciting powers” are the external forces, and the functions of the body are stimulants, so that “the whole phenomena of life, health as well as disease, consist in stimulus and nothing else.” Diseases he divided as sthenic, attended with preternatural excitement, and asthenic, characterized by debility.

Ninety-seven per cent. of all diseases, he declared, require a “stimulating treatment.” One good result of this theory was that it introduced a milder treatment of disease than the bleeding and purging doctors of his time advocated. The theory was called the Brunonian, and received greater attention in Italy than in England.

John Morgan, M.D. (1736-1789), was born in Philadelphia. He wrote an essay on his graduation at Edinburgh (1763), wherein “he maintained that pus is a secretion from the vessels, and in this view anticipated John Hunter.”1005

Robert James, M.D. (1703-1776), was the inventor of the celebrated fever-powder which bears his name.

Francis de Valingen, M.D. (1725-1805), was a Swiss who practised in London. He was the first to suggest the employment of chloride of arsenic in practice. His preparation was admitted into the London Pharmacopoeia.

Erasmus Darwin (1701-1802), a physician of Lichfield, was a true poet of science. His fame rests on the Botanic Garden, in which he describes the Loves of the Plants according to the LinnÆan system. His most important scientific work is his Zoonomia, a pathological work, and a treatise on generation, in which he anticipated the views of Lamarck. He asks: “Would it be too bold to imagine that in the great length of time since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind, would it be too bold to imagine that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the Great First Cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations, and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down these improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end!” He believed that plants possess sensation and volition.

Edward Spry, M.D. (lived in 1756). At the fire of Eddystone lighthouse an old man was injured by the fall of a quantity of molten lead upon him. Dying of his injuries in twelve days, he was examined by Dr. Spry, who stated that he found in the stomach a lump of lead three and three-quarter inches long by one and a half in breadth. As no surgeon would believe this story, Dr. Spry performed a number of experiments upon animals by pouring molten lead down their throats, with the result that at the Royal Society, Dr. Huxham, in his letter to Sir William Watson, “testified to his own belief in Mr. Spry’s veracity.”1006

John Coakley Lettsom, M.D. (1744-1815), was a learned and amiable philanthropist, who published several important medical and scientific works. His Reflections on the Treatment and Cure of Fevers and The Natural History of the Tea Tree appeared in 1772. He wrote the following lines:—

He gave away immense sums in charity, he was not so unfeeling as his verse would make him appear.

William Stark (1742-1770) was the earliest writer who distinguished between tuberculosis and scrofula.

Jean Astruc (1684-1766), professor at Montpellier, the oldest of the celebrated French obstetricians, was the author of a work on the diseases of women from the pathological point of view.

Johann E. Wichmann (1740-1802), a scientific physician of Hanover, in 1786 explained the cause of itch as due to the itch-mite passing from one individual to another. He experimented upon himself. Bonomo had, however, discovered the insect in the itch pustules in 1687.

Wichmann suggested the contagiousness of consumption, whooping cough, diarrhoea, and several other complaints.

J. P. Frank (1745-1821) was “the founder of medical police as a distinct department of science.”1007

Hospitals.

The condition of the hospitals for the sick in the eighteenth century was scandalous almost beyond belief. Thus, in the HÔtel Dieu of Paris, the mortality at one time was 220 per 1,000; a state of affairs which, however, we surpassed in the present century, when in the British hospitals at Scutari the mortality reached between 400 and 500 per 1,000. In both cases this was due to overcrowding. At the HÔtel Dieu two or three small-pox cases, or several surgical cases, or sometimes even four lying-in women would be packed into one bed. A large proportion of the beds were purposely made for four patients, and six were frequently crowded in.

John Howard (1726-1790), the philanthropist, by his splendid and devoted labours in connection with the reform of prisons, hospitals, and lazarettos, drew attention to the means of preventing the communication of the plague and other infectious fevers. In the words of Burke “his philanthropic spirit led him to dive into the depths of dungeons; to plunge into the infection of hospitals; to survey the mansions of sorrow and pain; to take the gauge and dimensions of misery, depression, and contempt; to remember the forgotten; to attend to the neglected; to visit the forsaken, and to compare and collate the distresses of all men in all countries.” Not the least of his services were those he rendered to the cause of sanitary science and public health.

