Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/590

586 doubtless strengthened the arms and legs of the criminal, but it was without profit to anybody. After the writings of Aristotle became known in western Europe they were accepted as the final word upon every subject on which the Stagirite had expressed himself. Yet he would have been the first man to protest against such a misuse of his books. Far more intellectual ingenuity was expended in trying to prove that they were true than in investigating to what extent they were true. If there is a subject that intimately concerns every man, woman and child, it is the healing art. And it has always been the same. Yet so thoroughly convinced were the minds of the medical fraternity that Galen had spoken the last word upon their profession, that until the beginning of the modern era he had the whole field to himself. When John Locke was in Montpellier he attended the ceremony of conferring the degree of doctor of medicine upon a candidate. Part of it consisted in an address by the head of the faculty which in this case was almost wholly taken up with a diatribe against Harvey's theory of the circulation of the blood.

The history of medicine illustrates in a striking way the tendency of the human mind to stagnate and dogmatize, and demonstrates how an art eventually becomes impregnated with the scientific spirit. The infancy of medical science falls in the middle of the seventeenth century; it is therefore not three hundred years old. In the Iliad physicians are held in great esteem by the Greeks. Herodotus tells us that the medical art was highly specialized in ancient Egypt and that there were physicians for almost every part of the body. Embalmers were also classed among physicians, for we are told in Genesis that Joseph commanded the physicians to embalm the body of his father. That there were practisingpracticing [sic] physicians in Palestine at an early period is evident from a few passages in the Old Testament. When we reflect that the ancient Greeks were almost continually at war either with barbarians or among themselves, it seems incredible that their books tell us almost nothing about the care of the sick and wounded in their armies. Xenophon relates that once during the retreat of the Ten Thousand, after a particularly severe conflict with the enemy, the officers found it necessary to appoint eight physicians because there were many wounded. If he had said "additional" we should suppose that the number of those whose duty it was to attend to the disabled was insufficient. The passage clearly conveys the meaning that there had been no previous provision for an organization corresponding to the modern ambulance corps. It is doubtful if the ancient Greek language contains a word corresponding to our "hospital." Hippocrates did not dogmatize, for the reason that he was one of the world's really great men. But some of his pupils founded the Dogmatic school; and while they made a few discoveries, their system was vitiated by philosophical theorems and