MEDICINE IN ANCIENT MEXICO AND PERU.
Hospitals in Mexico.—Anatomy and Human Sacrifices.—Midwives as
Spiritual Mothers.—Circumcision.—Peru.—Discovery of Cinchona Bark.
Little or nothing is known of the ancient history of Mexico and Peru.
Mexico, anciently called Anahuac, was probably conquered by the Aztecs,
who founded the city of Mexico about 1325. It was discovered in 1517.
Peru was long governed by the Incas, said to be descended from Manco
Capac, who ruled in the eleventh century. It was explored and conquered
by Pizarro, 1524-1533.
For the purposes of this work the history of these countries dates from
the time of their discovery, as the Spaniards in their blind fanaticism
destroyed most of their literature. Don Juan de Zumarraga was one of
the darkeners of human intelligence; he diligently collected all the
Mexican manuscripts, especially from Tezcuco, the literary capital
of the Mexican empire, and burned them in one great bonfire in the
market-place of Tlatelolco.[825]
Las Casas says that there were public hospitals in the cities of
Mexico, Tlascala, and Cholula, expressly endowed for the relief of
the sick. As surgeons attended the Mexican armies, it is evident that
they had attained some skill in medicine and surgery. They used the
temazcalli, or vapour-bath, practised bleeding, and knew the medicinal
properties of many herbs. They professed to have learned this wisdom
from their ancestors, the Tultecas, whose knowledge of chemistry they
likewise extolled. As human sacrifices were of daily occurrence in the
city of Mexico, they must have acquired some knowledge of anatomy,
which would assist them in the practice of surgery.[826]
Midwives were treated by the ancient Mexicans with great deference.
They were termed “spiritual mothers,” and were believed to be under
the immediate inspiration of the god Tezcatlipoca. Aglio says that
the treatment of lying-in women was very similar to that among the
Jews.[827]
The ancient Mexicans practised circumcision, and venerated the
Tequepatl, or flint knife, with which the rite was performed.[828]
Among the many vegetable products which America introduced to Europe
were maize, potatoes, chocolate, tobacco, ipecacuanha, and Peruvian
bark, from which we obtain quinine. The discovery of this valuable
medicine was due to the Jesuit missionaries. The second wife of the
viceroy, the Count of Chinchon, accompanied him to Peru. In 1628 she
was attacked by a tertian fever. Her physician was unable to cure
her. At about the same time an Indian of Uritusinga, near Loxa, in
the government of Quito, had given some fever-curing bark to a Jesuit
missionary. He sent some of it to Torres Vasquez, who was rector of the
Jesuit College at Lima and confessor to the viceroy. Torres Vasquez
cured the vice-queen by administering doses of the bark.... The remedy
was long known as Countess’s Bark and Jesuit’s Bark, and Linnæus gave
the name _Chinchona_ [after the viceroy Chinchon] to the genus of
plants which produces it.... Various species of this precious tree are
found throughout the eastern cordillera of the Andes for a distance of
2,000 miles. We owe guaiacum, sarsaparilla, sassafras, logwood, jalap,
seneka, serpentaria, and many other valuable drugs to the same part of
the world.
Frezier, in his voyage to the South Sea and along the coasts of Chili
and Peru in the years 1712, 1713, and 1714, says concerning Lima:
“There is an herb called _Carapullo_, which grows like a tuft of
grass, and yields an ear, the decoction of which makes such as drink
it delirious for some days. The Indians make use of it to discover the
natural disposition of their children. All the time when it has its
operation, they place by them the tools of all such trades as they
may follow—as by a maiden, a spindle, wool, scissors, cloth, kitchen
furniture, etc.; and by a youth, accoutrements for a horse, awls,
hammers, etc.; and that tool they take most fancy to in their delirium,
is a certain indication of the trade they are fittest for, as I was
assured by a French surgeon, who was an eye-witness to this verity.”
BOOK V.
_THE DAWN OF MODERN SCIENTIFIC MEDICINE._
CHAPTER I.
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
The Dawn of Modern Science.—The Reformation of
Medicine.—Paracelsus—The Sceptics.—The Protestantism of
Science.—Influenza.—Legal Recognition of Medicine in England.—The
Barber-Surgeons.—The Sweating Sickness.—Origin of the Royal
College of Physicians of London.—“Merry Andrew.”—Origin of St.
Bartholomew’s Hospital.—Caius.—Low State of Midwifery.—The Great
Continental Anatomists.—Vesalius.—Servetus.—Paré.—Influence of the
Reformation.—The Rosicrucians.—Touching for the Evil.—Vivisection of
Human Beings.—Origin of Legal Medicine.
The discovery of America in 1492 fitly typifies the still grander
mental world about to disclose its wonders to the newly liberated
minds of scientific investigators. The revolt against authority in
religion was paralleled by a scientific Protestantism; the mind of
man, long held in bondage to absurd and groundless fancies, struggled
to set itself free, to investigate, to test and explore on its
account, instead of accepting for granted doctrines elaborated in the
philosopher’s brains.
The revolt of medicine against the authority of Galen may be compared
to the revolt against Aristotle in philosophy. The authority of the
Arabian schools was overthrown, the principles of Hippocrates were
in the ascendant. The era of the Renaissance was not more an era of
Protestantism than an age of Scepticism. Faith had become credulity,
and credulity had sunk into imbecility. The power of the printing
press, the spread of humanism, the beginning of scientific inquiry,
the discovery of the splendid treasure of classic literature, long
buried beneath the dust of dark and barbarous ages, the widening of
the mental horizon as the world doubled itself before the prows of
the discoverers’ vessels—all these factors brought about the new
birth of Science. It was the golden age of the medical sciences.
Anatomy and surgery awoke, from their long slumber, and Europe
entered upon a period of scientific investigation such as the world
had never known before. Medicine formed an alliance with what are
called its accessory sciences; chemistry liberated from slavery to
the alchemist, botany set free from the delusions of the doctrine
of “signatures,” pharmacy elevated into a branch of medical science
from the kitchen and the confectioner’s store-room, lent their aid,
in conjunction with the hydraulics and pneumatics of the natural
philosopher, to advance it. All these things meant revolt against
the old order, Protestantism against the outworn creeds of Greek and
Arabian dogmatists. They meant more than this. Ere the ground could
be cleared for the new palace of physical science which the glorious
sixteenth century was to rear, scepticism must lend its withering
and desolating aid; foul undergrowths must be destroyed; evil germs,
bred of the stagnant marshes of the dark ages, must perish under the
wholesome, if ruthless, disinfectants of reason and unbelief. There
was a stern need of this. The demon theory of disease had lasted from
primeval ages up to this dawn of the sixteenth century. From glacial
times, through savage ages and religions, and often in beautifully
poetic faiths, the disease-demon held its own. Even in the hallowed and
renovating pages of the gospels the disease-demon stalks unchallenged
save by the thaumaturgist. Now he is to be banished from the mind of
civilized man for ever; and to reach this goal atheism was needed.
The sixteenth century, so far as medicine and physical science are
concerned, opens with the Cabalist Theosophists, Trithemius, Cornelius
Agrippa, Cardan, and their followers. Giordano Bruno, the aggressive
atheist and martyr of science, Montaigne, the philosophic sceptic,
Charron, the opponent of all religion, and Rabelais, the witty scoffer
at the gross corruptions of orthodoxy, helped to clear the ground for
the work of the scientists. Meanwhile Paracelsus, from his chair at
Basel University, having made an _auto-da-fe_ of ancient and dogmatic
medicine, lays the foundation-stone of the medicine of the modern era.
An army of savants begins to work for science as well as literature.
Linacre has introduced Italian Humanism to the doctors of England;
Caius busies himself with the Greek and Latin texts of the great
writers on medicine; Gesner, the German Pliny, and Aldrovandi promote
the study of natural history. Everywhere men are busy with the
beginnings of electricity, chemistry, mineralogy, botany, and the
other sciences which are to be the handmaidens of medicine. One clear
voice is heard from Basel. It is that of Paracelsus, exhuming physical
science: “You Italy, you Dalmatia, you Sarmatia, Athens, Greece,
Arabia, and Israel, follow me. Come out of the night of the mind!”
The teacher of Paracelsus, who exercised the greatest influence upon
his mental development, was the celebrated TRITHEMIUS, the abbot of
the Spanheim Benedictines (about 1500), who was so famous a student of
chemistry and the occult philosophy that scholars and mighty nobles
went on pilgrimages and princes sent ambassadors, to his monastery to
gather some fragments of his vast learning. Amongst many works, he
published several on magical subjects, and was the first who told the
wondrous story of Dr. Faustus, in whose magical doings he was a devout
believer.[829] His famous library consisted of the rare possession of
two thousand volumes. Cornelius Agrippa was his pupil, and in a letter
which he sent to his old master, with the manuscript of his _Occult
Philosophy_, we find a passage which throws a light on the studies of
the worthy abbot: “We conferred much about chemical matters, magic,
cabalism, and other things which at the present time lie hidden as
secret sciences and arts.”[830]
THEOPHRASTUS BOMBASTUS PARACELSUS OF HOHENHEIM (1493-1541), “The
Reformer of Medicine,” “Luther Alter,” effected a revolution in
medicine, and is one of the most remarkable characters, not only in
the history of the medical profession, but in that of civilization.
There was so much in this great man’s conduct to admire, and so much
of which to disapprove, that it is not surprising that he has been
either wholly praised or entirely condemned, and by very few considered
dispassionately. Perhaps Mr. Browning, in his noble poem _Paracelsus_,
has given the world the truest conception of a man who did for his
profession and for humanity the enormous service of liberating medicine
from a slavish adhesion to authority, though it must be admitted that
he was guilty of extravagances and excesses we may find it difficult to
excuse, even though for the most part they were faults common to his
country and his age. Paracelsus was born ten years later than Luther,
at Einsiedeln, near Zurich. He studied under the abbot Trithemius of
Spanheim, who was a great adept in magic, alchemy, and astrology.
Under this teacher he acquired a taste for occult studies, and formed
a determination to use them for the welfare of mankind. Trithemius
was a theosophist. As was the custom of the times, Paracelsus became
an itinerant student after his course at the University of Basel. He
studied chemistry in the laboratory of the Fuggers at Schwatz, in the
Tyrol.
Attached to the armies, he travelled widely as a military surgeon in
the Netherlands, the Romagna, Naples, Venice, Denmark. He worked in the
mines, that he might acquire a knowledge of metals, working as a common
labourer for his bread. In Bohemian fashion he wandered over the world,
visiting Spain, Portugal, Egypt, Tartary, and the East. He picked up
his scientific knowledge by any means rather than from books. He said,
“Reading never made a doctor, but practice is what forms a physician.
For all reading is a footstool to practice, and a mere feather broom.
He who meditates discovers something.” And so he held converse with
the common folk, and talked and drank with boors, shepherds, Jews,
gypsies, and tramps, gaining odd scraps of knowledge wherever he could.
He had no books. His only volume was Nature, whom he interrogated at
first-hand. He would rather learn medicine and surgery from an old
country nurse than from an university lecturer. If there was one thing
which he detested more than another, it was the principle of authority.
He bent his head to no man.
In the year 1525 Paracelsus went to Basel, where he was fortunate
in curing Froben, the great printer, by his laudanum, when he had
the gout. Froben was the friend of Erasmus, who was associated with
Œcolampadius, and soon after, upon the recommendation of Œcolampadius,
he was appointed by the city magnates a professor of physics, medicine,
and surgery, with a considerable salary; at the same time they made
him city physician, to the duties of which office he requested might
be added inspector of drug shops. This examination made the druggists
his bitterest enemies, as he detected their fraudulent practices; they
combined to set the other doctors of the city against him, and as these
were exceedingly jealous of his skill and success, poor Paracelsus
found himself in a hornet’s nest. We find him a professor at Basel
University in 1526. He has become famous as a physician, the medicines
which he has discovered he has successfully used in his practice; he
was now in the eyes of his patients at least,
“The wondrous Paracelsus, life’s dispenser,
Fate’s commissary, idol of the schools and courts.”
He began his lectures at Basel by lighting some sulphur in a chafing
dish, and burning the books of his great predecessors in the medical
art, Avicenna, Galen, and others, saying: “Sic vos ardebitis in
gehennâ.” He boasted that he had read no books for ten years, though
he protested that his shoe-buckles were more learned than the authors
whose works he had burned.
It must have been a wonderful spectacle when this new teacher took
his place before his pupils. The benches occupied hitherto by a dozen
or two of students were crowded with an eager audience anxious for
the new learning. Literature had been exhumed many years before, and
now it was the turn of Science! Leaving the morbid seclusion of the
cloisters, men had given up dreaming for inquiry, and baseless visions
for the acquisition of facts. This was the childhood of our science,
and its days were bright with the poetry of youth. It is a sight to
arouse our enthusiasm to see in the early dawn of our modern science
this man standing up alone to pit himself against the whole scientific
authority of his day. He rises from the crucibles and fires where his
predecessors had been vainly seeking for gold and silver, ever and
again pretending to have found them, and always going empty-handed to
a deluded world. Henceforth, he says, his alchemy shall serve a nobler
purpose than gold seeking; it shall aid in the healing of disease.
He casts aside the sacred books of medicine which have been handed
down the ages by his predecessors; destroying them, he declares, with
an earnestness which is less tinged by arrogance than by conviction,
that these men had been blind guides, that he alone has the clue of
the maze, and he forsakes all to follow Truth, though she lead him to
death. In his generous impulse to serve mankind he has spoken harshly
of his opponents. They would not have helped him, any way. He was above
them; they could not understand him, so they hated him, and he scorned
them. As too often happens to such heroes, he forgot the love of his
neighbour in his love for mankind.
Paracelsus found his pupils holding fast by the teachings of the school
of Salerno, and there seems no ground for supposing that the healing
art had made the slightest progress in Europe from the foundation
of that school in 1150, except perhaps in pharmacy. On the day that
Paracelsus stood up before his audience at Basel University, he cried,
“Away with Ætius, Oribasius, Galen, Rhasis, Serapion, Avicenna,
Averroes, and the other blocks!” He had diplomas sent him from Germany,
France, and Italy, and a letter from Erasmus.
In 1528 we find him at Colmar, in Alsatia. He has been driven by
priests and doctors from Basel.
He had been called to the bedside of some rich cleric who was ill.
He cured him, but so speedily that his fee was refused. Though not
at all a mercenary man (for he always gave the poor his services
gratuitously), he sued the priest; but the judge refused to interfere,
and Paracelsus used strong language to him, and had to fly to escape
punishment. We must not be too hard upon the canon. Disease was treated
with profound respect in those days, and great patients liked to be
cured with deliberation and some ceremonial.
The closing scenes of the life of Paracelsus were passed in a cell
in the hospital of Salzburg, in the year 1541, when he died at the
age of forty-eight, a martyr of science. Recent investigations in
contemporary records have proved that he had been attacked by the
servants of certain physicians who were his jealous enemies, and that
in consequence of a fall he sustained a fracture of the skull, which
proved fatal in a few days.
Within a period of time covering fifteen years he had written some 106
treatises on medicine, alchemy, natural history and philosophy, magic,
and other subjects. He despised University learning. “The book of
Nature,” he declared, “was that which the physician should read, and to
do so he must walk over its leaves.” His library consisted of a Bible,
St. Jerome on the Gospels, a volume on medicine, and seven manuscripts.
His epitaph tells but a part of his honours. “Here lies Philippus
Paracelsus, the famous doctor of medicine, who, by his wonderful art,
cured bad wounds, lepra, gout, dropsy, and other incurable diseases,
and to his own honour divided his possessions among the poor.”
This but feebly expresses what medicine owes to him. He discovered the
metal zinc, and hydrogen gas. In place of the elaborate concoctions
and filthy messes which were given as medicines in his time, he taught
doctors to give tinctures and quintessences of drugs. He invented
laudanum, and anticipated our discovery of transfusion of blood. He
opposed the barbarous method of reducing dislocations and dealing with
fractures, introduced the use of mercury in the treatment of syphilis,
and came very near to the discoveries which go under the name of
Darwinism. He taught that chemistry was to be employed, not in making
gold, but for the preparation of medicines; and he introduced into
practice mineral remedies, including mineral baths, iron, sulphur,
antimony, arsenic, gold, tin, lead, etc. Amongst the vegetable remedies
employed by him was arnica.
