Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/480

 and yet he is careful to take up these criticisms one by one and subject them to a close analysis. His vanity led him to maintain that he was the only person then living who was capable of lifting medicine out of the rut in which it was at that time rigidly held. He manifested a sovereign contempt, not only for the men whose opinions differed from his, but also for those who complained of the difficulty of comprehending the Latin in which his treatises are written. Finally, Lemoine states that Stahl is addicted to mysticism, as is shown by the invocations of all sorts with which he begins and ends most of his writings. Haeser adds that Stahl possessed a gloomy, reticent and overbearing spirit, in striking contrast with the charming sweetness of temper of his colleague Hoffmann.

Among Stahl's numerous contributions to medical literature there is only one in which our readers are likely to take any particular interest; I refer to the treatise which bears the title "Theoria medica vera"—the true theory upon which the science of medicine is based. It is in this work more particularly that Stahl expounds the doctrine of animism. As I have tried in vain to obtain a really satisfactory conception of this doctrine, which occupied so great a place in the thoughts of the physicians of the period between 1650 and 1750, I have decided to rest satisfied with merely reproducing here the interpretation which William Cullen of Edinburgh, one of Stahl's contemporaries and also one of the greatest English physicians of that period, gives in his celebrated "First Lines of the Practice of Physic":—

What is frequently spoken of as the power of nature—the "vis conservatrix et medicatrix naturae"—resides entirely in the rational soul. Stahl supposes that upon many occasions the soul acts independently of the body, and that, without any physical necessity arising from that state, the soul, purely in consequence of its intelligence, perceiving the tendency of noxious powers threatening, or of disorders any ways arising in the system, immediately excites such motions in the body as are suited to obviate the hurtful or pernicious consequences which might otherwise take place.