ThÉophile de Bordeu (1722-1776) was a professor of anatomy and midwifery at Montpellier. By his great work, Recherches sur le Pouls, he so enraged his professional brethren (who, like the Jews, always either maim or kill the prophets sent unto them), that he was attacked in his personal character with disgraceful malignity for several years. He rendered very great services to the progress of medical science. His physiology was far in advance of his age, and many men have found in his researches on the functions of the glands a mine of wealth for the establishment of their own reputation.

M. F.X. de Bichat (1771-1802) was a celebrated French anatomist and physiologist, whose great work, Anatomie GÉnÉrale, was the foundation of the reform of French medicine at the intellectual awakening after the great revolution. Pathology, the science of disease, would have been impossible without such researches as those of Bichat. He first took a “commanding view,” not merely of the organs of the body, but of the tissues of which they are built up. He resolved the complex into its elements, and investigated the structure of each. He completed the overthrow of the iatro-mathematical school, regarding the properties of the living tissues as vital actions. He classified the functions as organic and animal, and greatly aided in systematising the phenomena of life.

Mesmerism.

Frederick Anton Mesmer (1733-1815) studied medicine at Vienna. He embraced astrology, and believed in the influence of the stars on living beings. He came to think that cures might be effected by stroking with magnets; afterwards he discarded the magnets, and convinced himself that he could influence others by stroking them with his hands alone. In 1778 Paris was greatly excited over the miraculous cures of mesmerism. The medical faculty denounced him as a charlatan, though a Government Commission in its report admitted many of the facts, while tracing them to physiological causes. The Marquis de Puysegur revolutionised the art of mesmerism by producing all the phenomena without the mummeries and violent means resorted to by Mesmer. Dr. John Elliotson in England in 1830 successfully practised the art.

In 1845 Baron von Reichenbach declared he had discovered a new force which he called odyl, and in 1850 his Researches on Magnetism were translated into English by Dr. Gregory, professor of chemistry in the University of Edinburgh.

G. Van Swieten (1700-1772) was a pupil of Boerhaave, and famous in the history of medicine as the founder of the Old Vienna School. He brought about the clinical teaching for which that school has since been so famous. Following the instructions of Paracelsus, he introduced into his practice the use of mercuric perchloride internally in the treatment of syphilis. His commentaries on Boerhaave were considered to be more valuable than the text itself.

De Haen (1704-1776), of the Hague, studied under Boerhaave, and having been recommended by Van Swieten, was invited to Vienna as president of the clinical school in the hospital of that city. Observation, and the simplest treatment in disease, especially in fevers, made up the chief part of his medical system. Purgatives and emetics and powerful medicines he would use only on the most urgent necessity. Hygiene, both for the patient and the state, he considered of the highest importance in medical education. Clinical thermometry received great attention from De Haen, who demonstrated that in what is considered by the patient the cold stage of fevers there is really a notable increase in the temperature.

James Yonge (1646-1721), physician and F.R.S., wrote an important treatise on the use of turpentine as a means of arresting hÆmorrhage, entitled Currus Triumphalis de Terebintho. He described the flap operation in amputations, and was acquainted with the principle of the tourniquet for the arrest of bleeding during operations.

John Addenbrooke, M.D., died 1719, leaving by his will four thousand pounds to found a hospital at Cambridge, which now bears his name.

James Drake, M.D. (1667-1707), wrote a work, once deservedly popular, entitled Anthropologia Nova; or, a New System of Anatomy.

John Arbuthnot, M.D. (1658-1735), physician to Queen Anne, was a man of extensive learning and of great scientific abilities, characterized by Thackeray as “one of the wisest, wittiest, most accomplished, gentlest of mankind.”

Daniel Turner, M.D. (1667-1741), achieved a certain fame as the inventor of an excellent ointment, still known as “Turner’s Cerate,” composed of oil, wax, and calamine.

Richard Mead, M.D. (1673-1754), was the author of the Mechanical Account of Poisons, a work which at once established his reputation. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1703. On the accession of George II. he was appointed physician-in-ordinary to the King. He was the friend of Radcliffe, and like him a generous promoter of science and learning and of unbounded charity to those in misery. It was Mead who persuaded Guy to bequeath his fortune to found the noble hospital which bears his name. Mead was a political physician, and it is said by Miss Strickland that his prompt boldness occasioned the peaceable proclamation of George I. Mead’s work on the diseases of the Bible, entitled Medica Sacra, is a curious and interesting treatise. Excellent physician as he was, he recommended pepper and lichen as a specific against the bite of a mad dog.