Paracelsus used chemical principles, says Sprengel, for the explanation
of particular diseases. “Most or all diseases, according to him, arise
from the effervescence of salts, from the combustion of sulphur, or
from the coagulation of mercury.”[831]
His ætiology attributed diseases to five causes:—1. The Ens astrale
(a certain power of the stars); this means no more than foul air. 2.
The Ens veneni (power of poison), arising from errors of assimilation
and digestion. 3. The Ens naturale (power of nature or of the body);
diatheses. 4. Ens spirituale (power of the spirit); the disorders which
arise from perverted ideas. 5. Ens Dei (power of God); the injuries or
causes of disease predetermined by God.[832]
When Paracelsus came upon the scene of medical history, alchemy had
just begun to lose its credit. The true students of science had
discovered its deceptions and had abandoned it to the quacks. It has
often happened, and happens still, that certain pretended sciences,
when cast aside as worthless, are taken from their hiding-places and
made to do duty in another and perhaps nobler form. Paracelsus set
himself the task of rehabilitating alchemy. The deeper thinkers,
the more ardent truth-seekers in religion and science, imbued with
philosophy and penetrated by the scholasticism of the age, were quite
ready for a new reign of theosophical medicine to take the place of the
Arabian polypharmacy.
GEORGE AGRICOLA (1494-1555) was a physician who practised in Bohemia,
and was the first to raise mineralogy to the dignity of a science. He
did so much for it, in fact, that no great advance was made in it from
the point at which he left it, till the eighteenth century.
CONRAD GESNER (1516-1565), surnamed the German Pliny, was a famous
naturalist of vast erudition, and imbued with an enthusiastic love
of science. In 1541 he was professor of physics and natural history
at Zurich. He wrote several books on ancient medicine and botany. To
prepare himself to write his _History of Animals_, he read 250 authors,
travelled nearly all over Europe, and gathered information from every
source, even from hunters and shepherds. His medical works show that he
was far above the absurd fancies and prejudices of his time.
ANDREAS CÆSALPINUS (1519-1603), the first systematical botanist, and
the founder of the work which Linnæus developed, studied, if he did
not also teach, anatomy and medicine at Pisa. He had a clear idea of
the circulation of the blood, at least through the lungs, and he was
the first to use the term “circulation.” Claims have been made on
his behalf as the discoverer of the circulation; but they cannot be
substantiated, as he did not know of the _direct_ flow of the blood
from the arteries to the veins.
CARDAN (1501-1576), a physician and astrologer, was also a half-crazy
magician. He was a skilful physician, and visited King Edward VI. to
calculate his nativity, and Cardinal Beaton to cure him in his sickness.
GIORDANO BRUNO (1548-1600) was an Italian philosopher of the
Renaissance, who, from a determination to study the universe for
himself, threw off the restraints of the Christian religion and
revolted against the authority of Aristotle and tradition. His most
popular and characteristic work is the _Spaccio_. He was not an
atheist, as has been asserted, but a pantheist. He considered the soul
of man as a thinking monad, and as immortal. He was burnt at the stake
for his opinions, which, it must be admitted, were in some respects
detrimental to morality as well as to faith.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE (1533-1592), the sceptical founder of a new
philosophy, and one of the most delightful of essayists, anticipated
the scientific spirit by his minute and critical observation upon the
curious facts connected with human nature.
FRANÇOIS RABELAIS (_c._ 1490-1553) entered the faculty of medicine at
Montpellier.
EURICUS CORDUS (1486-1535), who studied medicine at Erfurt, is famous
for the following admirable epigram:—
“Three faces wears the doctor: when first sought,
An angel’s—and a God’s, the cure half wrought;
But, when that cure complete, he seeks his fee,
The Devil looks then less terrible than he.”
His son, VALERIUS CORDUS (1515-1544), was the discoverer of sulphuric
ether.
ANTONIO BENIVIENI (_c._ 1500), a physician of Florence, was the morning
star of a new era for surgery, when he insisted that the compilations
of the ancients and Arabians ought to be given up for the observation
of nature.[833] Thus, before the time of Ambroise Paré (1509-1590), the
way for the reception of the true modern surgery was prepared in Italy
by the efforts of those who strove to induce educated and talented men
to devote their attention to this branch of the healing art.
INFLUENZA.
A violent and extensive catarrhal fever prevailed in France and Europe
generally in 1510. Hecker considers there is evidence that it had its
origin in the remotest parts of the East.[834] His description of
this influenza is as follows: “The catarrhal symptoms, which, on the
appearance of disorders of this kind, usually form their commencement,
seem to have been quite thrown into the background by those of violent
rheumatism and inflammation. The patient was first seized with
giddiness and severe headache; then came on a shooting pain through the
shoulders and extending to the thighs. The loins, too, were affected
with intolerably painful dartings, during which an inflammatory fever
set in with delirium and violent excitement. In some the parotid glands
became inflamed, and even the digestive organs participated in the
deep-rooted malady; for those affected had, together with constant
oppression at the stomach, a great loathing for all animal food, and a
dislike even of wine. Among the poor as well as the rich many died, and
some quite suddenly, of this strange disease, in the treatment of which
the physicians shortened life not a little by their purgative treatment
and phlebotomy, seeking an excuse for their ignorance in the influence
of the constellations, and alleging that astral diseases were beyond
the reach of human art.”
LEGAL RECOGNITION OF MEDICAL PRACTITIONERS.
The first Act of Parliament dealing with the medical profession in
England was passed in the year 1511, and is entitled “AN ACT FOR THE
APPOINTING OF PHYSICIANS AND SURGEONS,” the preamble of which runs as
follows:—
“Forasmuch as the science and cunning of Physick and Surgery (to the
perfect knowledge of which be requisite both great learning and ripe
experience) is daily within this realm exercised by a great multitude
of ignorant persons, of whom the greater part have no manner of insight
in the same, nor in any other kind of learning; some also can read no
letters on the book, so far forth that common artificers, as smiths,
weavers, and women, boldly and accustomably take upon them great cures,
and things of great difficulty, in the which they partly use sorcery
and witchcraft, partly apply such medicines unto the disease as be
very noxious, and nothing meet therefore, to the high displeasure of
God, great infamy to the faculty, and the grievous hurt, damage, and
destruction of many of the king’s liege people; most especially of them
that cannot discern the uncunning from the cunning. Be it therefore
(to the surety and comfort of all manner of people) by the authority
of this present Parliament enacted:—That no person within the city of
London, nor within seven miles of the same, take upon him to exercise
and occupy as a Physician or Surgeon except he be first examined,
approved, and admitted by the Bishop of London, or by the Dean of St.
Paul’s, for the time being, calling to him or them four Doctors of
Physic, and for Surgeons, other expert persons in that faculty; and
for the first examination such as they shall think convenient, and
afterwards alway four of them that have been so approved.[835] ...
“That no person out of the said city and precinct of seven miles
of the same, except he have been (as is aforesaid) approved in the
same, take upon him to exercise and occupy as a Physician or Surgeon,
in any diocese within this realm; but if he be first examined and
approved by the Bishop of the same diocese, or, he being out of the
diocese, by his vicar-general; either of them calling to them such
expert persons in the said faculties, as their discretion shall think
convenient....”[836]
THE BARBER-SURGEONS.
The occupation of shaving and trimming beards was anciently considered
a profession, and was united to that of surgery. In the reign of Louis
XIV. of France the hairdressers were formally separated from the
Barber-Surgeons, who were incorporated as a distinct medical body.
A London Company of Barbers was formed in 1308, and the first year
of the reign of Edward IV. (1462) the barbers were incorporated by a
charter which was confirmed by many succeeding monarchs. In 1540 the
Company of Barbers, and those who practised purely as Surgeons, were
united as “the commonalty of Barbers and Surgeons of London.” It was
enacted (32 Hen. VIII.) that “No person using any shaving or barbery
in London shall occupy any surgery, letting of blood, or other matter,
except only drawing of teeth.” The Surgeons’ corporation in London two
years later petitioned Parliament to be exempted from bearing arms
and serving on juries, so that they might be free to attend to their
practice.[837] Their petition was granted, and all medical men are in
the enjoyment of these privileges at the present time.
An Act of Parliament was passed in 1540 allowing the United Companies
of Barbers and Surgeons to have yearly four bodies of criminals for
purposes of dissection. This is supposed to have been the first
legislative enactment passed in any country for promoting the study of
anatomy.[838]
Surgery in England in the reign of Henry VIII. was in a deplorable
condition. Thomas Gale thus describes the surgeons of the time:—
“I remember when I was in the wars at Montreuil, in the time of
that most famous prince, Henry VIII., there was a great rabblement
there that took upon them to be surgeons. Some were sow-gelders,
and some horse-gelders, with tinkers and cobblers. This noble sect
did such great cures that they got themselves a perpetual name; for
like as Thessalus’ sect were called Thessalonians, so was this noble
rabblement, for their notorious cures, called dog-leeches; for in two
dressings they did commonly make their cures whole and sound for ever,
so that they felt neither heat nor cold, nor no manner of pain after.
But when the Duke of Norfolk, who was then general, understood how the
people did die, and that of small wounds, he sent for me and certain
other surgeons, commanding us to make search how these men came to
their death, whether it were by the grievousness of their wounds or
by the lack of knowledge of the surgeons; and we, according to our
commandment, made search through all the camp, and found many of the
same good fellows which took upon them the names of surgeons; not only
the names but the wages also. We asking of them whether they were
surgeons or no, they said they were; we demanded with whom they were
brought up, and they, with shameless faces, would answer, either with
one cunning man, or another, which was dead. Then we demanded of them
what chirurgery stuff they had to cure men withal; and they would show
us a pot or a box which they had in a budget, wherein was such trumpery
as they did use to grease horses’ heels withal, and laid upon scabbed
horses’ backs, with verval and such like. And others that were cobblers
and tinkers used shoemaker’s wax, with the rust of old pans, and made
therewith ‘a noble salve,’ as they did term it. But in the end this
worthy rabblement was committed to the Marshalsea, and threatened to be
hanged for their worthy deeds, except they would declare the truth—what
they were and of what occupations; and in the end they did confess, as
I have declared to you before.”
Gale says in another place: “I have, myself, in the time of King Henry
VIII., helped to furnish out of London, in one year, which served by
sea and land, three score and twelve surgeons, which were good workmen,
and well able to serve, and all Englishmen. At this present day there
are not thirty-four of all the whole company of Englishmen, and yet the
most part of them be in noblemen’s service, so that if we should have
need, I do not know where to find twelve sufficient men. What do I say?
sufficient men? Nay; I would there were ten amongst all the company
worthy to be called surgeons.”
In the year 1518 the Barbers and Surgeons were united in one company.
The Barbers were restricted from performing any surgical operations,
except drawing teeth, and the Surgeons, on their part, had to abandon
shaving and trimming beards. Physicians were permitted to practise
surgery.
In the year 1542 it became necessary to pass an Act to further
regulate the practice of Surgery, the chief points of which are the
following: “Whereas in the Parliament holden at Westminster, in the
third year of the King’s Most Gracious Reign, amongst other things,
for the avoiding of sorceries, witchcrafts, and other inconveniences,
it was enacted, That no person within the City of London, nor within
seven miles of the same, should take upon him to exercise and occupy
as Physician and Surgeon, except he be first examined, admitted, and
approved by the Bishop of London, etc.... Sithence the making of which
said Act, the Company and Fellowship of Surgeons of London, minding
onely their owne lucres, and nothing the profit or ease of the diseased
or patient, have sued, troubled, and vexed divers honest persons,
as well men as women, whom God hath endueed with the knowledge of
the nature, kind and operation of certain herbs, roots and waters,
and the using and ministering of them, to such as have been pained
with custumable diseases, as women’s breasts being sore, a pin and
the web in the eye, uncomes of the hands, scaldings, burnings, sore
mouths, the stone, stranguary, saucelin, and morphew, and such other
like diseases.... And yet the said persons have not taken anything
for their pains or cunning.... In consideration whereof, and for the
ease, comfort, succour, help, relief, and health of the King’s poor
subjects, inhabitants of this his realm, now pained or diseased, or
that hereafter shall be pained or diseased, Be it ordained, etc., that
at all time from henceforth it shall be lawful to every person being
the King’s subject, having knowledge and experience of the nature of
herbs, roots and waters, etc., to use and minister according to their
cunning, experience, and knowledge ... the aforesaid statute ... or any
other Act notwithstanding.”
THE SWEATING SICKNESS.
In 1517 England was visited by a third attack of the Sweating Sickness.
Public business was suspended, the King moved his court from place to
place, and a panic seized the people. Erasmus, writing to Wolsey’s
physician, says: “I am frequently astonished and grieved to think
how it is that England has been now for so many years troubled by a
continual pestilence, especially by a deadly sweat, which appears in a
great measure to be peculiar to your country. I have read how a city
was once delivered from a plague by a change in the houses, made at the
suggestion of a philosopher. I am inclined to think that this also must
be the deliverance for England.” He proceeds to suggest that better
ventilation is necessary for dwellings; he remarks that the glass
windows admit light, but not air; that such air as does enter comes in
as draughts, through holes and corners full of pestilential emanations.
The floors laid with clay and covered with rushes, the bottom
layer of which was unchanged sometimes for twenty years, harboured
expectorations, vomitings, filth, and all sorts of abominations.
He advises that the use of rushes should be given up, that the rooms
should be so built as to be exposed to the light and fresh air on two
or three sides, and that the windows be so constructed as to be easily
opened or closed. He declares that at one time, if he ever entered a
room which had not been occupied for some months, he was sure to take
a fever. He suggests that the people should eat less, especially of
salt meats, and that proper officers be appointed to keep the streets
and suburbs in better order. Erasmus was thus our first sanitary
reformer.
Aubrey gives[839] a selection of the favourite prescriptions in use at
this period against the Sweating Sickness:—
“Take endive, sowthistle, marygold, m’oney and nightshade, three
handfuls of all, and seethe them in conduit water, from a quart to a
pint, then strain it into a fair vessel, then delay it with a little
sugar to put away the tartness, and then drink it when the sweat taketh
you, and keep you warm; and by the grace of God ye shall be whole.”
“Take half an handful of rew, called herbe grace, an handful marygold,
half an handful featherfew, a handful sorrel, a handful burnet, and
half a handful dragons, the top in summer, the root in winter; wash
them in running water, and put them in an earthen pot with a pottle
of running water, and let them seethe soberly to nigh the half be
consumed, and then draw aback the pot to it be almost cold, and then
strain it into a fair glass and keep it close, and use thereof morn
and even, and when need is oftener; and if it be bitter, delay it with
sugar candy; and if it be taken afore the pimples break forth, there is
no doubt but with the grace of Jesu it shall amend any man, woman or
child.”
“Another very true medicine.—For to say every day at seven parts of
your body, seven paternosters, and seven Ave Marias, with one Credo at
the last. Ye shal begyn at the ryght syde, under the ryght ere, saying
the ‘_paternoster qui es in cœlis, sanctificetur nomen tuum_,’ with
a cross made there with your thumb, and so say the paternoster full
complete, and one Ave Maria, and then under the left ere, and then
under the left armhole, and then under the left the [thigh?] hole, and
then the last at the heart, with one paternoster, Ave Maria, with one
Credo; and these thus said daily, with the grace of God is there no
manner drede hym.”
THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS OF LONDON ESTABLISHED.
The Royal College of Physicians of London was founded by Henry VIII.
for the repression of irregular and unlearned medical practice. The
Letters Patent constituting the College were dated 23rd September,
1518. The king was moved to this by the example of similar institutions
in Italy and elsewhere, by the solicitations of Thomas Linacre, one of
his own physicians, and by the advice and recommendation of Cardinal
Wolsey. Six physicians are named in the Letters Patent as constituting
the College, viz., John Chambre, Thomas Linacre, and Ferdinand de
Victoria, the king’s physicians; and Nicholas Halsewell, John Francis,
and Robert Yaxlery, physicians, “and all men of the same faculty, of
and in London, and within seven miles thereof, are incorporated as one
body and perpetual community or college.”[840]
DR. CHAMBRE was a priest before he became a physician. He was educated
at Oxford, studied at Padua, where he graduated in physic.
