No other physician has ever occupied the commanding
position of “Clarissimus” Galenus.
For fifteen centuries he dominated medical thought
as powerfully as did Aristotle in the schools.
Not until the Renaissance did daring spirits begin
to question the infallibility of this medical pope.
But here we must part with the last and, in many ways,
the greatest of the Greeks—a man very much
of our own type, who, could he visit this country
today, might teach us many lessons. He would
smile in scorn at the water supply of many of our cities,
thinking of the magnificent aqueducts of Rome and
of many of the colonial towns—some still
in use—which in lightness of structure and
in durability testify to the astonishing skill of
their engineers. There are country districts
in which he would find imperfect drainage and could
tell of the wonderful system by which Rome was kept
sweet and clean. Nothing would delight him more
than a visit to Panama to see what the organization
of knowledge has been able to accomplish. Everywhere
he could tour the country as a sanitary expert, preaching
the gospel of good water supply and good drainage,
two of the great elements in civilization, in which
in many places we have not yet reached the Roman standard.
CHAPTER III — MEDIAEVAL MEDICINE
There are waste places of the earth which fill
one with terror—not simply because they
are waste; one has not such feelings in the desert
nor in the vast solitude of the ocean. Very different
is it where the desolation has overtaken a brilliant
and flourishing product of man’s head and hand.
To know that
. . . the Lion and the
Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshyd
gloried and drank deep
sends a chill to the heart, and one trembles with
a sense of human instability. With this feeling
we enter the Middle Ages. Following the glory
that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, a desolation
came upon the civilized world, in which the light
of learning burned low, flickering almost to extinction.
How came it possible that the gifts of Athens and
of Alexandria were deliberately thrown away? For
three causes. The barbarians shattered the Roman
Empire to its foundations. When Alaric entered
Rome in 410 A. D., ghastly was the impression made
on the contemporaries; the Roman world shuddered in
a titanic spasm (Lindner). The land was a garden
of Eden before them, behind a howling wilderness,
as is so graphically told in Gibbon’s great history.
Many of the most important centres of learning were
destroyed, and for centuries Minerva and Apollo forsook
the haunts of men. The other equally important
cause was the change wrought by Christianity.
The brotherhood of man, the care of the body, the
gospel of practical virtues formed the essence of
the teaching of the Founder—in these the
Kingdom of Heaven was to be sought; in these lay salvation.
But the world was very evil, all thought that the
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The Evolution of Modern Medicine from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