John Freind, M.D. (1675-1728), a learned and accomplished physician, is famous as the author of an elaborate work, The History of Physick from the Time of Galen to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century. He laid the plan of this important work whilst a prisoner in the Tower, to which he was committed on suspicion of participation in the so-called “Bishop’s plot.” He was liberated after about three months’ confinement by the firmness of Dr. Mead, who refused to prescribe for Sir Robert Walpole till he consented to admit him to bail.1008 During his imprisonment Freind wrote a Latin letter On certain Kinds of Small Pox.

How near the physicians of Mead’s time came towards the discovery of the germ theory of infectious disorders may be seen from his account of the leprosy.1009 In this treatise he says it has been found by experiments that in the plague and other malignant eruptive fevers the infection once received into articles of clothing remains in them for a long time, and thence passes into human bodies, and “like seeds sown produces the disease peculiar to them.” With reference to the retention of the infection by dry walls, he says, “I thought it probable that they may, by a kind of fermentation, produce these hollow, greenish, or reddish strokes,” etc.

Surgeons.

Dominique Anel (1679-1730) was the famous French surgeon who invented the operation for aneurism, which Hunter afterwards modified and called by his own name.

He successfully treated lachrymal fistula, and invented several surgical instruments which are named after him.

J. L. Petit (1674-1750) in 1718 invented the screw tourniquet for compressing bleeding arteries. He was one of the most famous surgeons in the brightest period of the art in France, and was besides an excellent ophthalmologist.

Le Cat (1700-1768) was the famous lithotomist, and opponent of the doctrines of Haller.

Le Dran (1685-1770) performed the first disarticulation of the thigh.

Morand (1697-1773) performed disarticulation of the upper arm.

Pierre Joseph Desault (1744-1795) was a great French anatomist and surgeon, who instituted a clinical school of surgery at the HÔtel Dieu in Paris. He frequently had an audience of six hundred.

He introduced many improvements in surgical practice and in the construction of surgical instruments.

G. de la Faye (d. 1781), a great surgeon and oculist, also disarticulated the shoulder joint.

A. Louis (1723-1792) was a distinguished military surgeon.

R. B. Sabatier (1723-1811) was a distinguished surgeon, anatomist, and ophthalmologist, and a man of great and all-round information on medical subjects in general.

P. F. Percy (1754-1825) was a military surgeon who introduced cold-water dressings into French surgery.

Antonio Scarpa (1748-1832), the famous Italian anatomist, held the chair of anatomy at Modena, was distinguished in every branch of anatomical research, and investigated the minute anatomy of the nerves and bones. He decided the long-debated question whether the heart is supplied with nerves in the affirmative. He wrote on diseases of the eye, on aneurism, and on hernia. He was an elegant scholar, “equally at home in the criticism of the fine arts and in the details of scientific agriculture.”

Amongst the principal Italian surgeons of the century were Bertrandi (1723-1797), Troja (1747-1827), and Palletta (1747-1823).

Of the Germans the great names are, Schmucker (1712-1786), Richter (1742-1812), and Siebold (1736-1807), who first taught surgery clinically in Germany.

Callisen (1740-1824), the great Danish surgeon, and Anel (1741-1801), the founder of the Swedish School of Surgery, are two famous names which must be remembered in the surgical history of the period.

William Cheselden (1688-1752) was famous as a lithotomist and oculist. His dexterity in the performance of lithotomy caused marvellous legends to be told of him, it was even said that he had operated in fifty-four seconds. He published his Anatomy of the Human Body in 1713.

Samuel Sharp (1700-1778) excelled in nearly every branch of surgery, and was a skilful operator, who by his efforts to stimulate English surgeons to emulate the French did much to advance British surgery.

Benjamin Gooch of Norwich, Hey of Leeds, and Park of Liverpool, were also famous in this period.

Percival Pott (1713-1788) was a surgeon to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, whose life formed a sort of epoch in the history of surgery in England. Samuel Cooper says of him1010 that he was in his time the best practical surgeon, the best lecturer, the best writer on surgery, the best operator of which the metropolis could boast.

John Hunter (1728-1793) was a physiologist and surgeon combined, unrivalled in the annals of medicine. He raised surgery, which before his time was little more than a mechanical art, to the rank of a scientific profession. As a pathologist and comparative anatomist, he rendered the greatest services to medicine and surgery. He dissected 500 different species of animals. One of the most brilliant surgical discoveries of the century was Hunter’s operation for the cure of popliteal aneurism, by tying the femoral artery above the tumour and without interfering with it. He improved the treatment of rupture of the tendo achillis, and invented a method of curing lachrymal fistula, and of curing hydrocele radically by injection.

