Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/461

 his health suffered not a little from the frequent exposures to hardships of all sorts to which he was subjected; and, in addition, during this long period he saw very little of his wife to whom he was devotedly attached.

Fernel is universally admitted by French physicians to have been one of the most cultivated teachers and practitioners of medicine of his day. He was a very clear writer, and would doubtless have made a number of valuable additions to the science if he had not been carried off by illness at a comparatively early age.

Of his published writings the following are reckoned the most important: "Universa medicina," Paris, 1567; "De abditis rerum causis," Paris, 1548, and "Therapeutices universalis seu medendi rationis libri VII.," Paris, 1554. (Many editions of each of these works were published.)

In his discussion of various questions relating to physiology Fernel maintains that the component elements of the body are vivified by means of heat, and he elaborates this idea very much in the same manner as Hippocrates does that of the "callidum innatum." The spiritual life, he says, is presided over by the soul ("anima"). When he comes, however, to consider the individual powers of the soul, Fernel treats the subject exactly as does Galen. He gives expression to one rather bright idea: "The specific functions of each of the different organs may be inferred in large measure from the character of the structural elements of which they are composed."

In his scheme of pathology Fernel divides diseases into simple ("similares")—diseases of the tissues; compound ("organici")—diseases involving entire organs; and complicated ("communes")—diseases in which the normal relations between the different parts are broken up.

In the chapter which Fernel devotes to the subject of therapeutics, there is a section relating to venesection which, according to Haeser, is well worth reading, as it reveals the power of the writer to grasp the leading points and to reason correctly from them.

''Two English Physicians Who Became Famous During the Sixteenth Century.''—In the early part of the sixteenth