Page:The Harveian oration 1896.djvu/22

18 HARVEY AND GALEN often quite unintelligible. To the mediaeval practitioner who wanted an authority to quote from rather than to understand, this defect was less conspicuous. Then many of the best Greek works were either untranslated or practically unknown. It has been said that many a mediaeval school- man called himself a staunch Aristotelian though he knew no more of the master than two short logical treatises ', and many a mediaeval physician who swore by Galen often went no further than his smaller therapeutical work known as the Liber Tegni, or Ars Parva. Moreover, as time went on, the popularity of the translated Greek works evidently diminished, while Avicenna and other Arabians became predominant, especially in the Universities. Along with them the mediaeval compilers and copyists known as the Arabists or Neoterics (whom Harvey is recorded to have spoken of with great contempt) gradually became the most popular of all, being naturally more easily understood by their contemporaries. The scholars began to complain that the Arabians and their followers (the Neoterics and writers of so-called Practica) reigned in all the schools, while the pure fountains of Greek medicine were neglected *. Linacre

1 Sir Alexander Grant’s Aristotle, 1877, P- 59-

2 Mr. Hastings Rashdall, in his most valuable History of the Uni- versities of Europe in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1895), has given a list of the medical books prescribed for study in the University of Mont- pélier. He observes : ‘In the books prescribed by Statute in 1309 and 1340 the works of Galen predominate over Avicenna. A later series of documents, extending from 1488 to 1555, Show a greatly increased pro- portion of Arabic books. In 1494, of eight courses, five are upon Avi- cenna, two upon Galen, and only one upon Hippocrates. It is not till 1534 that the tidebegins to turn, under Re- naissance influence, in favour of the Greeks again’ (vol. ii. pp. 117, 123).

8 Janus Cornarius (Hagenbut), an eminent scholar and physician, thus expresses himself in 1535: ‘Et sane consultum esset ut omnes publicae scholae semel agnito errore, omnia tum Arabum tum Italorum ac Gallo- rum barbarorum medicorum opera, aut potius onera quorum iugo non aliter quam vilissima servitute gravis- sime premuntur, excuterent et ex- terminarent, et se Hippocrati vero artis medicae Timotheo formandos concrederent.

‘At vero non penitus desperandum quando nuper adeo una Florentina Academia resipiscendo aliquando etiam aliis spem nobis exhibuit, quae excusso Arabicae et barbarae servi- tutis medicae iugo, ex professo se Galenicam appellavit et profligato barbarorum exercitu, unum totum et