A large majority of these early naturalists and botanists
were physicians.(3) The Greek art of observation was
revived in a study of the scientific writings of Aristotle,
Theophrastus and Dioscorides and in medicine, of Hippocrates
and of Galen, all in the Greek originals. That
progress was at first slow was due in part to the fact
that the leaders were too busy scraping the Arabian
tarnish from the pure gold of Greek medicine and correcting
the anatomical mistakes of Galen to bother much about
his physiology or pathology. Here and there among
the great anatomists of the period we read of an experiment,
but it was the art of observation, the art of Hippocrates,
not the science of Galen, not the carefully devised
experiment to determine function, that characterized
their work. There was indeed every reason why
men should have been content with the physiology and
pathology of that day, as, from a theoretical standpoint,
it was excellent. The doctrine of the four humors
and of the natural, animal and vital spirits afforded
a ready explanation for the symptoms of all diseases,
and the practice of the day was admirably adapted
to the theories. There was no thought of, no
desire for, change. But the revival of learning
awakened in men at first a suspicion and at last a
conviction that the ancients had left something which
could be reached by independent research, and gradually
the paralytic-like torpor passed away.
(3) Miall: The
Early Naturalists, London, 1912.
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did three
things in medicine—shattered authority,
laid the foundation of an accurate knowledge of the
structure of the human body and demonstrated how its
functions should be studied intelligently—with
which advances, as illustrating this period, may be
associated the names of Paracelsus, Vesalius and Harvey.
PARACELSUS
Paracelsus is “der Geist der stets verneint.”
He roused men against the dogmatism of the schools,
and he stimulated enormously the practical study of
chemistry. These are his great merits, against
which must be placed a flood of hermetical and transcendental
medicine, some his own, some foisted in his name,
the influence of which is still with us.
“With what judgment ye judge it shall be judged
to you again” is the verdict of three centuries
on Paracelsus. In return for unmeasured abuse
of his predecessors and contemporaries he has been
held up to obloquy as the arch-charlatan of history.
We have taken a cheap estimate of him from Fuller
and Bacon, and from a host of scurrilous scribblers
who debased or perverted his writings. Fuller(4)
picked him out as exemplifying the drunken quack,
whose body was a sea wherein the tide of drunkenness
was ever ebbing and flowing—“He boasted
that shortly he would order Luther and the Pope, as
well as he had done Galen and Hippocrates. He
was never seen to pray, and seldome came to Church.
He was not onely skilled in naturall Magick (the utmost
bounds whereof border on the suburbs of hell) but
is charged to converse constantly with familiars.
Guilty he was of all vices but wantonnesse: .
. . "
