Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/433

 German, will even now find, in the excellent general treatises of Haeser, von Gurlt, Pagel, Puschmann, Baas-Henderson and Neuburger, great stores of the most satisfactory information concerning the thousand and one details about which I am obliged to remain silent.

Internal Pathology.—During the fifteenth century the practitioners of medicine in Italy and France were still strongly under the influence of the teachings of the Arabian medical authors. One of the first writers in Italy to place the doctrines of internal medicine upon a firmer footing was Antonius Benevienus, a native of Florence (1440-1502). His treatise on some of the unusual causes of disease, which was printed in Florence in 1506, is said to be written in very clear language and to be based entirely upon cases which came under his own observation. According to Haeser the first improvements in the doctrines relating to pathological anatomy may be credited to Benevienus, who also taught that pathological phenomena should be studied by direct observation rather than from books.

Johannes Manardus of Ferrara (1462-1536) was a very sturdy opponent of astrology, and, in general, did all in his power to weaken the prevailing blind trust in the authority of the Arabian medical authors. But the two physicians who, next to Fabricius ab Acquapendente, stand out most conspicuously among their Italian contemporaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are Fracastoro and Lancisi—the former a native of Northern and the latter of Southern Italy.

Hieronymus Fracastoro of Verona (1483-1553) ranks very high among the physicians of the first half of the sixteenth century for his valuable contributions to our knowledge of internal pathology. In the treatise which he published in 1546 on contagious maladies, he states in plain language his belief that the causes of diseases of this nature are to be found in living germs that are endowed with the power of propagating themselves. He divides these diseases into the following three groups:—

1, Those which infect only by contact; 2, Those which not only infect by contact, but at the same time leave behind a centre or