He was the first to describe phlebitis (inflammation of the veins), and he made the discovery that the white blood corpuscles are antecedent to the red. He investigated the subject of inflammation, the results of which he published in his Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation and Gun-shot Wounds. Other works of Hunter’s are his Treatise on the Natural History of the Human Teeth, A Treatise on the Venereal Disease, and Observations on Certain Points of the Animal Economy. “His greatest monument is the splendid museum which he formed by his sole efforts, which he made too when labouring under every disadvantage of deficient education and limited means.” His brother-in-law, Sir Everard Home, prepared the catalogue of the museum and then burned Hunter’s manuscripts, probably that he might conceal the plagiarisms of which he had been guilty in writing his book on Comparative Anatomy. The Government purchased Hunter’s museum from his widow for £15,000, upon condition that twenty-four lectures should be delivered every year to members of the college, and that the museum should be open to the public.

Charles White, a Manchester surgeon (circ. 1768), was the first to introduce what is known as conservative surgery. He first resected1011 the humerus, and taught the reduction of shoulder dislocations with the heel in the arm-pit.

The German surgeons in the seventeenth century held simply the position of barbers; they began life by cutting hair, shaving, cupping and bleeding, and then rose to be dressers of wounds and ulcers, and to treat fractures and dislocations.1012 In 1713, Berlin acquired its first anatomical theatre for the instruction of military doctors and “medico-surgeons.” Dresden and Hanover began to improve the education of clever barbers about the middle of the eighteenth century. The Military Medical School of Vienna was opened in 1781. Barbers and bathmen in the eighteenth century were trained into district medical officers and surgeons by a course of instruction lasting from two to three years. In Holland students were privileged to assist in operations at the hospitals. The first surgical clinic in Germany was established at WÜrzburg, in 1769. The Vienna surgical clinic arose in 1774. The greatest teacher of surgery in Germany, A.G. Richter, gave clinical instruction at GÖttingen, in 1781.1013

G. M. Thilenius in 1784 performed the first division of the tendo achillis for the cure of club-foot.

Justus Arneman (1763-1807) was a surgical professor at GÖttingen, who wrote a system of surgery and advanced the study of diseases of the ear.

Camper (1722-1789), a Dutch surgeon of a mechanical turn of mind, made improvements in trusses. Leguin, a Frenchman, was the first to employ steel springs in trusses (1663). Tipharie in 1761 introduced the double truss.1014

Obstetricians.

Johann Palfyn (1649-1730), a celebrated obstetric physician, in 1721 invented, or rather re-introduced, a species of forceps in difficult labour.

Hugh Chamberlen, M.D. (1664-1728), was the most famous man-midwife of his day. His name is for ever associated with the invention of the obstetric forceps—a noble instrument, which has saved more lives than any mechanical invention ever associated with the healing art. A monument was erected to his memory in Westminster Abbey, with a long Latin epitaph by Bishop Atterbury.

William Smellie (1680-1763), a distinguished English obstetric physician, improved the midwifery forceps and suggested and performed various operations in obstetric practice.

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William Bromfield (1712-1792) founded the Lock Hospital, London. He invented a tenaculum (a fine sharp hook by which the mouths of bleeding arteries are drawn out). He was a celebrated operator, and wrote a work on surgery.

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The Medical College of Philadelphia was the first institution established in North America to give medical instruction. It was organized in May, 1765, by Drs. Shippen and Morgan. The University of Pennsylvania developed its medical department from this humble beginning.

Anatomists, Physiologists, Botanists, etc.

Alexander Monro (1697-1767) was a very eminent surgeon and anatomist of Edinburgh, whose Medical School owes more to him probably than to any other individual. He wrote on the Anatomy of the Bones, and an Essay on Comparative Anatomy.

Frank Nicholls, M.D. (1699-1778), was a famous anatomist and physiologist at Oxford. “He was the inventor of corroded anatomical preparations, and one of the first to study and teach the minute anatomy of tissues, in other words, general, as distinguished from regional and descriptive anatomy.”1015 He was one of the first to describe correctly the mode of the production of aneurism, and he distinctly recognised the existence and function of the vaso-motor nerves.1016

Browne Langrish, M.D., was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1734. He was the author of several medical treatises, one of which was entitled Physical Experiments upon Brutes to discover a Method of dissolving Stone in the Bladder by Injections; to which is added a course of Experiments with the Lauro-Cerasus; on Fumes of Sulphur, etc. 8vo. Lond., 1746. His researches on the action of cherry laurel water are said to have suggested the use of prussic acid in medicine.1017

John Fothergill, M.D. (1712-1780), was a distinguished botanist, who collected a great number of rare plants from all parts of the world.

