Page:A short history of nursing - Lavinia L Dock (1920).djvu/72

56 56 A Short History of Nursing world was Galen, who collected all the writings of the past, and, though he himself contributed nothing new, became the medical authority of the world for a thousand years. We must also mention Dioscorides, author of the first materia medica. The early Benedictine monks were advised by Cassiodorus to read the works of Hippocrates, if possible in the original. But other Fathers of the Church retained the old ideas of demonology as connected with illness, and there was a long struggle between science and superstition. The rapid expansion of monastic life had the effect of limiting medical practice for many centuries to the rehgious orders, and had it not been that the rehgious thought of that time was out of sympathy with natural science, this might have been of great advantage to medical research and progress, for the sick were then gathered together in monasteries with men and women, the flower of their day, to tend them. The Benedictine monasteries were especially the centres of all learning and civiliza- tion, up to the time when universities began to develop (twelfth century), and medical study must have been seriously attempted under their roofs. Hildegarde, for instance, must have dissected at least the bodies of animals, and possibly the human body, but her records show that she had to conceal