Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/455



SOME OF THE LEADERS IN MEDICINE IN ITALY, FRANCE AND ENGLAND DURING THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES

Eminent French Physicians.—Among the physicians of France who attained a widespread and well-grounded celebrity throughout Europe during the sixteenth century, Pierre Brissot deserves to be given the first place. He was born in 1478 at Fontenay-le-Comte, not far from Rochelle, and was a professor of medicine at Paris. He attained considerable distinction, during the sixteenth century, by his advocacy of the superiority of the Hippocratic method of bloodletting over that introduced—or, rather, perpetuated—by the practitioners of that day in Central Europe. The rule which was laid down by Hippocrates was to the effect that, in venesection, the blood should be drawn from the vein lying nearest to the part inflamed. The Greek physicians of a later period forgot all about this rule and adopted in its place one that was based on the doctrine that venesection practiced in the vicinity of a focus of inflammation favors a determination of blood to that part and therefore does only harm; and they accordingly—especially in cases of pleuritis—abstracted blood from the arm on the side opposite to that on which the disease was located, or from one of the veins of the foot. This new rule was subsequently adopted by the Arabian physicians, and it remained in full force up to the end of the sixteenth century. A wide experience in the treatment of the epidemic pleuritis which raged in Paris in 1514 confirmed Brissot in the belief that the Hippocratic method is the one to be preferred; but, despite his pleadings, the Parisian