DR. THOMAS LINACRE was a distinguished scholar and physician, who was
born A.D. 1460. In 1484 he was elected a fellow of All Souls’, Oxford;
the next year he went to Bologna, where he studied under Pulitian;
he then went to Florence, where he became acquainted with Lorenzo
the Great; from Florence, he went to Rome, and thence to Venice and
Padua, which at that time was the most celebrated school of physic in
the world, and took the degree of Doctor of Medicine with the highest
applause. Linacre founded (1524) two Physic Lectures at Oxford and one
at Cambridge, but “they were not performed till divers years after
Linacre’s death, on account of the troubles concerning religion.”[841]
DR. ANDREW BORDE, Carthusian monk, physician, wit and buffoon, lived in
the reign of Henry VIII. He took his physician’s degree at Montpellier
in 1532, and afterwards became one of the court physicians on his
return to England. He was a learned, genial, and sensible doctor,
but possessed “a rambling head and an inconstant mind,” as Anthony à
Wood says. He wrote voluminously. His chief works, the _Breviary of
Health_, _The Dietary of Health_, and _The Book of the Introduction to
Knowledge_, have been edited by Dr. F. J. Furnivall, and published for
the Early English Text Society in a volume which is one of the most
entertaining works on medicine ever written. Borde earned his title
of “Merry Andrew” (a name which has become a household word) from
attending fairs and revels, and conducting himself with the buffoonery
which ill became so learned a man. Doubtless, however, it endeared
him to his countrymen of the period. His medical works are full of
prescriptions for various complaints, and many of them are exceedingly
valuable and fully equal to the best treatment followed now.
THOMAS VICARY was probably born between 1490 and 1500, was not a
trained surgeon, but “a meane practiser” at Maidstone. In 1525 he was
junior of the three Wardens of the Barbers’ or Barber-Surgeons’ Company
in London. In 1528 he was Upper or First Warden of the Company,
and one of the surgeons to Henry VIII., at £20 a year. In 1530 he
was Master of the Barber-Surgeons’ Company, and at the head of his
profession till his death in 1561 or 1562. As Dr. Furnivall says, he
was “the Paget of his great Tudor time.” Soon after the dissolution of
the monasteries, Henry VIII., at the request of the City of London,
handed over the monastic hospitals, Bartholomew’s and others, to the
Corporation of London. He gave to Bartholomew’s a small endowment
(nominally £333 odd) out of old houses which he charged with pensions
to parsons. The city raised £1000 for repairs and reopened the hospital
for one hundred patients, and on 29th September, 1548, appointed
Chief-Surgeon VICARY as one of the six new governors of the hospital.
The reorganization of the hospital was in a large measure due to this
excellent man and intelligent surgeon. In 1548 he published the first
English work on Anatomy, _The Anatomie of the Body of Man_, which was
reprinted by the Surgeons of Bartholomew’s in 1577. This text-book held
the field for 150 years.[842]
Those who are interested in the origin of our oldest and greatest
hospital in London will find much valuable information in the _Truly
Christian Ordre of the Hospital of S. Bartholomewes_, 1552, published
as Appendix XVI. in Dr. Furnivall’s Vicary, p. 291.
ROBERT COPLAND in 1547 or 48 published his book called _The Hy Way to
the Spitt House_. This is an important and interesting account of the
scamps and rogues who resorted to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London,
in the time of Henry VIII., after the Statute 22nd Hen. VIII. (1530-1),
against vagabonds. At that time the hospital gave temporary lodging to
almost all the needy, as well as a permanent home to the deserving poor
and sick; and sisters attended to them. Copland learns from the porter
all about the ne’er-do-wells and the rascals who sought to impose on
the charity.[843]
The old herbalists were often very patient and devoted investigators,
who experimented upon themselves, and by these means accumulated a
great number of facts of great use in the art of medicine. Conrad
Gesner was one of these; he used to eat small portions of wild herbs,
and test their effects on his own person, sitting down in the study
with the plants around him.[844]
SIR WILLIAM BUTTS, M.D. (died 1545), was physician to Henry VIII., and
was the friend of Wolsey, Cranmer, and Latimer. He was knighted by
Henry, and is immortalised in Shakspeare’s play of _Henry VIII._
GEORGE OWEN, M.D. (died 1558), was physician to Henry VIII., Edward
VI., and Queen Mary. It has been said that Edward VI. was brought into
the world by Dr. Owen, who performed the Cæsarian operation on his
mother.
JOHN CAIUS, M.D. (1510-1573), entered Gonville Hall, Cambridge, 1529.
He at first studied divinity, but in 1539 went to Padua to study
medicine under Montanus. Whilst at Padua, Caius lodged in the same
house with the anatomist Vesalius, devoting no less attention to
anatomy than his companion. He took the degree of doctor of medicine
at Padua. He was public professor of Greek in that University; in
1543 he visited all the great libraries of Italy, collecting MSS.,
with the view of giving correct editions of the works of Galen and
Celsus. In 1552 he was residing in London, and published an account
of the Sweating Sickness which prevailed in 1551. He was physician to
Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth. Dr. Caius enlarged and augmented the
resources of the college at Cambridge, at which he had been educated;
and he rendered eminent service to the College of Physicians by
defending its rights against the illegal practices of the surgeons, who
interfered with the proper functions of the physicians. His munificent
foundation at Cambridge is a claim on the gratitude of the English
nation, and ensures him a high place for ever in the annals of our
universities. The visitor to Cambridge will not fail to remember that
it was he who built the three singular gates at his college, inscribed
to Humility, to Virtue and Wisdom, and to Honour. But he has another
lasting claim to respect on the grounds that he first introduced
the study of practical anatomy into this country, and was the first
publicly to teach it, which he did in the hall of the Barber-Surgeons,
shortly after his return from Italy. Dr. Caius was a profound classical
scholar, and left numerous works on the Greek and Latin medical
authors. As a naturalist, linguist, critic, and antiquary, he was no
less distinguished than as a physician.
EDWARD WOTTON, M.D. (died 1555), seems to have been the first English
physician who applied himself specially to the study of natural
history. He made himself famous by his work on this subject, entitled
_De Differentiis Animalium_.
DR. GEYNES (died 1563) was cited before the College of Physicians for
impugning the authority of Galen; he recanted and humbly acknowledged
his heresy, and was duly pardoned. The circumstance is a curious
illustration of the sentiments of the times.[845]
SIMON LUDFORD was originally a friar who became an apothecary
in London, who was admitted by the University of Oxford to the
baccalaureate in medicine, although totally ignorant and incompetent.
The College reproved the University, and he was compelled to undergo a
course of study, when he was ultimately admitted doctor of medicine in
Oxford, and Fellow of the College of Physicians in 1563.
WILLIAM GILBERT, M.D. (born 1540), engaged in experiments relative to
the magnet, achieving results which Galileo declared to be “great to a
degree which might be envied,” and which induced Galileo to turn his
mind to magnetism.[846]
THOMAS PENNY, M.D. (practised in London, 1570-1). Gerard styles him “a
second Dioscorides, for his singular knowledge of plants.” He was also
one of the first Englishmen who studied insects.
PETER TURNER, M.D. (died 1614), was physician to St. Bartholomew’s
Hospital, and one of the greatest botanists of his age.
THOMAS MUFFET, M.D., the learned friend of distinguished physicians and
naturalists, was esteemed in his day the famous ornament of the body of
physicians (died 1604).
BERENGER OF CAPRI (died 1527) flourished at Bologna (1518). He was a
zealous anatomist, and declared that he had “dissected more than one
hundred human bodies.” He was the first who recognised the larger
proportional size of the male chest than the female, and the converse
concerning the pelvis. He discovered the two arytenoid cartilages in
the larynx, first accurately described the thymus, and gave a good
description of the brain and the internal ear, in which he noticed the
_malleus_ and _incus_. He rectified some of the mistakes of Mondino,
but was, like all other anatomists before Harvey, deeply perplexed
about the heart and the circulation. He investigated the structure of
the valves of the heart.
* * * * *
The art of midwifery, up to the middle of the sixteenth century, was
in the lowest possible condition. In 1521, a doctor named Veites was
condemned to the flames in Hamburg, for engaging in the business of
midwifery. In the year 1500, the wife of one JACOB NUFER, of Thurgau,
a Swiss sow-gelder, being in peril of her life in pregnancy, though
thirteen midwives and several surgeons had attempted to deliver her in
the ordinary way, it occurred to her husband to ask permission of the
authorities, and the help of God, to deliver her “as he would a sow.”
He was completely successful, and thus performed the first Cæsarian
operation on the living patient, who lived to bear several other
children in the natural way, and died at the age of seventy-seven.
Another sow-gelder performed the operation of ovariotomy on his own
daughter, in the sixteenth century.
FRANÇOIS ROUSSET (about 1581), physician to the Duke of Savoy, was the
first to write upon the Cæsarian operation. The improvement in printing
and engraving caused the works of the Greek, Roman, and Arabian writers
to be more widely known, and manuals were published for the instruction
of midwives. The first book of this kind was by EUCHARIUS ROSLEIN,
at Worms, called the _Rose Garden for Midwives_ (1513). VESALIUS
(1543) rendered great services to the obstetric art by his anatomical
teaching; and when Rousset published his treatise, the operation became
popular, and was constantly performed on the living subject, sometimes
even when it was not absolutely necessary. PINEAU, a surgeon of Paris,
in 1589, first suggested division of the pubes to facilitate difficult
labour.
* * * * *
In the year 1535 (27 Henry VIII.), Wood says[847] that at Oxford
“divers scholars, upon a foresight of the ruin of the clergy, had and
did now betake themselves to physick, who as yet raw and inexpert
would adventure to practise, to the utter undoing of many. The said
visitors ordered, therefore, that none should practise or exercise
that faculty unless he had been examined by the physick professor
concerning his knowledge therein. Which order, being of great moment,
was the year following confirmed by the king, and power by him granted
to the professor and successors to examine those that were to practise
according to the Visitor’s Order.”
PIERRE FRANCO (_c._ 1560) was a Swiss or French surgeon, and a famous
lithotomist, who performed the high operation for the first time in
1560, with success, on a child aged two years. Recognising the dangers
of this method, he introduced a new method in the operation known as
perineal lithotomy, which was called the lateral method. He preceded
Paré in improvements in dealing with strangulated hernia by the
operation known as herniotomy. He was one of the first to re-introduce
into midwifery practice the operation known as “turning,” in difficult
labour. The operation was a familiar one amongst the Hindus, and
had been known to the later Græco-Roman school, but had fallen into
disuse until Paré, Franco, and Guillemeau devoted themselves to the
improvement of this neglected branch of the healing art with great
success.
ANDREW LIBAVIUS (1546-1616), physician at Coburg, is said by Sprengel
to have been the person who began to cultivate chemistry; as distinct
from all theosophical fancies of his predecessors.
CONRAD GESNER, the miracle of learning, whom we have already mentioned,
devoted great attention to gynæcology, and wrote learnedly and without
prejudice upon medicine.
DR. HENRY ALKINS (born 1558) was one of the principal physicians
of James I. While president of the Royal College, the first London
Pharmacopœia was published in 1618.
JOHN BANNISTER was a voluminous writer on surgery who practised in
London, and wrote a treatise on surgery in 1575.
THOMAS GALE (1507-1586), the “English Paré,” was a military surgeon,
under Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, who taught that gun-shot wounds were
not poisoned as was commonly supposed, but were to be treated as
ordinary wounds.
WILLIAM BULLEYN (died 1576) was a famous physician and botanist in the
reigns of the later Tudors. He wrote _The Government of Health_ (1548),
_Book of Simples_, and other works.
FRESCATORIUS (1483-1553) was the first to publish a description of
typhus fever. Dr. Mead says[848] that he knew that “consumption is
contagious, and is contracted by living with a phthisical person, by
the gliding of the corrupted and putrified juices [of the sick] into
the lungs of the sound man.” He _inferred_ the microbes which we _see_.
G. BAILLOU (1536-1614) was the first to describe clearly the diseases
whooping cough and croup.
ALEXANDER BENEDETTI (died 1525) was an anatomist, who made important
observations on gall-stones.
FELIX PLATTER (1536-1614), a professor at Basle, must ever be
gratefully remembered for his humane and wise opposition to the cruel
treatment of the insane by coercive measures, which unhappily were
in fashion up to recent times. He suggested the division of diseases
into three classes: (1) Mental disorders; (2) Pains, fevers, etc.; (3)
Deformities and defects of secretion.
A book which contains directions for identifying simples and preparing
compound medicines is called a Pharmacopœia. The first work of this
character, which was published under Government authority, was that
of Nuremberg, in 1512. A student, VALERIUS CORDUS, passing through
the city, exhibited a recipe book, which he had compiled from the
writings of the most eminent physicians of the town. He was urged to
print it for the benefit of the apothecaries. The College of Medicine
at Florence issued the _Antidotarium Florentinum_, somewhat earlier,
but merely on its own authority. Dr. A. Foes used the term pharmacopœia
first as a distinct title for his work published at Basle, in 1561.[849]
COSTANZO VAROLIUS of Bologna (1545-1575), one of the greatest of the
Italian anatomists, described the optic nerves and many important
points in the anatomy of the brain.
VOLCHER COITER, of Groningen (1534-1600), was a pupil of Fallopius and
Eustachius, who was distinguished for his important researches on the
cartilages, bones, nerves, and the anatomy of the fœtal skeleton.
FABRICIUS, of Acquapendente (1537-1619), a pupil of Fallopius, and a
distinguished anatomist, made important researches on the structure of
animals in general. His famous discovery of the valves of the veins
and his investigations concerning their use led Harvey to make the
discovery of the circulation of the blood.
CASSERIUS (1561-1616) investigated the anatomy of the vocal organs,
discovered the muscles of the ossicles of the ear, and practised
bronchotomy, which he had learned from Fabricius. He was professor at
Padua, and a teacher of Harvey.
SPIGEL (1578-1625) made researches on the liver, a lobulus of which
bears his name.
OLAUS WORM (1588-1654) first described the small bones of the skull,
now called “Wormian” bones.
It was not till the sixteenth century that France contributed her
quota to the list of great anatomists. Nothing shows more clearly the
difficulty with which learning was spread in the times of which we
write than the fact that the works of the early Italian anatomists were
altogether unknown in France until a hundred years after they were
written.
JACQUES DUBOIS (1478-1555) taught anatomy at Paris, and was professor
of surgery to the Royal College. He was an irrational admirer of Galen.
The carcases of dogs and other animals were the materials from which
he taught; it does not appear that it was possible to obtain human
subjects for dissection without robbing the cemeteries.
CHARLES ETIENNE (1503-64) was the first to detect valves in the
orifices of the hepatic veins. He knew nothing of the researches of
Achillini concerning the brain, although they were made sixty years
before; yet his investigations of the structure of the nervous system
were most important, and his demonstration of the existence of a canal
running through the whole length of the spinal cord, which had not
previously been suspected, entitles him to a high place in the history
of anatomy.
A new era in the history of anatomy was inaugurated by the appearance
of ANDREW VESALIUS (1514-1564), a Fleming, who pursued the study with
the greatest assiduity at Venice, and demonstrated it at Padua before
he was twenty-two. He remained there seven years, then went to Bologna
and thence to Pisa. He is known as the first author of a systematic and
comprehensive view of human anatomy. He recognised the necessity of
divesting the science of the current misrepresentations of ignorance
and fancy.
Vesalius especially contributed to our knowledge of the circulatory
organs; it was he who, by his study of the structure of the heart and
the mechanism of its valves, stimulated his pupils and fellow-students
to pursue a course of research which ended at last in Harvey’s immortal
discovery. Besides these researches on the vascular system, he first
accurately described the sphenoid bone and the sternum. He described
the omentum, the pylorus, the mediastinum and pleura, and gave the
fullest description of the brain which, up to that time, had appeared.
Splendid as were his researches, and valuable as were his writings, it
was perhaps by the way in which he stimulated inquiry in others that he
rendered the greatest services to anatomical science.
Dr. Molony, writing in the _British Medical Journal_, December 31,
1892, says: “I recently secured possession of his works, entitled
_Andreæ Vesalii Invictissimi Caroli V. Imperatoris Medici Opera Omnia_.
It is a curious work in two immense folio volumes, written in fairly
good Latin. It has several plates representing the surgical instruments
of the period, dissections, and, it must be added, quadrupeds of all
sorts tied up evidently awaiting vivisection.
