Page:The Harveian oration 1896.djvu/29

THE INFLUENCE OF GALEN

25 great discovery of Harvey. With his momentous innovation the wave of the Greek revival had spent its force, and the era of modern medicine began. But still Harvey was in an intellectual sense the heir of Aristotle and Galen.

If the sketch which has now been given of the two generations antecedent to Harvey be correct, his discovery of the circulation was the climax of that movement which began a century and a half before with the revival of the Greek medical classics and especially of Galen ; for without Galen’s insistence on the all-importance of anatomy in every branch of medicine and surgery the anatomical revival would probably never have taken place. What honour or gratitude has Galen received for this signal service ? In modern times scanty praise or none. The great physician whom Harvey speaks of as divinus ille vir seems to be often thought good for little better than to point the moral of erroneous science. In some modern works, nay, sometimes even in a Harveian Oration, we hear only of the astounding errors of Galen. There is, perhaps, no other instance of a man of equal intellectual rank who has been so persistently misunderstood and even misrepre- sented — a reaction doubtless from the extravagant homage formerly paid him. Some have thought it would have been better if Galen had been forgotten and the medical revival had started direct from Hippocrates. I cannot think so. In that case there would probably have been no anatomy, which is little regarded in the Hippocratic treatises, and the great discovery of Harvey might not have been made. Medicine would probably have lapsed into pure empiricism, and might not for centuries have been placed upon a scientific basis.

Still less can we wish that medicine had followed Paracelsus in his violent revolt against Galen and the ancients. Paracelsus equally repudiated anatomy ; and, moreover, experience shows that blank denial and contra- diction are not the best means of dealing with traditional doctrines. The school of Paracelsus, though it did some service to medicine by way of chemistry, remained a sort