Page:Science and medieval thought. The Harveian oration delivered before the Royal College of Physicians, October 18, 1900 (IA sciencemedievalt00allbrich).pdf/117

 Such was the check which, after the death of Leo the Tenth, had befallen liberal studies: no Bembo now secretly protected freethinkers; in Central Europe the generous Maximilian the Second, who died in 1576 while counselling tolerance in religion to Henry the Third, was followed by reactionary emperors. In England no doubt the sky was clearer; in the Salamis of modern civilization the malign pretensions of Philip were shattered, and the "spacious times of Elizabeth" were glorious in their outburst of freedom, adventure, and culture. Medicine, however, sinking in the sixteenth century, fell, in the seventeenth, into that reproach which has become a byword. All superstition was not within the Faith. When Harvey's discovery, like an earthquake, had broken up galenism and other outworn sophistries, his masterly work stood forth not only against long-winded dia- lectics on ars sphygmica, critical days, coctions, derivatives, revulsives, and like abstractions be- queathed by realism and uncritical subservience to texts, but also against a more lurid background of folk superstitions-of vampires, witch-burning, magic, cabbalism, astrology, alchemy, chiromancy, and water-casting. For medicine, says Bacon, is associated with charlatanry as Aesculapius with