Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/291



EARLY EVIDENCES OF THE INFLUENCE OF THE RENAISSANCE UPON THE PROGRESS OF MEDICINE IN WESTERN EUROPE

In previous chapters we have seen how the Arabs, inspired with an extraordinary zeal for acquiring knowledge of the different sciences, devoted time and money freely, throughout a period of several centuries, to the accomplishment of this purpose. They were fired with ambition to become a great nation, and their studies of the world's history taught them that the ancient Greeks had accumulated in their literature vast stores of the very knowledge which they were so anxious to acquire. Accordingly all their energies were directed toward converting these stores from the Greek into their own language, the Arabic. This widespread eagerness of the nation, at a given period of its history, to improve itself intellectually is spoken of as the Arabic Renaissance, and, at the time which I am now about to consider, the movement had practically come to a standstill. A short time, however, before this occurred, the physicians of Italy and of the more northerly countries of Western Europe began to show a similar desire to add to their medical literature; and their first step, like that of the Arabs four or five centuries earlier, was directed to the work of translating Arabic medical treatises into debased Latin, which was the language commonly employed by the learned during the Middle Ages. The knowledge which they desired to acquire could not at that time be obtained in any other way, for nobody was acquainted with the Greek language, and, besides, Greek originals had not yet been brought into Western