“The preface consists of a lengthy and appreciative life of Vesalius,
from which it seems that he was born in 1514, at Brussels, where his
father was court physician. As a boy he seems to have shown a taste for
comparative anatomy, ‘puer animalium penetralia nudare atque viscera
inspicere soleret.’ His anatomical studies were at all times pursued
under difficulties. He obtained the bodies of criminals by bribing
the judges, ‘corpora nactus eorum, in cubicula vexit, suosque in usus
per tres et ultra septimanas asservavit. Horretne legenti animus? O
juvenilis ardor, repagula eluctatur ferrea! Tali opus erat ingenio,
artibus bis, at nobile conderet opus.’ He does not seem to have been
married, if we may judge from the following extract: ‘Aetate vero
integra, uxore, liberis, rei familiaris omni cura liber, totum se
immersit in anatomicis.’
“Vesalius was an enthusiastic surgeon, and apparently looked down
upon the physicians of the period: ‘Jocatus medicos reliquos syrupis
præscribendis unice occupari.’ His success aroused the jealousy of his
contemporaries. Among others he came into collision with Sylvius of
Paris, Eustachius of Rome, and Fallopius of Padua. Mention is also made
of ‘Joannis Caji Medici Celebris Britanni.’ It would be interesting to
ascertain who this was. [No doubt it was Caius.]
“The end of Vesalius was tragic enough. ‘Hispanum curabat nobilem
petiit ab amicis defuncti corpus aperire ut mortis scrutaretur causam.
Quo concesso, visum cor in aperto jam pectore adhuc palpitans.’ The
punishment ordered for this was a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. On his
return voyage he was wrecked on the island of Zacinthus. ‘Inops, in
loco solitario, omnique carens subsidio miserabiliter vitam finivit
1564.’”
“VESALIUS,” says Portal, “appears to me one of the greatest men who
ever existed. Let the astronomers vaunt their Copernicus, the natural
philosophers their Galileo and Torricelli, the mathematicians their
Pascal, the geographers their Columbus, I shall always place Vesalius
above all their heroes. The first study for man is man. Vesalius has
this noble object in view, and has admirably attained it; he has made
on himself and his fellows such discoveries as Columbus could only
make by travelling to the extremity of the world. The discoveries of
Vesalius are of direct importance to man; by acquiring fresh knowledge
of his own structure, man seems to enlarge his existence; while
discoveries in geography or astronomy affect him but in a very indirect
manner.”
The zeal of Vesalius and his fellow-students of anatomy often led
them to weird adventures. Hallam says:[850] “they prowled by night in
charnel-houses, they dug up the dead from the graves, they climbed the
gibbet, in fear and silence, to steal the mouldering carcase of the
murderer; the risk of ignominious punishment, and the secret stings of
superstitious remorse, exalting no doubt the delight of these useful
but not very enviable pursuits.” Vesalius, as has been said above,
was once absurdly accused of dissecting a Spanish gentleman before he
was dead. He only escaped the punishment of death by undertaking a
pilgrimage to Jerusalem, during which he was shipwrecked, and died of
famine in one of the Greek islands.[851]
GABRIEL FALLOPIUS (1523-1562) was a prominent pupil of Vesalius who
studied the anastomoses (the blending together) of the blood-vessels.
His researches in the anatomy of the bones and the internal ear greatly
advanced anatomical knowledge. He discovered the tubes connected
with the womb, called after him the “Fallopian tubes.” Fallopius is
described as a savant distinguished by his sense of justice, his
modesty and gentleness; yet Dr. Baas says,[852] “the fact that even
Fallopio did not shrink from accepting the gift of some convicts, and
then poisoning them—indeed, when the first experiment proved a failure,
he tried it again with better success—is characteristic of the zeal of
the age in the investigation of the human body, and of the barbarous
idea that might makes right towards those guilty before the law!”
EUSTACHIUS was a contemporary of Vesalius. He divides with him the
honour of having created the science of human anatomy. His name is
perpetuated by the tube in the internal ear, called the “Eustachian
tube.” His researches on the anatomy of the internal part of the organ
of hearing, his studies in the anatomy of the teeth, in which he was
the pioneer, his famous _Anatomical Engravings_, and his labours in
connection with the intimate structure of the organs of the body, taken
in connection with their relative anatomy, prove that he laboured for
the advancement of the knowledge of the structure of the human frame
with the utmost assiduity and success.
J. C. ARANZI (1530-1589), of Bologna, gave the first correct account of
the anatomy of the fœtus, and his description of that of the brain is
exceedingly minute and lucid. He named the _hippocampus_, described the
choroid plexus, and the fourth ventricle under the name of the _cistern
of the cerebellum_.
COLUMBUS (died 1559) was a pupil of Vesalius, whom he succeeded in the
chair of anatomy at Padua. He had a glimpse of how the blood passes
from the right to the left side of the heart, but he had no true
knowledge of the circulation.
_Michael Servetus_ (1511-1553) was either a pupil or fellow-student of
Vesalius, who, in 1553, described accurately the pulmonary circulation.
He recognised that the change from venous into arterial blood took
place in the lungs, and not in the left ventricle. He was a pioneer in
physiological science by his great discovery of the respiratory changes
in the lungs.
LEVASSEUR (about 1540), says Hallam,[853] appears to have known the
circulation of the blood through the lungs, the valves of the veins,
and their direction and purpose.
GASPARE TAGLIACOZZI (1546-1599) was a professor at Bologna, whose
name is famous in the history of surgery from his skill in performing
“plastic operations.” Rhinoplastic operation is a term in surgery
sometimes synonymous with the Taliacotian operation, which is a process
for forming an artificial nose. It consists in bringing down a piece
of flesh from the forehead, and while preserving its attachment to
the living structures, causing it to adhere to the anterior part of
the remains of the nose. Tagliacozzi, himself, to replace the lost
substance employed the skin of the upper part of the arm, as BRANCA
did previously. Patients flocked to him from all parts of Europe. The
world was, as usual, ungrateful; the great surgeon was considered to
have presumptuously interfered with the authority of Providence. Noses
and lips which the Divinity had destroyed as a punishment for the sins
of men had been restored by this daring man. After his death some nuns
heard voices in their convent crying for several weeks: “Tagliacozzi is
damned!” By the direction of the clergy of Bologna his corpse was taken
from the grave and re-interred in unconsecrated ground.[854] We are not
in a position to sneer at this, for the preachers of the nineteenth
century said something very similar of the use of chloroform in
midwifery only a few years ago. In 1742 the Faculty of Paris declared
Tagliacozzi’s operation impossible; but the English journals, in 1794,
discovered that such a method of surgical procedure had been in use
in India from ancient times, and then the scientific world tried the
experiment and succeeded perfectly.
AMBROISE PARÉ, “the father of French surgery” (1509-1590), availed
himself of the opportunities offered him in military surgery during the
campaign of Francis I. in Piedmont. It was the practice of the time to
treat gunshot wounds with hot oil—a treatment which Paré revolutionized
by using merely a simple bandage.
In 1545 he attended the lectures of Sylvius at Paris, and became
prosector to that great anatomist. His book on _Anatomy_ was published
five years later. By his employment of the ligature for large arteries,
he was able so completely to control hæmorrhage that he was able to
practise amputation on a larger scale than had before been attempted.
Paré is considered as the first who regularly employed the ligature
after amputation. He declares in his _Apologie_ that the invention
was due to the ancients, and he explains their use of it, although he
ascribes to inspiration of the Deity his own first adoption of the
practice.
The PHILOSOPHER RAMUS in 1562 urged Charles IX. of France to establish
schools for clinical teaching, such as already existed at Padua.
ROBERT FLUDD, M.D., or in the Latin style he affected, _Robertus
de Fluctibus_, was born in 1574; he was an ardent supporter of the
Rosicrucian philosophy. He had a strong leaning towards chemistry, but
had little faith in orthodox medicine. His medical ideas consisted of
a mysterious mixture of divinity, chemistry, natural philosophy, and
metaphysics.
In 1573, Harrison, in his unpublished _Chronologie_, remarks that
“these daies the taking in of the smoke of the Indian herb called
tabaco, by an instrument like a little ladell, is gretly taken up and
used in England against rewmes.”
It was not till 1576 that croup was well understood. Laënnec thinks it
was quite unknown to the Greek and Arabian physicians; but Forbes says
that it was known to Hippocrates and Aretæus, although its pathology
was not understood. Ballonius was the first who accurately described
the false membrane, which is a characteristic of the disease.[855]
At the Reformation in England under Elizabeth, some of the Catholic
priests who refused to conform to the new religion sought in other
professions the means of living. In a curious old book, _Tom of all
Trades, or the Plaine Pathway to Preferment_, by Thomas Powell (printed
1631), there is a story which no doubt was founded in fact. “And heere
I remember me of an old tale following, _viz._, At the beginning of the
happy raigne of our late good Queene _Elizabeth_, divers Commissioners
of great place, being authorized to enquire of, and to displace, all
such of the _Clergie_ as would not conforme to the reformed _Church_,
one amongst others was Conuented before them, who being asked whether
he would subscribe or no, denied it, and so consequently was adiudged
to lose his benefice and to be deprived his function; wherevpon, in
his impatience, he said, ‘That if they (meaning the Commissioners)
held this course it would cost many a man’s life.’ For which the
Commissioners called him backe againe, and charged him that he had
spoke treasonable and seditious words, tending to the raysing of a
rebellion or some tumult in the Land; for which he should receive the
reward of a Traytor. And being asked whether hee spake those words or
no, he acknowledged it, and tooke vpon him the Iustification thereof;
‘for, said he, ‘yee have taken from me my liuing and profession of the
Ministrie; Schollership is all my portion, and I have no other meanes
now left for my maintenance but to turn _Phisition_; and before I
shalbe absolute Master of that Misterie (God he knowes) how many mens
lives it will cost. For few _Phisitions_ vse to try experiments vpon
their owne bodies.’
“With vs, it is a Profession can maintaine but a few. And diuers of
those more indebted to opinion than learning, and (for the most part)
better qualified in discoursing their travailes than in discerning
their patients malladies. For it is growne to be a very huswiues trade,
where fortune prevailes more than skill.”
A writer in Hood’s _Every-Day Book_, on the date February 25, says
that the monks knew of more than three hundred species of medicinal
plants which were used in general for medicines by the religious
orders before the Reformation. The Protestants, the more efficiently to
root out Popery, changed the Catholic names of many of these. Thus the
_virgin’s bower_ of the monastic physician was changed into _flammula
Jovis_; the _hedge hyssop_ into _gratiola_; _St. John’s wort_ became
_hypericum_; _fleur de St. Louis_ was called _iris_; _palma Christi_
became _ricinus_; _Our Master wort_ was christened _imperatona_;
_sweet bay_ they called _laurus_; _Our Lady’s smock_ was changed into
_cardamine_; _Solomon’s seal_ into _convallaria_; _Our Lady’s hair_
into _trichomanes_; _balm_ into _melissa_; _marjoram_ into _origanum_;
_herb Trinity_ into _viola tricolor_; _knee holy_ into _rascus_;
_rosemary_ into _rosmarinus_; _marygold_ into _calendula_; and a
hundred others. But the old Catholic names cling to the plants of the
cottage garden, and _Star of Bethlehem_ has not quite given place to
_ornithogalum_; _Star of Jerusalem_ to _goat’s beard_; nor _Lent lily_
to _daffodil_.
The gullibility of mankind has never been exhibited in a clearer
light than JOHANN VALENTIN ANDREÆ (1586-1654) succeeded in showing
in his elaborate joke of the SOCIETY OF THE ROSY-CROSS. In 1614 a
famous but entirely fabulous secret society set the scholars of Europe
discussing the pretensions of the Rosicrucians, who were said to have
derived their origin from one CHRISTIAN ROSENKREUZ, two hundred years
previously. This philosopher, it was said, had made a pilgrimage to
the East, to learn its hidden wisdom, of which the art of making
gold was a portion. The character of the society was Christian, but
anti-Catholic, and its ostensible objects were the study of philosophy
and the gratuitous healing of the sick. Its device was a cross, with
four red roses. Andreæ was a learned man, but jocular withal; for no
sooner had the public eagerly swallowed his story, than he confessed
the whole was pure invention, and that he had originated the idea with
the view of ridiculing the alchemists and Theosophists, whose opinions
were dominating European society. The public, however, liked the idea
so well that it developed and flourished, and a society was established
called _Fraternitas Rosæ Crucis_. The most celebrated followers of
the Rosicrucians were Valentine Wiegel, Jacob Boehm, Egidius Gutman,
Michael Mayer, Oswald Crollius, and Robert Fludd.[856]
De Quincey has traced the connection between the Rosicrucians and
Freemasons. “Rosicrucianism,” he says, “it is true, is not Freemasonry,
but the latter borrowed its form from the first.”[857]
Scrofula was anciently treated in a superstitious manner by the
sovereigns of England and France by imposition of hands. This ceremony
is said to have been first performed by Edward the Confessor
(1042-1066). A special “Service of Healing” was used in the English
Church in the reign of Henry VIII. (1484-1509).
The ceremonies of blessing cramp-rings on Good Friday, called the
Hallowing of the Cramp-Rings, is described by Bishop Percy in his
_Northumberland Household Book_,[858] where we have the following
account:—
“And then the Usher to lay a Carpett for the Kinge to Creepe to the
Crosse upon. And that done, there shal be a Forme sett upon the
Carpett, before the Crucifix, and a Cushion laid upon it for the King
to kneale upon. And the Master of the Jewell Howse ther to be ready
with the Booke concerninge the Hallowing of the Crampe Rings, and
Amner (Almoner) muste kneele on the right hand of the Kinge, holdinge
the sayde booke. When that is done the King shall rise and goe to the
Alter, wheare a Gent. Usher shall be redie with a Cushion for the Kinge
to kneele upon; and then the greatest Lords that shall be ther to take
the Bason with the Rings and beare them after the Kinge to offer.”
In the Harleian Manuscripts there is a letter from Lord Chancellor
Hatton to Sir Thomas Smith, dated Sept, 11th, 158-, about a prevailing
epidemic, and enclosing a ring for Queen Elizabeth to wear between
her breasts, the said ring having “the virtue to expell infectious
airs.”[859]
Andrew Boorde, in his _Introduction to Knowledge_ (1547-48), says: “The
Kynges of England by the power that God hath gyuen to them, dothe make
sicke men whole of a sickeness called the kynges euyll. The Kynges of
England doth halowe euery yere crampe rynges, the whyche rynges, worne
on ones fynger, dothe helpe them the whyche hath the crampe.”[860]
Concerning the king’s evil, which Boorde explains is an “euyl sickenes
or impediment,” he advises: “For this matter let euery man make frendes
to the Kynges maiestie, for it doth pertayne to a Kynge to helpe this
infirmitie by the grace the whiche is geuen to a Kynge anoynted.”[861]
In Robert Laneham’s letter[862] about Queen Elizabeth’s visit to
Kenilworth Castle, it is told how on July 18th, 1575, her Majesty
touched for the evil, and that it was “a day of grace.” “By her
highnes accustumed mercy and charitee, nyne cured of the peynfull and
daungerous diseaz, called the kings euill; for that Kings and Queenz of
this Realm withoout oother medsin (saue only by handling and prayerz)
only doo cure it.”
Sir John Fortescue, in his defence of the House of Lancaster against
that of York, argued that the crown could not descend to a female
because the Queen is not qualified by the form of anointing her to
cure the disease called the king’s evil. On this account, and more
especially after the excommunication of Elizabeth by the Pope in 1570,
it must have been eminently comforting to all concerned to find that
the power to cure disease by the royal touch had not been affected by
the change of religion or any other cause. The practice was at its
height in the reign of Charles II.[863]
Lord Braybrooke says,[864] “In the first four years after his
restoration he ‘touched’ nearly 24,000 people.” We find that Dr.
Johnson was touched by Queen Anne. “The Office for the Healing”
continued to be printed in the Book of Common Prayer after the
accession of the House of Hanover.
The custom evidently arose from the fact that Edward the Confessor
was a saint as well as a king. William of Malmesbury gives the origin
of the royal touch in his account of the miracles of Edward: “A young
woman had married a husband of her own age, but having no issue by
the union, the humours collecting abundantly about her neck, she had
contracted a sore disorder, the glands swelling in a dreadful manner.
