Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/410

 association were to cultivate their master's philosophy, to carry on the work of experimental physics, and to apply its principles in every department of natural science. Alphonso Borelli (1608-1679), Professor of Mathematics first at Messina and afterward at Pisa, the author of the famous treatise on "The Movements of Animals," and the founder of the iatromathematical school, was a member of the association. In this connection it is important to mention another zealous worker in the field of iatromathematics, viz., Sanctorius Sanctorinus, of Capo d'Istria (1561-1636). His work was done quite independently of any general movement among scientific investigators and at a much earlier period than that during which the school flourished. He was quite successful, for example, in his attempts to measure the actual amount of imperceptible evaporation, and to determine the influence which this process exerts upon health and disease. In the course of these investigations in what he called "static medicine," Sanctorinus invented a number of unusual instruments.

The phenomenon of the formation of schools or sects, the members of which were keenly interested in the maintenance and promulgation of certain physiological, pathological, or therapeutic doctrines, manifested itself anew, as I have shown above, in the seventeenth century. In the early years of the Christian era the partisans of different medical doctrines formed schools of this nature which flourished for a certain period of time and then died out completely. Such, for example, were the sects of the Dogmatists, the Methodists, the Pneumatists, etc. The mere fact of the existence of these different schools or sects showed unmistakably that the science of medicine was alive at that time and that its devotees were making vigorous efforts to increase their stock of knowledge. Then followed the long period of the Middle Ages, a series of many centuries, during which medicine made only slight gains; but at last came the Renaissance,—the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,—and here again we have a recurrence of the same phenomenon of sects in medicine; but note the great difference between the earlier manifestations