Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/411

 and those which I have just outlined. The present group, it is proper to remark, is merely the forerunner of several similar movements that are to occur during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, movements that are all based, in varying degrees, upon the truth.

The Employment of Latin in Lecturing and Writing on Medical Topics.—In all the countries of Europe, but more particularly in Germany, there existed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—and for a long time subsequently—the practice of delivering all the lectures on medical topics in the Latin tongue—i.e., in a language which at best could not be easily understood by more than a small proportion of the students. Even the lecturers themselves must have been hampered in the full expression of their thoughts by this rule, which was practically compulsory. Paracelsus (1493-1534), the famous Swiss physician, tried—a full century earlier, as will be shown farther on—to break up this seemingly harmless but in reality objectionable custom; his example, however, was not followed, and the practice was continued without interruption for at least two centuries longer. The use of Latin as the language in which all medical knowledge was to be taught was undoubtedly based upon the idea that it was necessary for the educated physician to be reasonably familiar with that particular tongue, for the simple reason that it was the only one in which, in those early days in Western Europe, the writings of Galen were accessible, for nobody but a few expert scholars had yet acquired any useful knowledge of Greek, the language in which all of Galen's works were originally written. But it is quite likely that with this motive, which certainly was intended to produce good and useful fruit, there was coupled the further idea that the great mass of irregular practitioners—the quacks, the early barber-surgeons (Wundaerzte), and the peripatetic physicians—would in this way be debarred from entering the ranks of the regularly trained physicians. It was only after the custom of using the Latin for lecturing and writing purposes had become thoroughly rooted in the minds of medical men as something right and