Admonished in a dream to have the part affected washed by the king,
she entered the palace, and the king himself fulfilled this labour of
love, by rubbing the woman’s neck with his fingers dipped in water.
Joyous health followed his healing hand; the lurid skin opened, so that
worms flowed out with the purulent matter, and the tumour subsided.
But as the orifice of the ulcers was large and unsightly, he commanded
her to be supported at the royal expense till she should be perfectly
cured. However, before a week was expired, a fair new skin returned,
and hid the scars so completely, that nothing of the original wound
could be discovered; and within a year becoming the mother of twins,
she increased the admiration of Edward’s holiness. Those who knew him
more intimately, affirm that he often cured this complaint in Normandy;
whence appears how false is their notion, who in our times assert, that
the cure of this disease does not proceed from personal sanctity, but
from hereditary virtue in the royal line.”[865]
Many other miracles of healing were attributed to St. Edward. Jeremy
Collier[866] maintains that the scrofula miracle is hereditary upon
all his successors. The curious fact, however, is that the hereditary
right of succession was repeatedly interrupted, yet the power remained.
In connection with this royal touching, pieces of gold were given by
the sovereigns to be worn by the patients as amulets. They were called
“touching pieces,” and though not absolutely requisite for the cure,
some persons declared that the disease returned if they lost the coins.
We can only account for the great efficacy which in some cases seemed
to have attended the royal treatment, by the confidence and exalted
expectation awakened in the sufferers by the ceremony, which acted as a
tonic to the system, and roused the patients’ imagination to contribute
to their own cure.[867]
Chips and handkerchiefs dipped in the blood of King Charles I. are said
to have been efficacious in curing sick persons in hundreds of cases.
The College of Physicians of Edinburgh was created by the king’s
letters patent in 1581, one year after the foundation of Edinburgh
University by James VI.
In the reign of Elizabeth, when physicians rode on horseback, they were
seated sideways; many of them carried muffs, to keep their fingers warm
when they had to feel their patient’s pulse. Twice a year everybody was
bled—a system which must have caused many disorders.
Fifteen centuries after the age of CELSUS, with the revival of learning
and science came the revival of human vivisection. VESALIUS, as
above mentioned, is known to have vivisected men; and in the _Storia
Universale_ of CESARE CANTÙ there is an account of the DUKE OF FLORENCE
giving a man for vivisection to FALLOPIUS. This incident has been
disputed; but the following series of cases, extracted by Professor
ANDREOZZI from the Criminal Archives of Florence, and published by him
in his book _Leggi Penali degli antichi e Cinesi_, are beyond question.
COSMO DE MEDICI seems to have taken the anatomists of Pisa under his
special favour, and to have sent them the miserable convicts from the
prisons at his option. The following examples are a selection from the
cases extracted by Signor ANDREOZZI from the _Archivio Criminale_:—
“1. January 15th, 1545.—SANTA DI MARIOTTO TARCHI DI MUGELLO, wife of
BASTIANO LUCCHESE, was condemned to be beheaded for infanticide. Under
the sentence is written, ‘Dicta Santa, de mente Excell^{mi} Ducis, fuit
missa Pisis, de ea per doctores fieret notomia.’[No notice to be found
of any execution of the woman, such as would have appeared had she been
put to death before she was sent to Pisa.]
“2. December 14th, 1547.—GIULIO MANCINI SANESE was condemned for
robbery and other offences. Sent to Pisa to be anatomised. ‘Ducatur
Pisis, pro faciendo de eo notomia.’
“3. In the record of prisoners sent away, dated September 1st, 1551,
occurs this entry:—‘Letter to the Commissioner of Castrocaro, that
MADDALENA, who is imprisoned for killing her son, should be sent here,
if she be likely to recover, as it pleases S. E. that she should be
reserved for anatomy. Of this nothing is to be said, but she is to be
kept in hopes. If she is not likely to recover, the executioner is
to be sent for to decapitate her.’ The end of the horrible extract
is,—‘Went to Pisa, to be made an anatomy.’
“4. December 12th, 1552.—A man named ZUCCHERIA, accused of piracy, was
reserved from hanging, with his comrade, and sent to Pisa, ‘per la
notomia.’
“5. December 22nd, 1552.—A certain ULIVO DI PAOLO was condemned by
the Council of Eight to be hanged for poisoning his wife. Sentence
changed—to be sent for anatomy. Was sent to Pisa on January 13th.
“6. November 14th, 1553.—MARGUERITA, wife of BIAJIO D’ANTINORO,
condemned to be beheaded for infanticide.... December 20th, ‘she was
released from the fetters and consigned to a familiar, who took her to
Pisa to the Commissario, _who gave her, as usual, to the anatomist, to
make anatomy of her_; which was done’ (‘che la consegni, secondo il
solito, al notomista, per farne notomia, come fu fatto’).”
“Several other cases, from 1554 to 1570, are recorded, with equally
unmistakable exactitude. In one instance the condemned man’s destiny
was mitigated, and after having been ordered to be sent to Pisa for
the Commissario to consign to the anatomist, ‘when he should ask for
him, and at his pleasure,’ he was mercifully sentenced to be hanged
at once at Vico, ‘by direction of Sua Excellenza Illustrissima.’ Two
unfortunate thieves, PAOLI DI GIOVANNI and VESTRINO D’AGNOLO, were sent
together by the Council of Eight to be anatomised; the Duke having
written to say ‘that they wanted in Pisa a subject for anatomy.’”
After the date 1570 no more cases occur in the Archives.
Francis I. invited the Italian anatomist VIDUS VIDIUS to his royal
college at Paris.
Several new medicines were introduced about this period.
Lemon juice was first spoken of as a remedy for scurvy in 1564. Its use
was discovered by some Dutch sailors whose ship was laden with lemons
and oranges from Spain.[868]
The virtues of sassafras as a medicine for scurvy were discovered,
according to Cartier, in 1536, on a voyage to explore the coast of
Newfoundland and the St. Lawrence. The natives advised the sailors
afflicted with the malady to use the wood of the tree ameda, which was
thought to have been sassafras.[869]
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF A DOCTOR’S HOUSE.
Facsimile of a miniature from the _Epistre de Othea_, by Christine de
Pisan. (Fifteenth century MS. in Burgundy Library, Brussels.)
[_Face p._ 374]
Sarsaparilla was first brought to Europe by the Spaniards, in the
middle of the sixteenth century, from Peru and Brazil.
Guaiacum was introduced into Europe in 1509, and in 1519 its use became
common.
Holinshed complained[870] that estimation and credit given to compound
medicines made with foreign drugs in his time was one great cause of
the prevailing ignorance of the virtues and uses of “our own simples,”
which he held to be fully as useful as the “salsa parilla, mochoacan,
etc.,” so much in request. “We tread those herbs under our feet, whose
forces, if we knew and could apply them to our necessities, we would
honour and have in reverence.—Alas! what have we to do with such
Arabian and Grecian stuff as is daily brought from those parts which
lie in another clime?—The bodies of such as dwell there are of another
constitution than ours are here at home. Certes, they grow not for us,
but for the Arabians and Grecians.—Among the Indians, who have the most
present cures for every disease of their own nation, there is small
regard of compound medicines, and less of foreign drugs, because they
neither know them nor can use them, but work wonders even with their
own simples.”
CARLO RUINI, of Bologna, published in 1598 a work on the anatomy of the
horse, in which Ercolani has found evidence that he, to some extent,
anticipated Harvey’s discovery.[871]
NICHOLAS HOUEL (1520-1585) was born at Paris, 1520. He was a famous
and learned pharmacien, who devoted the fortune which he acquired by
his industry and skill to philanthropic and scientific purposes. He
founded a great orphanage in Paris, and the School of Pharmacy of that
city owes its origin to him. He wrote a _Treatise on the Plague_, and
one on the _Theriacum of Mithridates_, both published in 1573. It is to
his enlightened and charitable suggestion that dispensaries arose in
Paris. His “Garden of Simples” inspired the creation of the _Jardin des
Plantes_.[872]
Even at the close of the sixteenth century careful and sober men, as
Mr. Henry Morley says,[873] believed in the miraculous properties of
plants and animals and parts of animals. When the century commenced,
the learned and unlearned alike believed in the influences of the stars
and the interferences of demons with diseases, and in the mysteries
of magic. The reason why students of such sciences as existed were
punished and persecuted was the dread which men had that the knowledge
of the occult powers of nature would afford the learner undue and
mysterious power over them.
LEGAL MEDICINE.
That most important branch of medical science known as Medical
Jurisprudence, or Forensic Medicine, first took its rise in Germany,
and, later, was recognised as a necessary branch of study in England.
Briefly this science may be described as “that branch of State medicine
which treats of the application of medical knowledge to the purposes
of the law.” It embraces all questions affecting the civil or social
rights of individuals, and of injuries to the person. Although we
find traces of the first principles of this science in ancient times,
especially in connection with legitimacy, feigned diseases, etc., it
is by no means certain that even in Rome the law required any medical
inspection of dead bodies. The science dates only from the sixteenth
century. The Bishop of Bamberg, in 1507, introduced a penal code
requiring the production of medical evidence in certain cases. In
1532, Charles V. induced the Diet of Ratison to adopt a code in which
magistrates were ordered to call medical evidence in cases of personal
injuries, infanticide, pretended pregnancy, simulated diseases, and
poisoning. The actual birth of forensic medicine, however, did not take
place until the publication, in Germany, in 1553, of the _Constitutio
Criminalis Carolina_.[874] The difficulties which the infant science
had to contend against may be estimated from the fact that a few years
later a physician named Weiker, who declared that witches and demoniacs
were simply persons afflicted with hypochondriasis and hysteria, and
should not be punished, was with difficulty saved from the stake by his
patron, William, Duke of Cleves.
AMBROSE PARÉ wrote on monsters, simulated diseases, and the art of
drawing up medico-legal reports.
In 1621-35 Paulo Zacchia, of Rome, published a work entitled
_Quæstiones Medico-Legales_, which inaugurated a new era in the
history of Forensic Medicine. He exhibited immense research in this
classical work, the materials for which he collected from 460 authors.
Considering that chemistry and physiology were then so imperfectly
understood, such a work is a proof of the learning and sagacity of the
author.
In 1663 the Danish physician Bartholin proposed the hydrostatic
test for the determination of live-birth, the method used to-day in
examining the lungs of an infant to discover whether the child was born
alive or not, by observing whether they float or sink in water.
CHAPTER II.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
Bacon and the Inductive Method.—Descartes and
Physiology.—Newton.—Boyle and the Royal Society.—The Founders of the
Schools of Medical Science.—Sydenham, the English Hippocrates.—Harvey
and the Rise of Physiology.—The Microscope in Medicine.—Willis and the
Reform of Materia Medica.
The seventeenth century is important in the history of medicine as
the era of the two greatest discoveries of modern physiology—the
circulation of the blood, and the development of the higher animals
from the egg (ovum). Both of these are due to Harvey, and both were
made in the midst of the troubles of the great Civil War. The history
of medicine is so interwoven at this important period with that of
science and philosophy in general, that it is necessary to glance
awhile at the great factors which were working out the advancement of
medical learning.
Amongst the greatest figures on the scientific stage at the beginning
and middle of the seventeenth century are the following:—
FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626) was the great leader in the reformation of
modern science, and shares with Descartes the glory of inaugurating
modern philosophy. His great work, the _Novum Organon_, was given to
the world just as authority and dogmatism had been discarded from
scientific thought, and the era of experiment had begun. It was not
Bacon’s contributions to science, not his discoveries, which entitle
him to the highest place in the reformation of science, but the
general spirit of his philosophy and his connected mode of thinking,
his insistence upon the need for rejecting rash generalization, and
analysing our experience, employing hypothesis, not by guess work,
but by the scientific imagination which calls to its assistance
experimental comparison, verification, and proof. Bacon’s philosophy of
induction was reared upon a foundation of exclusion and elimination. He
relegated theological questions to the region of faith, insisting that
experience and observation are the only remedies against prejudice and
error.[875]
The publication of Bacon’s _Novum Organon_ in 1620 resulted in the
formation of a society of learned men, who met together in London in
1645 to discuss philosophical subjects and the results of their various
experiments in science. They are described as “inquisitive,” a term
which aptly illustrates the temper of the times. Taking nothing upon
trust, these men inquired for themselves, and left their books to make
experiment, as Bacon had urged students of nature to do. About 1648-9
DRS. WILKINS, WALLIS, and others removed to Oxford, and with SETH WARD,
the HON. ROBERT BOYLE, PETTY, and other men of divinity and physic,
often met in the rooms of DR. WILKINS at Wadham College, and so formed
the Philosophical Society of Oxford, which existed only till 1690.
About 1658 the members were dispersed, the majority coming to London
and attending lectures at Gresham College. Thus, in the midst of civil
war, thoughtful and inquiring minds found a refuge from the quarrels
of politicians and the babel of contending parties in the pursuit
of knowledge and the advancement of research. The Royal Society was
organized in 1660, and on 22nd April, 1662, Charles II. constituted it
a body politic and corporate. The _Philosophical Transactions_ began
6th March, 1664-5. 1668 Newton invented his reflecting telescope,
and on 28th April, 1686, presented to the Society the MS. of his
_Principia_, which the council ordered to be printed.
RENE DESCARTES (1596-1650), the philosopher, applied himself to the
study of physics in all its branches, but especially to physiology. He
said that science may be compared to a tree; metaphysics is the root,
physics is the trunk, and the three chief branches are mechanics,
medicine, and morals,—the three applications of our knowledge to the
outward world, to the human body, and to the conduct of life.[876] He
studied chemistry and anatomy, dissecting the heads of animals in order
to explain imagination and memory, which he believed to be physical
processes.[877] In 1629 he asks Mersenne to take care of himself, “till
I find out if there is any means of getting a medical theory based
on infallible demonstration, which is what I am now inquiring.”[878]
Descartes embraced the doctrine of the circulation of the blood as
discovered by Harvey, and he did much to popularise it, falling in
as it did with his mechanical theory of life. He thought the nerves
were tubular vessels which conduct the animal spirits to the muscles,
and in their turn convey the impressions of the organs to the brain.
He considered man and the animals were machines. “The animals act
naturally and by springs, like a watch.”[879] “The greatest of all
the prejudices we have retained from our infancy is that of believing
that the beasts think.”[880] Naturally such a monstrous theory did much
to encourage vivisection, a practice common with Descartes.[881] “The
recluses of Port Royal,” says Dr. Wallace,[882] “seized it eagerly,
discussed automatism, dissected living animals in order to show to
a morbid curiosity the circulation of the blood, were careless of
the cries of tortured dogs, and finally embalmed the doctrine in a
syllogism of their logic: no matter thinks; every soul of beast is
matter, therefore no soul of beast thinks. He held that the seat of the
mind of man was in that structure of the brain called by anatomists the
pineal gland.”
MALEBRANCHE (1638-1715) was a disciple of Descartes, who thought his
system served to explain the mystery of life and thought. In his
famous _Recherche de la Verite_ he anticipated later discoveries in
physiology, _e.g._, Hartley’s principle of the interdependence of
vibrations in the nervous system and our conscious states.
BLAISE PASCAL (1623-1662), as a natural philosopher, rendered great
services to science. The account of his experiments, written in 1662,
on the equilibrium of fluids, entitles him to be considered one of the
founders of hydrodynamics. His experiments on the pressure of the air
and his invention for measuring it greatly assisted to advance the work
begun by Galileo and Torricelli. Not only in the great work done, but
in those which were undertaken in consequence of his inspiration, we
recognise in Pascal one of the most brilliant scientists of a brilliant
age.
HOBBES (1588-1679), the famous author of the _Leviathan_, endeavoured
to base all that he could upon mathematical principles. Philosophy, he
said, is concerned with the perfect knowledge of truth in all matters
whatsoever. If the moral philosophers had done for mankind what the
geometricians had effected, men would have enjoyed an immortal peace.
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA (1632-1677), the philosopher, had some medical
training. His spirit has had a large share in moulding the philosophic
thought of the nineteenth century. Novalis saw in him not an atheist,
but a “God-intoxicated man.” His philosophy indeed was a pure
pantheism; the foundation of his system is the doctrine of one infinite
substance. All finite things are modes of this substance.
SIR ISAAC NEWTON (1642-1727), the greatest of natural philosophers,
in the years 1685 and 1686—years for ever to be remembered in the
history of science—composed almost the whole of his famous work, the
_Principia_.
