translation from the Greek, but by translation from the Arabic of a
Syriac version. The first work to be so rendered was a version of
_Aphorisms_ of Hippocrates which, however, as we have seen, were
already available in Latin dress, together with the Hippocratic
_Regimen in acute diseases_, and certain works of Galen as corruptly
interpreted by Isaac Judaeus. These were rendered from Arabic into
Latin by Constantine, an African adventurer who became a monk at Monte
Cassino and died there in 1087. Constantine was a wretched craftsman
with an imperfect knowledge of both Arabic and Latin. More effective
was the great twelfth century translator from the Arabic, Gerard of
Cremona (died 1185), who turned many medical works into Latin from
Arabic, and who was followed by a whole host of imitators. Yet more
important for the advance of medicine, however, was the learned
revival of the thirteenth century. In the main that revival was based
on translations from Arabic, but a certain number of works were
also rendered direct from the Greek. During the thirteenth century
Aristotle’s scientific works began to be treated in this way, but more
important for the course of medicine were those of Galen, and they had
to wait till the following century. The long treatise of Galen, περὶ
χρείας τῶν ἐν ἀνθρώπου σώματι μορίων, _On the uses of the bodily parts
in man_, was translated from the Greek into Latin by Nicholas of Reggio
in the earlier part of the fourteenth century. This work, with all its
defects, was by far the best account of the human body then available.
Many manuscripts of the Latin version have survived, and it was
translated into several vernaculars, including English, and profoundly
influenced surgery. The rendering into Latin of this treatise, and
its wide distribution, may be regarded as the starting-point of
modern scientific medicine. Its appearance is moreover a part of the
phenomenon of the revived interest in dissection which had begun to be
practised in the Universities in the thirteenth century,[139] and was a
generally accepted discipline in the fourteenth and fifteenth.[140]
[139] Dissection of animals was practised at Salerno as early as the
eleventh century.
[140] The sources of the anatomical knowledge of the Middle Ages
are discussed in detail in the following works: R. R. von Töply,
_Studien zur Geschichte der Anatomie im Mittelalter_, Vienna, 1898;
K. Sudhoff, _Tradition und Naturbeobachtung_, Leipzig, 1907; and
also numerous articles in the _Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin und
Naturwissenschaften_; Charles Singer, ‘A Study in Early Renaissance
Anatomy’, in _Studies in the History and Method of Science_, vol. i,
Oxford, 1917.
Until the end of the fifteenth century progress in anatomy was
almost imperceptible. During the fifteenth century more Galenic and
Hippocratic texts were recovered and gradually turned into Latin, but
still without vitally affecting the course of Anatomy. The actual
printing of collected editions of Hippocrates and Galen came rather
late, for the debased taste of the Renaissance physicians continued to
prefer Dioscorides and the Arabs, of whom numerous editions appeared,
so that medicine made no advance corresponding to the progress of
scholarship. The Hippocratic works were first printed in 1525, and an
isolated edition of the inferior Galen in 1490, but the real advance
in Medicine was not made by direct study of these works. So long as
they were treated in the old scholastic spirit such works were of
no more value than those of the Arabists or others inherited from
the Middle Ages. Even Hippocrates can be spoilt by a commentary, and
it was not until the investigator began actually to compare his own
observations with those of Hippocrates and Galen that the real value
of these works became apparent. The department in which this happened
first was Anatomy, and such revolutionaries as Leonardo da Vinci
(1452-1518), who never published, and Vesalius (1514-1564), whose
great work appeared in 1543, were really basing their work on Galen,
though they were much occupied in proving Galen’s errors. Antonio
Benivieni (died 1502), an eager prophet of the new spirit, revived the
Hippocratic tradition by actually collecting notes of a few cases with
accompanying records of deaths and post-mortem findings, among which it
is interesting to observe a case of appendicitis.[141] His example was
occasionally followed during the sixteenth century, as for instance,
by the Portuguese Jewish physician Amatus Lusitanus (1511-_c._ 1562),
who printed no fewer than seven hundred cases; but the real revival
of the Hippocratic tradition came in the next century with Sydenham
(1624-1689) and Boerhaave (1668-1738), who were consciously working
on the Hippocratic basis and endeavouring to extend the Hippocratic
experience.
[141] Benivieni’s notes were published posthumously. Some of the
spurious Greek works of the Hippocratic collection have also case
notes.
Lastly surgery came to profit by the revival. The greatest of the
sixteenth century surgeons, the lovable and loving Ambroise Paré
(1510-1590), though he was, as he himself humbly confessed, an ignorant
man knowing neither Latin nor Greek, can be shown to have derived much
from the works of antiquity, which were circulating in translation in
his day and were thus filtering down to the unlearned.
Texts of Hippocrates and of Galen had formed an integral part in the
medical instruction of the universities from their commencement in
the thirteenth century. The first Greek text of the _Aphorisms_ of
Hippocrates appeared in 1532, edited by no less a hand than that of
François Rabelais. With the further recovery of the Greek texts and
preparation of better translations, these became almost the sole mode
of instruction during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The
translators became legion and their competence varied. One highly
skilled translator, however, is of special interest to English
readers. Thomas Linacre (1460?-1524), Physician to Henry VIII, Tutor
to the Princess Mary, founder and first president of the College of
Physicians, a benefactor of both the ancient Universities and one
of the earliest, ablest, most typical, and most exasperating of the
English humanists, spent much energy on this work of translation for
which his abilities peculiarly fitted him. He was responsible for
no less than six important works of Galen, of which one, the _De
temperamentis et de inaequali intemperie_, printed at Cambridge in
1521, was among the earliest books impressed in that town and is said
to be the first printed in England for which Greek types were used. It
has been honoured by reproduction in facsimile in modern times. Such
works as these, purely literary efforts, had great vogue for a century
and more, and were much in use in the Universities. These humanistic
products sometimes produced, among the advocates of the new scientific
method, a degree of fury which was only rivalled by that of some of
the humanists themselves towards the translators from the Arabic. But
these are now dead fires. As the clinical and scientific methods of
teaching gained ground, textual studies receded in medical education,
as Hippocrates and Galen themselves would have wished them to recede.
The texts of Hippocrates and Galen have now ceased to occupy a place in
any medical curriculum. Yet all who know these writings, know too, not
only that their spirit is still with us, but that the works themselves
form the background of modern practice, and that their very phraseology
is still in use at the bedside. Modern medicine may be truly described
as in essence a creation of the Greeks. To realize the nature of our
medical system, some knowledge of its Greek sources is essential. It
would indeed be a bad day for medicine if ever this debt to the Greeks
were forgotten, and the loss would be at least as much ethical as
intellectual. But there is happily no fear of this, for the figure and
spirit of Hippocrates are more real and living to-day than they have
been since the great collapse of the Greek scientific intellect in the
third and fourth centuries of the Christian era.
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