Page:The Harveian oration 1896.djvu/20

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HARVEY AND GALEN

especially in Mohammedan Spain, by a band of scholars gathered from various countries of Europe.

Gradually a large part of Greek science and medicine, with the Arabic comments and compilations, was put into Latin, and a knowledge of it became diffused through Europe. It is well known that a great stimulus was thus given to European thought. To this was due the first scientific revival, associated to us with the names of such men as Roger Bacon and Albert the Great. And in our own subject the Arabic version of Greek medicine thus presented was the foundation of all medical knowledge through, the Middle Ages. But among all these writers two names were always conspicuous, Aristotle and Galen, both of whom the Arabs honoured almost to adoration, and who, largely for this reason, took a corresponding position in the mediaeval world. It has often been said that, while Aristotle reigned supreme over the schools, Galen was the autocrat of medicine, rulers whose authority it was almost impiety to question. Hippocrates would be named as the master of Galen, but was certainly little read. A great crowd of Arabian and modern writers formed the court and retinue of the monarch Galen, and, as may happen in actual life, had in many cases more influence than the titular sovereign. Chaucer has given us in his portrait of the Doctor of Physic a good notion of the library of a mediaeval physician, in which, as we see, the Greeks, the Arabians, and the moderns, or Neoteric s, were all represented : —

‘ Well knew he the old Aesculapius And Dioscorides, and eke Rufus;

Old Hippocras, Hali, and Galien,

Serapion, Rasis, and Avicen;

Averroes, Damascene, and Constantin,

Bernard, and Gatisden, and Gilbertin 1 .’

1 Canterbury Tales, The Prologue. — In this remarkable list the writings assigned to Aesculapius may safely be dismissed as mythical. The name Asclepius appears, how- ever, as that of the author of some

mediaeval MSS., perhaps confounded with Asclepiades. Dioscorides, the great botanist, whose work on Materia Medica was the standard for centuries, need only be mentioned. Rufus of Ephesus was a Greek physician