ROBERT BOYLE (1626-1691), one of the great nature philosophers of the
seventeenth century, and one of the founders of the Royal Society,
published his first book at Oxford, in 1660, entitled _New Experiments,
Physico-Mechanical, touching the Spring of Air, and its Effects_.
He was at one time deeply interested in alchemy. He was the first
great investigator who carried out the suggestions of Bacon’s _Novum
Organon_. He was a patient researcher and observer of facts.
PIERRE BAYLE (1647-1706), the author of the celebrated _Historical
and Critical Dictionary_, was a sceptic, of a peculiar turn of mind.
He knew so much concerning every side of every subject which he
had considered, that he came to the conclusion that certainty was
unattainable.
VAN HELMONT (1578-1644) was one of the most celebrated followers of
Paracelsus. He learned astronomy, astrology, and philosophy at Rouvain,
then studied magic under the Jesuits, and afterwards learned law,
botany, and medicine; but he became disgusted with the pretensions of
the latter science when it failed to cure him of the itch. He became
a mystic, and attached himself to the principles of Tauler and Thomas
à Kempis. Then he practised medicine as an act of charity, till,
falling in with the works of Paracelsus, he devoted ten years to their
study. He married, and devoted himself to medicine and chemistry,
investigating the composition of the water of mineral springs. Few
men have ever formed a nobler conception of the true physician
than Van Helmont, or more earnestly endeavoured to live up to it.
Notwithstanding his mysticism, science owes much to this philosopher,
for he was an acute chemist. We owe to him the first application of the
term “gas,” in the sense in which it is used at present. He discovered
that gas is disengaged when heat is applied to various bodies, and when
acids act upon metals and their carbonates. He discovered carbonic
acid. He believed in the existence of an Archeus in man and animals,
which is somewhat like the soul of man after the Fall; it resides
in the stomach as creative thought, in the spleen as appetite. This
Archeus is a ferment, and is the generative principle and basis
of life. Disease is due to the Fall of Man. The Archeus influus
causes general diseases; the Archei insiti, local diseases: dropsy,
for example, is due to an obstruction of the passage of the kidney
secretion by the enraged Archeus. Van Helmont gave wine in fevers,
abhorred bleeding, and advocated the use of simple chemical medicines.
FRANCIS DE LA BOË (Sylvius), (1614-1672) was a physician who founded
the Medico-Chemical Sect amongst doctors. Health and disease he held to
be due to the relations of the fluids of the body and their neutrality,
diseases being caused by their acidity or alkalinity.
THOMAS GOULSTON, M.D. (died 1632), was a distinguished London
physician, who was not less famous for his classic learning and
theology than for the practice of his profession. He founded what are
known as the Goulstonian lectures, which are delivered by one of the
four youngest doctors of the Royal College of Physicians, London. “A
dead body was, if possible, to be procured, and two or more diseases
treated of.”
THOMAS WINSTON, M.D. (born 1575), was professor of physic in Gresham
College. His lectures included “an entire body of anatomy,” and were
considered, when published, as the most complete and accurate then
extant in English.
The Anatomy Lecture at Oxford was first proposed to the University on
Nov. 17th, 1623, with an endowment of £25 a year stipend. Out of this
the reader had “to pay yearly to a skilful Chirurgeon or Dissector of
the body, to be named by the said reader, the sums of and £3 and £2
more by the year towards the ordering and burying of the body.”[883]
Dr. Clayton, the King’s Professor of Physic, was the first reader, and
the first chirurgeon was Bernard Wright.[884]
GIOVANNI ALFONSO BORELLI (1608-1679), the founder of the Mathematical
School of Medicine, which attempted to subject to calculation the
phenomena of the living economy, was professor of medicine at Florence.
He restricted the application of his system chiefly to muscular
motions, or to those which are evidently of a mechanical character.
Physiology is exceedingly indebted to this school for many valuable
suggestions, and Boerhaave distinctly acknowledged them in his
_Institutions_.[885]
GEORGE JOYLIFFE, M.D. (died 1658), was partly concerned in the
discovery of the lymphatics. It is not possible to say precisely to
whom the discovery of the lymphatics was due; they seem to have been
observed independently about the year 1651 to 1652 by Rudbeck a Swede,
by Bartholine a Dane, and by Joyliffe.[886]
A new era in medicine was inaugurated by THOMAS SYDENHAM, M.D.
(1624-1689), “the British Hippocrates,” whose only standard was
observation and experience, and whose faith in the healing power
of nature was unlimited. He studied at Oxford, but he graduated at
Cambridge. He was the friend of Locke and of Robert Boyle. He was
looked upon by the faculty with disfavour as an innovator, because,
in his own words to Boyle, he endeavoured to reduce practice to a
greater easiness and plainness. His fame as the father of English
medicine was posthumous. It was indeed acknowledged in his lifetime
that he rendered good service to medicine by his “expectant” treatment
of small-pox, by his invention of his laudanum (the first form of a
tincture of opium such as we have it), and for his advocacy of the
use of Peruvian bark in agues. Yet his professional brethren were
inclined to look upon him as a sectary, and considerable opposition
was manifested towards him. Arbuthnot, in 1727, styled him “Æmulus
Hippocrates.” Boerhaave referred to him as “Angliæ lumen, artis Phœbum,
veram Hippocratici viri speciem.” He did the best he could to cure
his patients without mystery and resort to the traditional and often
ridiculous dogmas of the medical craft. Many good stories are extant
which illustrate this fact. He was once called to prescribe for a
gentleman who had been subjected to the lowering treatment so much
in vogue in those days. He found him pitifully depressed. Sydenham
“conceived that this was occasioned partly by his long illness, partly
by the previous evacuations, and partly by emptiness. I therefore
ordered him a roast chicken and a pint of canary.” When Blackmore first
engaged in the study of medicine, he asked Dr. Sydenham what authors he
should read, and was told to study DON QUIXOTE, “which,” he said, “is a
very good book; I read it still.” He used to say that there were cases
in his practice where “I have consulted my patients’ safety and my own
reputation most effectually by doing nothing at all.”
Sydenham, having long attended a rich man for an illness which had
arisen and was kept going chiefly by his own indolence and luxurious
habits, at last told him that he could do no more for him, but that
there lived at Inverness a certain physician, named Robinson, who would
doubtless be able to cure him. Provided with a letter of introduction
and a complete history of the “case,” the invalid set out on the long
journey to Inverness. Arrived at his destination, full of hope and
eager expectation of a cure, he inquired diligently for Dr. Robinson,
only to learn that there was no such doctor there, neither had there
been in the memory of the oldest inhabitant. The gentleman returned to
London full of indignation against Sydenham, whom he violently rated
for sending him so far on a fool’s errand. “But,” exclaimed Sydenham,
“you are in much better health!” “Yes,” replied the patient, “I am now
well enough, but no thanks to you.” “No,” answered Sydenham; “it was
Dr. Robinson who cured you. I wished to send you a journey with some
object and interest in view; in going, you had Dr. Robinson and his
wonderful cures in contemplation; and in returning, you were equally
engaged in thinking of scolding me.”
The Civil War, which violently upset the speculations and research at
Oxford, when, as Antony Wood says, the University was “empty as to
scholars, but pretty well replenished with Parliamentary soldiers,”
afforded just that stimulus to thought and that upheaval of dogma and
prejudice which were eminently favourable to the advance of medical
science. Men had learned to treat old doctrines with little respect for
their mere antiquity; authority was discredited, it was subjected to
test, observation and criticism; men no longer believed those doctrines
about God and His counsels which the Fathers and the Church taught them
about religion, much less were they inclined to bow to Aristotle and
Galen when they dictated to them on medicine. Anciently, when bitten
by a mad dog, it was enough for them to believe with the fathers of
medicine that it was sufficient for the patient to hold some herb
dittany in the left hand, while he scratched his back with the other
to ensure his future safety. Men took to thinking for themselves; the
spirit of investigation was aroused; men’s minds, in every condition
of society, in every town and village, were aroused to activity. There
probably never was a time when there was more activity of thought in
Oxford than at this period. The stimulus of collision evoked many
sparks of genius, and the Civil War produced at our Universities
wholesome disturbance, not destruction of any good things. Sydenham,
therefore, was distinctly the product of his age. He does not seem
to have been a very learned man, neither, on the other hand, was he
wholly untaught. There are not many evidences in his works of very
wide reading of medical literature, though he was a sincere admirer
of Hippocrates, evidently from a sound acquaintance with his works.
Sydenham’s first medical work was published in 1666. It consisted of
accounts of continued fevers, symptoms of the same, of intermittent
fevers and small-pox, and was entitled _Methodus Curandi Febres,
Propriis observationibus superstructa_. In it the author maintains that
“a fever is Nature’s engine which she brings into the field to remove
her enemy, or her handmaid, either for evacuating the impurities of
the blood, or for reducing it into a _new state_. Secondly, that the
true and genuine cure of this sickness consists in such a tempering
of the commotion of the blood, that it may neither exceed nor be too
languid.”[887]
It was about this period that Peruvian bark was first introduced into
European medicine. Perhaps no other drug has ever been so widely
and deservedly used as this American remedy for fevers, agues, and
debility. The earliest authenticated account of the use of Cinchona
bark in medicine is found in 1638, when the Countess of Cinchon, the
wife of the Governor of Peru, was cured of fever by its administration.
The Jesuit missionaries are said to have sent accounts of its virtues
to Europe, in consequence of one of their brethren having been cured of
fever by taking it at the suggestion of a South American Indian.
The University of Montpellier, at the time of our great Civil War, was
much derided by the Paris Faculty for its laxity in granting degrees
in medicine. The enemies of Montpellier said that a three-months’
residence, and the keeping of an act and opponency, sufficed to make a
man a Bachelor of Medicine. The professors were accused of neglecting
their lectures and selling their degrees; but, worse than all, it was
alleged that blood-letting and purging had fallen into disuse, and that
the Montpellier treatment was “more expectant than heroic, and more
tonic than evacuant.”[888] Friendly historians, on the other hand, say
that at this period the medicinal uses of calomel and antimony were
better taught there than elsewhere; that museums, libraries, and good
clinical teaching flourished, so as to afford the student excellent
means of acquiring a sound knowledge of his profession.[889]
WILLIAM HARVEY, M.D., the famous discoverer of the circulation of the
blood, and the greatest physiologist the world has ever seen, was born
at Folkestone, 1578. He entered Caius College, Cambridge, 1593. Having
taken his degree, he travelled through France and Germany, and then
visited Padua, the most celebrated school of medicine of that time.
Fabricius ab Aquâpendente was then professor of anatomy, Minadous
professor of medicine, and Casserius professor of surgery. In 1615
Harvey was appointed Lumleian lecturer, and he commenced his course of
lectures in the following year—the year of Shakespeare’s death.
In this course he is supposed to have expounded his views on the
circulation of the blood, which rendered his name immortal. His
celebrated work, _Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis_,
was published in 1628; but he says in that work that for more than nine
years he had confirmed and illustrated his opinion in his lectures, by
arguments which were founded on ocular demonstration. He was appointed
physician extraordinary to James I. in 1618. He was in attendance
on King Charles I. at the battle of Edgehill. The king had been an
enlightened patron of Harvey’s researches, and had placed the royal
deer parks at Hampton Court and Windsor at his disposal. In 1651
Harvey’s _Exercitationes de Generatione_ was published.
ARISTOTLE knew but little of the vessels of the body, yet he traced the
origin of all the veins to the heart, and he seems to have been aware
of the distinction between veins and arteries. “Every artery,” he says,
“is accompanied by a vein; the former are filled only with breath or
air.”[890]
Aristotle thought that the windpipe conveys air into the heart.
Although _Galen_ understood the muscles very well, he knew little
of the vessels. The liver he held to be the origin of the veins, and
the heart of the arteries. He knew, however, of their junctions or
anastomoses.[891]
MONDINO, the anatomist of Bologna, who dissected and taught in 1315,
had some idea of the circulation of the blood, for he says that the
heart transmits blood to the lungs.[892] The great Italian anatomists,
diligent students as they were of the human frame, all missed the
great discovery. SERVETUS, who was burnt by Calvin as a heretic in
Geneva in 1553, is the first person who distinctly describes the small
circulation, or that which carries the blood from the heart to the
lungs and back again to the heart. He says:[893] “The communication
between the right and left ventricles of the heart is made, not as
is commonly believed, through the partition of the heart, but by a
remarkable artifice the blood is carried from the right ventricle
by a long circuit through the lungs; is elaborated by the lungs,
made yellow, and transferred from the _vena arteriosa_ into the
_arteria venosa_.” Still, his theories are full of fancies about a
“_vital spirit_, which has its origin in the left ventricle,” and
are accordingly unscientific to that extent. Servetus was, however,
certainly the true predecessor of Harvey in physiology; this is
universally admitted.[894]
REALDUS COLUMBUS[895] is thought by some writers to have had a still
greater share than Servetus in the discovery of the circulation. He
denies the muscularity of the heart, yet correctly teaches that the
blood passes from the right to the left ventricle, not through the
partition in the heart but through the lungs. Harvey quotes Columbus,
but does not refer to Servetus. It must be remembered that when the
unfortunate Servetus was burnt at the stake, his work was destroyed
with him, and only two copies are known to have escaped the flames.[896]
The discovery of the valves of the veins by SYLVIUS and FABRICIUS[897]
undoubtedly was the chief factor in the preparation for Harvey’s
discovery of the circulation. It was he who first appreciated
their significance, and grasped the full meaning of the pulmonary
circulation. CÆSALPINUS, in his _Quæstiones Peripateticæ_ (1571), is
another claimant for the honours due to Harvey; he had certain confused
ideas of the general circulation, and he made some experiments which
enabled him to understand the pulmonary circulation, but he certainly
did not know the circulation of the blood as a whole; he knew no more
of it, in fact, than he gathered from Galen and Servetus.[898]
Even Harvey, splendid as was the work he did, could not entirely
demonstrate the complete circulation of the blood. He was not able
to discover the capillary vessels by which the blood passes from the
arteries to the veins. This, the only missing point, was reserved for
MALPIGHI to discover. In 1661 this celebrated anatomist saw in the
lungs of a frog, by the aid of the newly invented microscope, the blood
passing from one set of vessels to the other.
Harvey began his investigations by dissecting a great number of living
animals. He examined in this way dogs, pigs, serpents, frogs, and
fishes. He did not disdain to learn even from slugs, oysters, lobsters,
and insects, and the chick itself while still in the shell. He observed
and experimented upon the ventricles, the auricles, the arteries,
and the veins. He learned precisely the object of the valves of the
veins—to favour the flow of the blood towards the heart; and it was to
this latter observation, and not the vivisection, that he attributed
his splendid discovery.
“I remember,” says Boyle, “that when I asked our famous Harvey what
were the things that induced him to think of a circulation of the
blood, he answered me, that when he took notice that the valves in the
veins of so many parts of the body were so placed, that they gave a
free passage to the blood towards the heart, but opposed the passage
of the venal blood the contrary way, he was incited to imagine that
so provident a cause as Nature had not placed so many valves without
design; and no design seemed more probable than that the blood should
be sent through the arteries, and return through the veins, whose
valves did not oppose its cause that way.” What clear views of the
motions and pressure of a fluid circulating in ramifying tubes must
have been held by Harvey to enable him to deduce his discovery from a
contemplation of the simple valves! It was observation, experience,
which led him to this. “In every science,” he says,[899] “be it what
it will, a diligent observation is requisite, and sense itself must be
frequently consulted. We must not rely upon other men’s experience,
but our own, without which no man is a proper disciple of any part of
natural knowledge.”
Dr. J. H. Bridges, of the Local Government Board, delivered the
Harveian oration on October 20th, 1892, at the Royal College of
Physicians. Dr. Bridges said: “In his discovery William Harvey
employed every method of biological research, direct observation,
experiment, above all the great Aristotelian method of comparison to
which he himself attributes his success. His manuscript notes show how
freely he used it. They show that he had dissected no less than eighty
species of animals. It is sometimes said that experimentation on living
animals was the principal process of discovery. This I believe to be an
exaggerated view, though such experiments were effective in convincing
others of the discovery when made. It need not be said that no ethical
problem connected with this matter was recognised in Harvey’s time.