William Cruikshank (1745-1800) was an anatomist who discovered urea.

Stephen Hales (1677-1761), an experimental physiologist and pathologist, produced dropsy by injecting water into the veins of animals, and investigated by experiments on animals the relative movements of the blood.

Antonio Valsalva (1666-1723), a great Italian anatomist, held the professor’s chair at Bologna and wrote a valuable treatise upon the ear and its anatomy.

Giovanni Santorini (1681-1737) was a Venetian anatomist whose investigations in the anatomy of the larynx, nose, face, etc., have immortalised his name in connection with several structures of those parts.

Giovanni B. Morgagni (1682-1772) was the great founder of pathological anatomy. He was a pupil of Valsalva. His famous book on pathological anatomy was not published until he was in his 79th year. He was the author of the maxim that “observations should be weighed, not counted.” The researches in morbid anatomy carried out by Morgagni formed an epoch in the history of modern medicine, which may indeed be said to rest on the two methods of Sydenham and Morgagni. The work of the Italian anatomist was complementary to that of the English Hippocrates, who neglected anatomy. Morgagni and the “EncyclopÆdic Haller,” whom we are next to consider, were two of the brightest medical lights of the century.

Albert von Haller (1708-1777), surnamed “the Great,” was a Swiss physician of Berne, who was not only a distinguished scientist, but a man of letters and a famous poet. He studied comparative anatomy at TÜbingen; in 1725 he removed to Leyden, which at that time was the first medical school in Europe. He visited England in 1727, and made the acquaintance of Sir Hans Sloane, Cheselden, Dr. James Douglas, and other eminent persons. Leaving London, he went to Paris, but having been detected by the police in dissecting in his lodgings, he had to leave France, and he went to Basle to continue his investigations in anatomy; there he studied mathematics under John Bernoulli, and, having imbibed a taste for botany, studied the flora of Switzerland, on which he afterwards published a work. In 1729 he returned to Berne and lectured on anatomy; invited in 1726 to accept the professorship of anatomy, surgery, and botany in the newly founded University of GÖttingen, he removed to that city, and by his influence a botanical garden, an anatomical theatre, a school of surgery and midwifery were established there. In 1747 he published his most valuable work, the PrimÆ LineÆ PhysiologiÆ which was used as a text-book in medical schools.

Van Swieten (1700-1772), the pupil of Boerhaave, established the first clinical institution in Germany. He was with Sanchez the first to use corrosive sublimate in medicine. To his exertions it was due that the teaching of medicine was greatly improved in Austria.

J. F. Meckel (1724-1774) was an anatomist whose researches on the nerves, blood-vessels, glands, etc., have greatly contributed to our knowledge of their physiological functions.

J. C. Peyer (1653-1712) and J. C. Bruner (1653-1727) discovered the glands in the intestines which are known to this day by their names.

A. Pacchioni (1665-1726) described the glands we call in his honour “Pacchionian.” W. Cowper (1666-1709) discovered those which bear his name. M. Naboth (1675-1721) described the structures we call ovula Nabothi. H. Meibom (1638-1700) discovered the glands of the eyelids named after him.

Walter Charlton, M.D. (1619-1707), anatomist, a voluminous writer, was to some extent a follower of Van Helmont.

Thomas Fuller, M.D. (died 1734), published several pharmacopoeias and an account of eruptive fevers, with several other works.

Nehemiah Grew, M.D. (born about 1641), wrote The Anatomy of Plants, with an Idea of a Philosophical History of Plants, which Sprengel calls opus absolutum et immortale. Hallam says,1018 “no man, perhaps, who created a science has carried it further than Grew; few discoveries of great importance have been made in the mere anatomy of plants since his time.” His great discovery was the sexual system of plants; “that the sexual system is universal in the vegetable kingdom, and that the dust of the antherÆ is endowed with an impregnating power.”1019

He was the first to obtain sulphate of magnesia from the Epsom waters, and to investigate its properties. His treatise on Epsom salts was published in 1697.

