Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/504

 *able. There was no museum of anatomy and the medical school owned only two human skeletons—one male, that had been set up by Vesalius, and one female which had been prepared by Platter. During the first two hundred years of the existence of this university, only twenty-three copies of the different writings of Hippocrates, of Galen, of Dioscorides and of Paulus Aegineta were available for the instruction of the medical students. "These books should be diligently read aloud to the young men if their contents are to furnish the maximum of useful information." As for clinical instruction, each student was expected to secure for himself, by private arrangement with some active practitioner, the position of assistant, or to obtain from the Archiater or City Physician an occasional opportunity of seeing patients at the hospital. According to the rules established by the Faculty the students were permitted to take private courses with different physicians. Another and very valuable source of information that was within the reach of these young men, was supplied by the public disputations which were held quite frequently.

The preceding brief account, which I have compiled from von Gurlt's work, will serve, as I believe, to convey a fairly clear idea of the primitive and very limited opportunities of acquiring a knowledge of medicine and surgery which were afforded the student in Germany during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. (It should be borne in mind that Basel, although located in Switzerland, was in nearly all respects a German city.) It was not until a much later period that the schools of that country, in nearly every department of human knowledge, caught up with and eventually surpassed—at least for a number of years—the similar institutions in Italy and France.

Hieronymus Brunschwig.—Hieronymus Brunschwig was born at Strassburg during the early part of the fifteenth century, the exact date not being known. It is believed that he attained a great age, some even claiming that he was one hundred and ten years old at the time of his death. His treatise on surgery, bearing the simple title "Das buch-*