The first to recognise such a problem was that great and successful
experimenter, deep thinker, and humane man, Sir Charles Bell. What
were the effects of Harvey’s discovery? It was assuredly the most
momentous event in medical history since the time of Galen. It was the
first attempt to show that the processes of the human body followed or
accompanied each other by laws as certain and precise as those which
Kepler and Galileo were revealing in the solar system or on the earth’s
surface. Henceforth it became clear that all laws of force and energy
that operated in the inorganic world were applicable to the human body.”
The case for Harvey’s originality is well put by the author of the
article on Harvey in the _Dictionary of National Biography_. “The
modern controversy as to whether the discovery was taken from some
previous author is sufficiently refuted by the opinion of the opponents
of his views in his own time, who agreed in denouncing the doctrine
as new; by the laborious method of gradual demonstration obvious in
his book and lectures; and lastly, by the complete absence of lucid
demonstration of the action of the heart and course of the blood
in Cæsalpinus, Servetus, and all others who have been suggested as
possible originals of the discovery. It remains to this day the
greatest of the discoveries of physiology, and its whole honour belongs
to Harvey.”
“That there is one blood stream, common to both arteries and veins,
that the blood poured into the right auricle passes into the right
ventricle, that it is from there forced by the contraction of the
ventricular walls along the pulmonary artery through the lungs and
pulmonary veins to the left auricle, that it then passes into the
left ventricle to be distributed through the aorta to every part of
the animal body; and that the heart is the great propeller of this
perpetual motion, as in a circle. This is the great truth of the
motion of the heart and blood, commonly called the circulation, and
must for ever remain the glorious legacy of William Harvey to rational
physiology and medicine in every land.”[900]
Harvey explains how he was led to his great discovery: “When I first
gave my mind to vivisections as a means of discovering the motions and
uses of the heart, and sought to discover these from actual inspection,
and not from the writings of others, I found the task so truly arduous,
so full of difficulties, that I was almost tempted to think with
Frascatorius, that the motion of the heart was only to be comprehended
by God. For I could neither rightly perceive at first when the systole
and when the diastole took place, nor when and where dilatation and
contraction occurred, by reason of the rapidity of the motion, which
in many animals is accomplished in the twinkling of an eye, coming and
going like a flash of lightning; so that the systole presented itself
to me now from this point, now from that; the diastole the same; and
then everything was reversed, the motions occurring, as it seemed,
variously and confusedly together. My mind was therefore greatly
unsettled, nor did I know what I should myself conclude, nor what
believe from others. I was not surprised that Andreas Laurentius should
have written that the motion of the heart was as perplexing as the flux
and reflux of Euripus had appeared to Aristotle. At length, and by
using greater diligence and investigation, making frequent inspection
of many and various animals, and collating numerous observations, I
thought that I had attained to the truth, that I should extricate
myself and escape from this labyrinth, and that I had discovered
what I so much desired, both the motion and the use of the heart and
arteries.”[901]
JOHN LOCKE (1632-1704). The great philosopher was a thoroughly educated
physician engaged in the practice of medicine. He was the friend of
Sydenham, whose principles he defended and whose works are doubtless
permeated with the thoughts of the author of the famous treatise on the
Human Understanding. In a letter of Locke’s to W. Molyneux he says:
“You cannot imagine how far a little observation carefully made by
a man not tied up to the four humours [Galen], or sal, sulphur, and
mercury [Paracelsus], or to acid and alkali [Sylvius and Willis], which
has of late prevailed, will carry a man in the curing of diseases,
though very stubborn and dangerous; and that with very little and
common things, and almost no medicine at all.” Locke declared that
we have no innate ideas, but that all our knowledge is derived from
experience. The acquirement of knowledge is due to the investigation of
things by the bodily senses.
Surgery about this period began to flourish in England. RICHARD
WISEMAN (1625-1686), the “Father of English Surgery,” was in the royal
service from Charles I. to James II. His military experience greatly
assisted him in his profession. He treated aneurism by compression,
practised “flap-amputation,” and laid down rules for operating for
hernia.
JAMES PRIMROSE, M.D. (died 1659), was a voluminous writer who opposed
the teaching of Harvey on the circulation of the blood.
BALDWIN HAMEY, jun., M.D., was the most munificent of all the
benefactors of the London College of Physicians. He was lecturer on
Anatomy at the College in 1647, and a voluminous writer, though he
published little or nothing.
FRANCIS GLISSON, M.D. (died 1677), was one of the first of the group
of anatomists in England who, incited by Harvey’s example, devoted
themselves to enthusiastic research. His account of the cellular
envelope of the portal vein in his work _De Hepate_, published in 1654,
has immortalised his name in the designation “Glisson’s capsule.” He
wrote a work on rickets, _De Rachitide seu Morbo Puerili_. Glisson
ascribed to the lymphatic vessels the function of absorption.
JONATHAN GODDARD, M.D. (died 1674), frequented the meetings which gave
birth to the Royal Society. He was a good chemist, and invented the
famous volatile drops known on the Continent as the Guttæ Anglicanæ. He
made the first telescope ever constructed in this country.
DANIEL WHISTLER, M.D. (died 1684), wrote an essay on “The Rickets,”
which is the earliest printed account we have of that disease.
THOMAS WHARTON, M.D. (died 1673), was a very distinguished anatomist,
who remained in London during the whole of the plague of 1666. He was
the author of the most accurate work on the glands of the body and
their diseases which up to that time had appeared.
RAYMOND VIEUSSENS in 1684 published a great work on the anatomy of the
brain, spinal cord, and nerves. He investigated the sympathetic nerve
and the structure of the heart.
LEEUWENHOECK (1632-1723) discovered the corpuscles in the blood and the
spermatozoa.
MARCELLO MALPIGHI (1628-1694), by his microscopical researches, first
explained the organization of the lung and the terminations of the
bronchial tubes. He traced the termination of the arteries in the
veins, and thus completed the discovery of the circulation of the
blood; by his researches in the deeper layer of the cuticle, and
certain bodies in the spleen and kidney, he has given his name to these
structures.
The invention of the MICROSCOPE in 1621 was of the utmost importance to
the study of minute anatomy and physiology.
PIERRE DIONIS (died 1718), a famous French surgeon, published a work on
the anatomy of man, which was translated into Chinese at the emperor’s
request. He also wrote on rickets in relation to the pelvis, and
advanced the study of dentistry. He explained the circulation, and
wrote a monograph on catalepsy.
THOMAS BARTHOLIN (1619-1680), professor of anatomy at Copenhagen, made
important investigations on the lacteals and lymphatic vessels.
CASPAR ASSELLIUS (1581-1626) discovered the chyliferous vessels in the
dog; FABRICE DE PEIRESC (1580-1637), dissecting a criminal two hours
after execution, discovered them in man; VAN HORNE (1621-1670), in
1652, first demonstrated the vessels in man. (It has, however, been
claimed that George Jolyffe discovered the lymphatics in 1650.)
JEAN PECQUET (1622-1674), a French physician, published, in 1651, his
_New Anatomical Experiments_, in which he made known his discovery
of the receptacle of the chyle, till then unknown, and described the
vessel which conveys the chyle to the subclavian vein.
OLAUS RUDBECK (1630-1702), a Swedish surgeon, shares with Jolyffe the
honour of the discovery of the termination of the lymphatic vessels. He
demonstrated them in the presence of Queen Christina, and traced them
to the thoracic duct, and the latter to the subclavian vein.
GERARD BLAES (died 1662) made numerous discoveries in connection with
the glands.
ANTONY NUCK (1650-1692) first injected the lymphatics with quicksilver,
rectified various errors in the work of his predecessors, and by his
own researches did much to complete the anatomy of the glands.
PAUL SARPI (1552-1623), of Venice, was a monk of whom La Courayer
said, “Qu’il était Catholique en gros et quelque fois Protestant en
détail.” He was the friend of Galileo, and, though he did not invent
the telescope, was the first who made an accurate map of the moon.
It is not true that he anticipated Harvey in his discovery of the
circulation, though he was a great physiologist, and discovered the
contractility of the iris.
NATHANAEL HIGHMORE (1613-1685) was a physician and anatomist who is
chiefly remembered for his description of the cavity in the superior
maxillary bone which bears his name. It had, however, been previously
described by Cassørius. He demonstrated the difference between the
lacteals and the mesenteric veins.
GEORGE WIRSUNG (died 1643) was a prosector to Vesalius. He discovered
the excretory duct of the pancreas.
SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN (1632-1723) was the first to suggest the injection
of medicines into the veins.
THORBERN, a Danish peasant, about this time invented an instrument for
amputating the elongated uvula.
JAN SWAMMERDAM (1637-1686) was the first to prove that the queen bee
was a female.
THOMAS MILLINGTON (_circ._ 1676) pointed out the sexual organs of
plants.
FELIX VICQ D’AZYR (1748-1794) was one of the zoologists whose
researches exercised an important influence on the progress of anatomy.
He investigated the origin of the brain and nerves, and the comparative
anatomy of the vocal organs.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE, M.D., of Norwich (1605-1682), the author of the
immortal _Religio Medici_, studied medicine at Montpellier, Padua, and
Leyden. He was a man who, in his own words, _could not do nothing_.
Though he wrote a famous work on _Vulgar Errors_, he could not rise
superior to the commonest one of his time—the belief in witchcraft.
THOMAS WILLIS, M.D. (1621-1675), was celebrated for his researches in
the anatomy and pathology of the brain. Unfortunately he neglected
observation for theorising.
Dr. Freind said of Willis that he was the first inventor of the nervous
system. Willis taught that the cerebrum is the seat of the intellectual
faculties, and the source from which spring the voluntary motions. He
consigned the involuntary motions to the cerebellum; these go on in a
regular manner, without our knowledge and independently of our will. He
supposed that the nerves of voluntary motions arise chiefly from the
cerebrum, and those of the involuntary motions from the cerebellum or
its appendages.[902]
Willis deserves to be gratefully remembered in medical history as the
great reformer of pharmacology. Having been led to consider how it is
that medicines act on the various organs of the body, he reflected that
there was usually very little relationship between the means of cure
and the physiological and pathological processes to be influenced.
Medicines were given at random. Mineral poisons, such as antimony, were
recklessly prescribed, to the destruction, not of the disease only, but
too frequently of the patient also. “So heedlessly,” says Willis, “are
these executioners in the habit of sporting with the human body, while
they are led to prepare and administer these dangerous medicines, not
by any deliberation, nor by the guidance of any method, but by mere
hazard and blind impulse.”[903]
The object of Willis was to establish a direct and reasonable
relationship between the physiological and morbid conditions of the
body on the one hand, and the indications for cure and the therapeutic
means by which these were to be brought about on the other.[904] It was
a great task, and Willis did not wholly succeed; but his method was
the right one, however grievously he failed to carry it into practice,
for he prescribed blood, the human skull, salt of vipers, water of
snails and earthworms, millipeds, and other things which he ought to
have known could have no effect on any disease.[905] We must not be too
severely critical, for Willis was the first to attempt the reformation
of this degraded state of Materia Medica.
The state of Materia Medica (or the drugs and chemicals used by the
physician) during the end of the seventeenth and the earlier part of
the eighteenth century, was remarkable, says Dr. Thomson,[906] for four
circumstances.
_First_, there was a great number of remedies strongly recommended for
the cure of diseases; but many of them were inert and useless, and thus
the practitioner was perplexed and confused.
_Secondly_, the popular confidence in all these medicines was
irrational and extreme.
_Thirdly_, it was the custom to combine in one prescription a great
number of ingredients. The Pharmacopœias of the period contain formulæ
which embraced in some instances from twenty-four up to as many as
fifty-two ingredients. Sydenham is the first who exhibits any tendency
to greater simplicity in his prescriptions.
_Lastly_, there was no rational or logical connection between the
disease to be cured and the remedy with which it was treated.
Empiricism and superstition to a serious extent dominated medicine, and
retarded its progress.
Yet, even during the seventeenth century, original thinkers and men
of genius connected with one or other of the universities, struck
out a path for themselves which led to brighter things. First was
Harvey, then came Wharton, Glisson, Willis, Lower, Mayow, Grew,
Charleton, Collins, Sydenham, Morton, Bennet, and Ridley; all these
men were students of anatomy and ardent investigators in the field of
physiology. It is true that it was long before the labours of these
pioneers of scientific medicine resulted in any marked improvement in
the actual method of treating disease; it is no less certain that our
methods of to-day are based upon the labours of the great scientific
investigators of the age we are considering.
SAMUEL COLLINS, M.D. (died 1710), was celebrated as an accomplished
comparative anatomist, whose work was much praised by Boerhaave and
Haller.
WILLIAM CROONE, M.D. (died 1684), was one of the original Fellows of
the Royal Society. In 1670 he was appointed lecturer on anatomy at
Surgeons’ Hall. He is gratefully remembered as the founder of what is
now called the “Croonian Lecture.”
RICHARD LOWER, M.D. (1631-1691), was an anatomist and physiologist,
who assisted Willis in his researches, and who wrote a treatise on
transfusion of blood, which he practised at Oxford in 1665, and also
before the Royal Society. His name is kept in remembrance by anatomists
by its association with the study of the heart in the structure known
as the “tuberculum Lowerii.”
We must not omit to mention FRÈRE JACQUES, who went to Paris in 1697;
he was a Franciscan monk, who was a famous operator for the stone.
Originally a day labourer, he became so expert a lithotomist that he
is said to have cut nearly 5,000 persons in the course of his life. In
the height of his success he had no knowledge of anatomy, though he
was afterwards induced to learn it. He is for ever celebrated as the
inventor of the lateral method in lithotomy.[907]
CHAPTER III.
SKATOLOGICAL MEDICINE AND THE REFORM OF PHARMACOLOGY.
Loathsome Medicines.—Sympathetical Cures.—Weapon-Salve.—Superstitions.
Notwithstanding all the splendid scientific work of the period, the
absurdest superstitions about amulets and charms still held their
ground. Sir John Harrington, in his _Schoole of Salerne_, printed in
1624, says: “Alwaies in your hands use eyther Corall or yellow Amber,
or a chalcedonium, or a sweet Pommander, or some like precious stone
to be worne in a ring upon the little finger of the left hand; have
in your rings eyther a Smaragd, a Saphire, or a Draconites, which you
shall beare for an ornament; for in stones, as also in hearbes, there
is great efficacie and vertue, but they are not altogether perceived by
us; hold sometime in your mouth eyther a Hyacinth, or a Crystall, or a
Granat, or pure Gold, or Silver, or else sometimes pure Sugar-candy.
For _Aristotle_ doth affirme, and so doth Albertus Magnus, that a
Smaragd worne about the necke, is good against the Falling-sicknes; for
surely the virtue of an hearbe is great, but much more the vertue of a
precious stone, which is very likely that they are endued with occult
and hidden vertues.”
MATERIA MEDICA.
Amongst those who, after Willis, laboured to reform pharmacology may be
mentioned—
JOHN ZWELFER, a learned physician of Vienna, who published in 1651 a
greatly improved Pharmacopœia, which rejected many useless and improper
medicines.
DANIEL LUDWIG in 1671 published a dissertation on useless and
unsatisfactory drugs. He denied the virtues of earthworms, toads, and
the like.
MOSES CHARAS (1618-1698) was a pharmacist of Paris, who founded the
historical establishment known as the _Vipères d’or_ of that city.
Seventeenth-century pharmacy owed much to this man, who was “one
of the last of the Arabian polypharmacists, one of the last of the
adepts of expiring alchemy, and the immediate precursor of the epoch
of Lemery.”[908] He studied pharmacy at Montpellier. He was acquainted
with natural history.
No history of medicine would be complete without reference to the
immense number of loathsome and filthy substances which from the
remotest times, even up to the present, have been used as medicines.
This subject has been treated in a very complete form by Captain Bourke
in his work on _Skatological Rites of all Nations_, an important
section of which is devoted to “Skatological Medicine.”[909] The
theory underlying the use of disgusting remedies seems to be this:
Nearly all medicines which have any efficacy are unpleasant to take;
a bitter infusion of tonic leaves or roots is not usually agreeable;
many good medicines are very nasty, but their efficacy is universally
acknowledged. Ignorant persons argue that the nastiness is the sign of
the efficacy; that the more disgusting the potion or pill, the more
good it will do. Even at the present day pauper and hospital patients
of the lower classes have no faith in medicines which are not dark in
colour and rich in sediment; elegant pharmacy would soon destroy the
best East-End practice. The most repulsive sediment in a mixture is
readily swallowed, and is usually considered highly “nourishing.” Now
from nasty herbal medicines to filthy animal excretions is but a short
step. Pliny gives hundreds of instances of skatological remedies in his
_Natural History_, and the ancient writers frequently prescribe them.
