Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/595

 to repeat the series of mercurial inunctions as many as four times. His aim, in other words, was to accomplish a radical cure of the disease, whereas his contemporaries, who were mainly ignorant and uneducated physicians, were satisfied to carry out a purely symptomatic treatment. Morejon, the historian of Spanish medicine, expresses the belief that Almenar was the first to use steam baths in the treatment of syphilis. Both Hensler and Simon, the best modern authorities with regard to the history of syphilis, agree that Almenar's inunction method of treating this disease forms, notwithstanding its crudeness in certain respects, the basis of all modern methods of the same general character. Unfortunately, the physicians of a later period did not follow the relatively mild and safe inunction method advocated by Almenar, but so modified it for the worse that it became a common thing for men to say that the cure was worse than the disease.

A Few Special Advances Worthy of Note.—The beginnings of medical journalism belong to the second half of the seventeenth century. In 1665, for example, there appeared for the first time, a medical article in the "Journal des Scavans," and during the same year similar articles were printed in the "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London." According to August Hirsch the earliest periodical that was devoted entirely to the interests of the medical profession was the "Journal des découvertes en médecine," which was first published in 1679 and continued, in 1680, under the title of "Le Temple d'Esculape." Then followed soon afterward: "Le Journal des Nouvelles Découvertes en Médecine" (1681-1683); "Le Mercure Savant" (1684); "Le Zodiacus Medico-Gallicus" (1680-1685), which was published in Latin in Geneva, by Bonet; etc.

In addition to the more important advances in anatomy and physiology that have already been mentioned on previous pages, the following deserve to receive at least a passing notice: In the department of anatomy and physiology, William Briggs (1642-1704), one of the physicians of St. Thomas' Hospital, London, published at