Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/624

618 in Ispahan. His medical works seem to have been the chief guide in this branch in Europe for almost five centuries; their sway was not broken until the beginning of the seventeenth century. It is strong and yet painful testimony to the inherent stupidity of mankind, physicians not excepted, that the doctrines of Avicenna are little more than what is found in Galen somewhat modified by Aristotle; and, as wc have seen, Galen represents no great advance upon Hippocrates. Alas for the human race that it has always been so much easier to memorize than to think and to investigate! The medical science and practise of the Arabs was confined chiefly to surgery and the empirical treatment of internal diseases. There was no lack of victims in view of the constant wars in which the califs were engaged, and no lack of opportunity for the study of disease in its various forms in the hospitals which some of them founded in various parts of their domains. Both medical science and philosophy, though not metaphysics, had run their course by the time the Alexandrian era opened. A not inconsiderable number of new facts were collected in Alexandria, but the ability or the will to arrange them into an orderly system was lacking; at least we must adopt this view with the scant evidence to the contrary before us. For more than a thousand years the one question asked was not, What does nature say? What are the facts in the case? but, What does the master say? Beginning with the first christian centuries, Europe and western Asia more and more became organized into a society to suppress the increase of knowledge. It would not be easy to say in which century this organization did the most effective work, though there is no doubt that its most effective instrument was the inquisition. As everybody knows, it was not theology alone that was conservative; law and medicine were equally so. GeotheGoethe [sic] pays his respects to this attitude of mind when he says in Faust:

 Hear, therefore, one alone, for that is best, in sooth, And simply take your master's words for truth. On words let your attention center! Then through the safest guide you'll enter The temple-halls of certainty.

And again:

 Prepare beforehand well your part With paragraphs all got by heart, So you can better watch and look That naught is said but what is in the book: Yet in this writing as unwearied be As did the Holy Ghost dictate to thee.

This conservatism was a characteristic of the times; the protestant revolution was hardly more than the beginning of a struggle for emancipation in a single direction. It did not enlarge the intellectual horizon of the lawyer or the physician. There is much evidence to show that