Page:Science and medieval thought. The Harveian oration delivered before the Royal College of Physicians, October 18, 1900 (IA sciencemedievalt00allbrich).pdf/66

60 Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who early in the seven- teenth century attended lectures at Padua, opined that natural science deals with "ignoble studies, not proportioned to the dignity of our Souls." In the eighteenth century indeed, grave English physicians, humanists who forgot how Aristotle had exclaimed that marvellousness lies in all natural phenomena, scorned the trivial curiosity of John Hunter respecting flies and tadpoles.

It is part of my argument to-day to point out one evil of many which this prejudice has wrought for medicine. The progress of an applied science dependent as it is upon accessions of advantage from other arts, yet on the whole is from the simple to the complex; from facts of more direct observation to those of longer inference: and this path was the more necessary when the right method of inference-the so-called inductive method-had not been formulated, and indeed was barely in use. Now in medicine, from Homer to Lord Lister, direct observation and the simpler means of ex- periment have obtained their first-fruits on the surface of the body. In Homeric times surgery was the institution of medicine, and kings con-