Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/309

Rh of the great physician, Galen, became the court of final appeal, and his ignorance marked the limit of all medical knowledge.

Yet there were great physicians in those days, martyrs and saints who should rank with the noblest, men who tried to know the truth and to act in accord with it. Roger Bacon was on the verge of discovering the secret of contagious disease and its prevention by inoculation and sanitation. Fourteen years in prison prevented all this.

Vesalius in these days was the founder of anatomy. Dissection of human bodies was prohibited as sacrilegious, the work of sorcerers and dangerous, as the supposed resurrection bone, the nucleus of the rising body, might be injured or destroyed by careless handling. "Vesalius haunted gibbets and charnel houses, for the waste of human bodies. He hoped especially to find through dissection the secret of the Black Death. The personal physician of Charles V., he had powerful protection in his early work, but he fell at last under the mean bigotry of Philip II. "He was not lost," says President White. "In this century a great painter has again given him to us. By the magic of Hamann's pencil Vesalius again stands on earth and we look once more into his cell. Its windows and doors, bolted and barred within, betoken the storm of bigotry which rages without; the crucifix, toward which he turns his eyes, symbolizes the spirit in which he labours; the corpse of the plague-stricken beneath his hand ceases to be repulsive; his very soul seems to send forth rays from the canvas, which strengthen us for the good fight in this age."

Those who destroyed Vesalius did so in the name of religion. It was believed that 'diseases are sent as punishment; who interferes with them breaks God's commandment and is God's enemy.'

This belief checked the growth of medicine even so late as fifty years ago when Simpson first used anæsthetics in obstetrics. This was held to violate the command: 'In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children.' To doubt the prevalent theory of disease was to doubt all religion and to be a foe to Christianity. No wonder there were physicians who doubted; no wonder that it was declared on high authority: 'When three physicians meet, there are two atheists,' if by atheist was meant all who believe that diseases are produced by natural causes.

So long as medicine rested on a basis of mystery, symbolism and philosophy, its limits set by the words of Galen, so long its progress was marked by martyrs, not by its successful practitioners. Even a hundred years ago success in medicine was largely quackery. Imaginary diseases were treated and in fantastic ways. In Napoleon's time, the itch was a prevalent disease in the higher classes, a disease which they did not know how to cure. At this time, most internal ills were diagnosed as 'Gale repercutée,' 'Itch struck-in,' and the arch