William Briggs, M.D. (died 1704), was famous for his “skill in difficult cases of the eye.”

Edward Tyson, M.D. (died 1708), wrote on anatomy; he was the Carus of Garth’s Dispensary, and the discoverer of “Tyson’s Glands.”

William Pitcairn, M.D. (1711-1791), was an accomplished botanist. He lived in the Upper Street, Islington, where he had a botanical garden five acres in extent, stocked with the scarcest and most valuable plants. He introduced into St. Bartholomew’s Hospital a much freer use of opium in the treatment of disease, and especially of fevers, than had hitherto been customary, and that with the greatest benefit to the patients.

Peter Shaw, M.D. (1694-1763), greatly facilitated the study of chemistry in England by his translations of the chemical works of Stahl and Boerhaave, as well as by his own works. He edited the works of Bacon and Boyle, and published a number of books on medicine and chemistry.

William Hunter, M.D. (1718-1783), was an earnest and devoted anatomist and obstetrician. He was a pupil of Cullen, and was so successful a practitioner that he expended £100,000 upon his house and anatomical collection, etc. The Hunterian Museum of the University of Glasgow was formed from this collection. The famous John Hunter was his younger brother.

Thomas Dimsdale, M.D. (1711-1800), a celebrated promoter of inoculation for small-pox, acquired a great reputation and immense wealth by the process. Catherine II. of Russia paid him enormous sums for successful inoculations, and gave him a barony.

William Heberden, M.D. (1710-1801), lectured on Materia Medica at Cambridge. Dr. Munk1020 gives an interesting extract from one of Heberden’s lectures on Mithridatum and Theriaca, the famous classic medicines; he proves that the only poisons known to the ancients were hemlock, monk’s-hood, and those of venomous beasts, and that they had no antidotes for these. He says that the first accounts of powerful poisons concealed in seals or rings, poisonous vapours in gloves and letters, etc., are idle inventions of ignorant and superstitious persons.

Buffon (1707-1788) was the celebrated French naturalist to whom “we owe our first clear and practical connection of the distribution of animals with the geography of the globe.”

George Armstrong in 1769 opened the first children’s hospital in Europe; he was the physician who first devoted special attention to the diseases of children. Armstrong was a London man, and died 1781.

Joh. E. Gredring (1718-1775) was a German physician who was the first to investigate “the seat, cause, and diagnosis of insanity.”1021

James Currie (1756-1805) advocated the cold-water treatment of typhus fever patients, and thus introduced a method of treatment which in one form or another is used at the present time for reducing the temperature of the body in such cases. Currie determined the temperature by the thermometer.

Lady Wortley Montagu (1690-1762) is famous in the annals of medicine for her courageous adoption of the Turkish practice of inoculation for small-pox in the case of her own son. By her zealous advocacy she was instrumental in causing the practice to be introduced into England in 1721. Dr. Keith having subjected his son to the operation, experiments were conducted upon criminals by Maitland, and these having been successful, the Prince of Wales and the royal princesses were inoculated by Mead. On behalf of the Almighty, whose province was supposed to be trespassed upon by these and similar proceedings, the practice was violently opposed by the clergy and others.

Edward Jenner (1749-1823) introduced the practice of vaccination as a preventive of small-pox. He commenced his investigations concerning cow-pox about the year 1776. The practice of inoculation with the virus of small-pox, which had been introduced into England through the suggestion of Lady Wortley Montagu, indirectly led Jenner to his grand discovery. His attention was excited by finding that certain persons to whom he attempted to communicate small-pox by inoculation were not susceptible to the disease; on pursuing his inquiries he found that these persons had undergone cow-pox—a complaint common among the dairy-servants and farmers in Gloucestershire, and that these people were aware that cow-pox in some way was a preventive against the small-pox. Local medical men had long been acquainted with this idea, but had paid no attention to it, considering it merely a popular and groundless belief. Jenner’s genius, however, led him to divine the truth of the matter and turn it to practical advantage. The disease which affects the udder of the cow was found to be inoculable in the human subject, and could be propagated from one person to another, rendering those who had passed through the complaint secure from an attack of small-pox. Having confided the fact of this discovery to some medical friends, it was taken up in 1796 by Mr. Clive, of St. Thomas’s Hospital, who introduced vaccination into London. Vaccination was adopted in the army and navy, and Jenner was honoured by professional distinctions and a parliamentary grant of £20,000. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, and his fame and the benefits of his discovery were rapidly extended to continental nations.

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