which lay in a free and untrammelled study of nature.  A century which could produce men capable of building the Gothic cathedrals may well be called one of the great epochs in history, and the age that produced Dante is a golden one in literature.  Humanity has been the richer for St. Francis; and Abelard, Albertus and Aquinas form a trio not easy to match, in their special departments, either before or after.  But in science, and particularly in medicine, and in the advance of an outlook upon nature, the thirteenth century did not help man very much.  Roger Bacon was “a voice crying in the wilderness,” and not one of the men I have picked out as specially typical of the period instituted any new departure either in practice or in science.  They were servile followers, when not of the Greeks, of the Arabians.  This is attested by the barrenness of the century and a half that followed.  One would have thought that the stimulus given by Mundinus to the study of anatomy would have borne fruit, but little was done in science during the two and a half centuries that followed the delivery of his lectures and still less in the art.  While William of Wykeham was building Winchester Cathedral and Chaucer was writing the Canterbury Tales, John of Gaddesden in practice was blindly following blind leaders whose authority no one dared question.

The truth is, from the modern standpoint the thirteenth was not the true dawn brightening more and more unto the perfect day, but a glorious aurora which flickered down again into the arctic night of mediaevalism.

To sum up—­in medicine the Middle Ages represent a restatement from century to century of the facts and theories of the Greeks modified here and there by Arabian practice.  There was, in Francis Bacon’s phrase, much iteration, small addition.  The schools bowed in humble, slavish submission to Galen and Hippocrates, taking everything from them but their spirit and there was no advance in our knowledge of the structure or function of the body.  The Arabians lit a brilliant torch from Grecian lamps and from the eighth to the eleventh centuries the profession reached among them a position of dignity and importance to which it is hard to find a parallel in history.

CHAPTER IV —­ THE RENAISSANCE AND THE RISE OF ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY

The “reconquest of the classic world of thought was by far the most important achievement of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  It absorbed nearly the whole mental energy of the Italians....  The revelation of what men were and what they wrought under the influence of other faiths and other impulses, in distant ages with a different ideal for their aim, not only widened the narrow horizon of the Middle Ages, but it also restored self-confidence to the reason of humanity."(1)

     (1) J. A. Symonds:  The Renaissance in Italy; the Revival of
     Learning, 1877, p. 52.