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.
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.
