Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/71

 GREECE AND SCIENCE AND MEDICINE 65

ten. I will, however, go much farther than that and say that in treat- ment, our profession np to as late as 100 years ago had forgotten a very deal of the practical therapeutic sanity of the Greeks, and had replaced it by a fantastic and revolting empiricism. The accounts of the doings of medical men at the death-beds of, e,g,, Charles the II. or Lord Byron are painful and humiliating, deserving of all the satire which a Moli^re could invent.

Vulgar representation and monkish credulity were soon mixed up with the few facts of medical learning which had survived the Fall of the Boman Empire. Astrological and alchemical verbiage obscured truths well known 300 years before Christ.

Hippocrates, Aristotle and Galen were not studied in the original, for the language of Greece was both dead and buried, but through Latin translations of Arabic translations. Not only did men not go back to Nature, they did not even go back to the authorities in their original tongues. Trifles of no medical or physiological importance were made the subjects of bitter debates that lasted through many generations.

It was the Arabian physicians who, through their translations of the Greek medical classics, preserved chiefly in Spain the learning of an- tiquity from sufl!ering extinction during the earlier Middle Ages.

The grand objective simplicity of Hippocrates had given place to pseudo-philosophical and quasi-learned disquisitions about the principles of treatment Certainly it is true that in every school of medicine the writings of Hippocrates and Galen were the text-books (as when in "The Merry Wives'* Evans says, "He has no more knowledge in Hib- bocrates and Galen,'* etc., and again "What says my iEsculapius? My Gralen?'*) The lectures, in fact, consisted in readings from their works and discourses upon what was said therein. In course of time it became a heresy to discover an error in Galencial anatomy, a grave offence to propound a view of functional activity contrary to or beyond that indicated by the Fergamite. This intellectual bondage lasted until the middle of the sixteenth century, when by the boldness and industry of the Belgian Vesalius, and by the origiuality and candor of the English Harvey, the reformation of anatomy and physiology was accomplished. Vesalius* text-book and Harvey's discovery swept away forever the mental miasms of the Dark Ages. The error of the men of the Middle Ages was not that they revered too much the writings of the great ancients, but in holding that these were beyond criticism and con- tained the last words in matters medical. The writings of Galen they had allowed to become not merely a great text-book but a work of super-human authority. This was perhaps the greatest honor that the mediocre could pay to the master mind, and that mind the Hellenic. The golden gleam of the glory that was Greece failed not to light as with the kindly glow of a summer evening's sun the thousand years of those ages which, otherwise, would have been dark indeed. VOL. m. — 5.

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