They consist of such things as the dung and urine of various animals,
not excepting those of man, of the catamenial and lochial discharges,
of the sweat of athletes, of the parasites of human and animal bodies,
of ear wax, human blood, etc.
“XENOCRATES OF APHRODISIAS (about A.D. 70) introduced disgusting filth
as medicines; _e.g._, ear wax, catamenial fluid, human flesh, bats’
blood, etc.”[910]
“ASCLEPIADES PHARMACION (about A.D. 100) recommended even animal
excrement as a medicine.”[911]
QUINTUS SERENUS SAMONICUS (died A.D. 211) prescribed mouse dung in
poultices; goats’ urine internally for stone in the bladder; earth and
dung from a wagon rut for colic, externally.[912]
MARCELLUS EMPIRICUS, physician to Theodosius (345-395), prescribed
natural pills of rabbit’s dung. Dr. Baas declares that this remedy is
in use on the Rhine at the present day, as a cure for consumption.[913]
Culpeper, in his translation of the Pharmacopœia (1653), ridicules the
remedies enumerated in that work. Thus the College of Physicians employ
“the fat, grease, or suet of a duck, goose, eel, bore, heron, thymallos
(‘_if you know where to get it_,’ says Culpeper), dog, capon, bever,
wild cat, stork, hedgehog, hen, man, lyon, hare, kite, or jack (_if
they have any fat, I am persuaded ’tis worth twelve pence the grain_),
wolf, mouse of the mountains (_if you can catch them_), pardal, hog,
serpent, badger, bear, fox, vulture (_if you can catch them_), album
græcum, east and west benzoar, stone taken out a man’s bladder,
viper’s flesh, the brain of hares and sparrows, the rennet of a lamb,
kid, hare, and a calf and a horse too (_quoth the colledg_) [_they
should have put the rennet of an ass to make medicine for their addle
brains_], the excrement of a goose, of a dog, of a goat, of pidgeons,
of a stone horse, of swallows, of men, of women, of mice, of peacocks,”
etc., etc.
There was, says Southey,[914] a water of man’s blood which in Queen
Elizabeth’s day was a new invention, “whereof some princes had very
great estimation, and used it for to remain thereby in their force,
and, as they thought, to live long.” They chose a strong young man
of twenty-five, dieted him for a month on the best meats, wines and
spices, and at the month’s end they bled him in both arms as much as he
could “tolerate and abide.” They added a handful of salt to six pounds
of this blood, and distilled it seven times, pouring water upon the
residuum after every distillation. An ounce of this was to be taken
three or four times a year. As the life was thought to be in the blood,
it was believed it could thus be transferred.
Dr. O. Möller says that in Denmark, even now in some few places, human
excrements are not entirely obsolete as epispastic applications in
inflammation of the breast.[915]
Dr. Baas says[916] that urine is taken in the Rhine provinces in fevers
instead of quinine. This was recommended by the surgical writer Schmidt
in 1649. In the seventeenth century the old pharmacies of Germany
contained, amongst other disgusting remedies, frog-spawn water, mole’s
blood, oil of spiders, snake’s tongue, mouse dung, spirits of human
brain, urine of a new-born child, etc.[917] The dung of screech-owls
was prescribed for melancholy, as also was the dung of doves and calves
boiled in wine, ox-dung, etc. Dog-dung and fleas boiled with sage was a
medicine for gout, and death-sweat was used as a cure for warts.[918]
Mould from the churchyard is used in some parts of Ireland and in
Shetland medicinally. Clay or mould from a priest’s grave boiled with
milk is given as a decoction for the cure of disease.[919] The dew
collected from the grave of the last man buried in a churchyard has
been used as a lotion for goitre. It is so employed at Launceston.[920]
In Shetland a stitch in the side was treated by applying mould dug
from a grave and heated, the mould was to be taken from and returned
to the grave before sunset.[921] In Lincolnshire a portion of a human
skull taken from the grave was grated and given to epileptics for the
cure of fits. A similar custom prevailed in Kirkwall, at Caithness,
and the Western islands—the patient was made to drink from a suicide’s
skull.[922]
In the year 1852 I saw amongst the more precious drugs in the shop of a
pharmaceutical chemist at Leamington a bottle labelled in the ordinary
way with the words, “Moss from a Dead-Man’s Skull.” This has long been
used superstitiously, dried, powdered, and taken as snuff, for headache
and bleeding at the nose.[923]
SYMPATHETICAL CURES.
A curious chapter in the history of surgery is found in the popular
belief in “sympathetical cures,” which prevailed in the reigns of
James I. and Charles I. Sir Kenelm Digby professed to have introduced
a method of curing wounds by the “powder of sympathy.” Dr. Pettigrew,,
in his _Superstitions of Medicine and Surgery_, says that a Mr. James
Howel, endeavouring to part some friends who were fighting a duel,
received a severe wound in his hand. The king sent one of his own
surgeons to attend him; but as the wound did not make good progress,
application was made to Sir Kenelm Digby, who first inquired if the
patient had any article which had the blood upon it. Mr. Howel sent
for the garter with which his hand had been bound; then a basin of
water having been brought, Sir Kenelm dissolved therein some powder of
vitriol, and immersed the bloody garter in the solution. The patient
was instructed to lay aside all his plasters and keep the wound clean
and in a moderate temperature. All the while the garter lay in the
solution of vitriol. The patient did well; probably if it had been
applied to the injured part it would have made it worse. In the course
of five or six days the wound was cicatrized and a cure effected. Sir
Kenelm professed to have learned the secret from a Carmelite friar.
It was communicated to the king’s physician, Dr. Mayerne, and before
long every country barber knew of it. Sir Kenelm Digby discoursed on
the matter before an assembly of nobles and learned men at Montpellier
in France, and endeavoured to explain the action of his powder by all
sorts of conjectures, as emanation of light, the action of impinging
rays, etc. He tried to prove that the spirit which emanated from
the vitriol became incorporated with the blood, and there met the
exhalation of hot spirits from the inflamed part.
Infinitely simpler, however, was the process of cure. Nature, left to
herself, did the whole of the work. It seemed, as Dr. Pettigrew says,
that it had hitherto been the practice of surgeons to place every
obstacle in the way of the union of severed parts of the body. What
with ointments and various more or less filthy applications, the edges
of the wound were kept apart, and so the healing process was retarded.
Of a kindred character to the “powder of sympathy” was the “weapon
salve” of the period. Instead of anointing the wound, the knife, axe,
or other instrument which caused it was smeared with ointment and the
weapon was then carefully wrapped up and put away. Dryden refers to
this same “weapon salve” in the “Tempest,” Act V. sc. 1. Dr. Pettigrew
says that the practice was at one time very general.[924]
The principle underlying the doctrine of sympathetic powders was
explained by Sir Kenelm thus: “In time of common contagion they use
to carry about them the powder of a toad, and sometimes a living toad
or spider shut up in a box; or else they carry arsenic, or some other
venomous substance, which draws unto it the contagious air, which
otherwise would infect the party; and the same powder of toad draws
unto it the poison of a pestilential cold. The scurf or farcy is a
venomous and contagious humour within the body of a horse; hang a toad
about the neck of the horse in a little bag, and he will be cured
infallibly; the toad, which is the stronger poison, drawing to it the
venom which was within the horse.”[925]
The same author says that persons of ill breath can be cured by holding
their mouths open at a cesspool, the greater stink having the power to
draw away the less.[926]
In the reign of Charles II. a gentleman named Valentine Greatrakes, of
a good family and education, “felt an impulse that the gift of curing
the king’s evil was bestowed upon him.” He published an account of his
cures of this and other diseases, ague, epilepsy, and palsy, and some
other complaints more or less connected with the nervous system, in a
letter to the Hon. Robert Boyle. He seems to have performed his cures,
which were by some persons considered miraculous, by a kind of massage,
or “by the Stroaking of the Hands.” The cures were simply the effect of
an excited imagination.[927]
CHAPTER IV.
BATHS AND MINERAL WATERS.
Miraculous Springs.—The Pool of Bethesda.—Herb-baths.
Especially in Germany mineral waters achieved great popularity in the
treatment of diseases in the seventeenth century.
In ancient times, according to Pliny, Paulus Ægineta, and others,
mineral waters were recognised as possessing curative effects, and
the temples of health were frequently erected in contiguity to these
powerful aids to treatment. Savages are everywhere fully aware of
the value of such medicinal waters, and avail themselves of their
benefits. Hot springs, wherever they occur, are highly esteemed by the
natives. Humboldt states that on Christianity being introduced into
Iceland, the natives refused to be baptized in any but the waters of
the geysers.[928] Hooker tells us that in the hot springs of Yeuntong,
which burst from the bank of the Lachen, in the Himalayas, the natives
remain three days at a time, bathing in the saline and slightly
sulphuretted waters. No better treatment for certain forms of skin
diseases could be followed.[929] Such a course of treatment is carried
out now at the baths of Leuk, in Switzerland, amongst other places.
There the patients take their meals and play cards, chess, draughts,
etc., while up to their necks in the warm medicinal waters. Hooker
tells us, again, of the use of hot baths amongst the Sikkim Bhoteeas.
The bath consists of a hollowed prostrate tree trunk, the water of
which is heated by throwing in hot stones with bamboo tongs. They
can raise the temperature to 114°, the patient submitting to this at
intervals for several days, never leaving till wholly exhausted.[930]
Dr. Mead[931] thinks that the Pool of Bethesda, spoken of in the Gospel
of St. John, chap, v., was a medicinal bath, whose virtues principally
resided in the mud which settled at the bottom. It was necessary,
therefore, that the pool should be “troubled,” that is to say, stirred
up, so that the person bathing therein might derive benefit from the
metallic salts, “perhaps from sulphur, alum, or nitre,” which settled
at the bottom. Celsus and Pliny recommend medicinal baths for nervous
disorders. Pliny particularly advises aluminous baths for paralytics,
and adds that “They use the mud of those fountains with advantage,
especially if, when it is rubbed on, it be suffered to dry in the
sun.”[932]
Many curious instances of the superstitious uses made of holy wells
in the treatment of disease, in which customs the elements of magic
ritual are not difficult to discover, are given in Gomme’s _Ethnology
in Folklore_, pp. 97-99.
Eight miles from Munich lies the village of Heilbrunn (healing spring);
tradition says it is the oldest medicinal spring in Bavaria. Near the
spring was a monastery, said to have been destroyed and the well choked
with the _débris_ in 935 A.D. In 1509 the monks made some excavations,
and the source of the spring was discovered; at the same time flames
burst forth over it, the phenomena being of course attributed to a
miracle. The reputation of the medicinal waters brought the Elector’s
wife to the spot in 1659; she derived such benefit from the visit
that the spring was named after the princess—Adelheid’s Quelle. It
became famous amongst the country people for the cure of scrofulous
and other diseases. In 1825 Dr. A. Vogel, of Munich, analysed the
waters, and found them to contain iodine in important quantity. This
led to the deepening and improvement of the spring, and in the course
of the operations one of the workmen brought a lighted candle close
to the surface of the water; the gas, escaping in bubbles, at once
caught fire, and the miracle of 1509 was explained. The fact is that
a considerable amount of carburetted hydrogen floats over the surface
of the water, and will readily take fire when in contact with a light.
Recent analysis of the water shows that it contains bromine, iodine,
and chloride of sodium, sulphate of soda, carbonates of soda, lime,
magnesia, and iron. It is altogether one of the most remarkable of the
medicinal springs, and its composition explains its value in calming
and soothing the mucous membrance of the stomach and other organs. Its
curative effects have been proved in scrofula, glandular swellings,
bronchial affections, mesenteric and female disorders.[933]
Baths impregnated with vegetable extracts and odours have long been
in use. Pine-leaves are at present largely employed, and baths of
conium, lavender, hyssop, etc., are still used as sedatives. Anciently
baths of this kind were as complicated in character as the medicines
administered internally.
Here is an ancient prescription for a medicinal bath:—
THE MAKYNG OF A BATHE MEDICINABLE.[934]
“Holy hokke and yardehok peritory[935] and the broun fenelle,[936]
Walle wort[937] herbe John[938] Sentory[939] rybbewort[940] and
cammamelle,
Hey hove[941] heyriff[942] herbe benet[943] brese wort[944] and small
ache,[945]
Broke lempk[946] Scabiose[947] Bilgres wild flax is good for ache;
Wethy leves, grene otes boyld in fere fulle soft,
Cast them hote in to a vesselle and sett your soverayn alloft,
And suffire that hete a while as hoot as he may a-bide;
Se that place be couered welle over and close on every side;
And what dissese ye be vexed with, grevaunce outher peyn,
This medicyne shalle make yow hoole surely, as men seyn.”[948]
George Herbert, in his _Priest to the Temple_, enumerates the duties of
the parson’s wife, and extols the virtues of these homely remedies.
“For salves, his wife seeks not the city, but prefers her gardens
and fields before all out-landish gums; and surely hyssop, valerian,
mercury, adder’s tongue, melilot, and St. John’s wort, made into a
salve, and elder, comphrey, and smallage, made into a poultice, have
done great and rare cures.”
CHAPTER V.
WITCHCRAFT AND MEDICINE.
Comparative Witchcraft.—Laws against Sorcery.—Magic in Virgil
and Horace.—Demonology.—Images of Wax and Clay.—Transference of
Disease.—Witchcraft in the Koran.—White Magic and Black.—Coral and the
Evil Eye.—“Overlooking” People.—Exorcism in the Catholic Church.
COMPARATIVE WITCHCRAFT.
“Witches and impostors,” said Bacon, “have always held a competition
with physicians.” The History of Medicine, therefore, demands some
notice of the strange delusions which have exerted the most terrible
influence over the minds of men in all ages and in all stages of
civilization. Nothing in the history of the human species is older than
the belief in magic, and it will be found that the practices of the
savage in this connection have their analogies amongst ourselves at
the present day. Gipsy craft, fortune telling, dream interpretation,
spiritualism, the miracles of the theosophists, may all be traced in
the customs and practices of savage tribes. They are survivals which
will not be got rid of probably for centuries to come. Education, so
far from delivering us from the bondage, has curiously enough in many
cases served but to rivet the chains more firmly. In the chapters on
the demon theory of disease, much light has been thrown on the origin
of our belief in the influence of spirits good and bad. Trials in
England connected with witchcraft were most numerous in the seventeenth
century. The most interesting is that of the Suffolk witches, when Sir
Matthew Hale was the judge and Sir Thomas Browne the medical expert
witness. This excellent and learned physician testified that certain
children, said to have been bewitched, suffered from fits, heightened
to great excess by the subtlety of the devil co-operating with the
witches. The report alleges that after conviction of the accused the
children immediately recovered.
While condemning the cruelty and severity of the laws against
witchcraft, and reflecting on the injustice and ignorance with which
they were enforced, we must remember that in many cases sorcerers and
other dabblers in black magic have added to their supposed supernatural
methods the very real and serious arts of the poisoner, and the not
less real, though purely mental influences of terror and alarm. To
know that an evil-minded person was compassing one’s death or was
busied in bringing about, by diabolical influences, some dreadful
sickness or other injury to one’s person, was quite sufficient, in
ignorant and superstitious times, to effect all the evil which it was
in the mind of the magician or witch to induce. But probably there
never was a regular professional sorcerer who did not use the actual
weapons of poison, or deleterious drugs of some kind or other, to
assist his evil intentions. In the case of the trial of the Countess of
Somerset, in 1616, a charge of witchcraft was joined with the charge of
poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury.[949] Witchcraft and murder were combined
in the Master of Orkney’s case. The last case ever brought before the
“Chambre Ardente” in France resulted in the condemnation, in 1680, of
a woman named Voisin, for sorcery and poisoning, in connection with
the Marquise de Brinvilliers. But even apart from considerations of
material injury, the mental impressions are often fatal enough; thus,
in the Pacific Islands, to quote but one instance, magical arts have
been proved effective through the patient’s own imagination. “When he
knows or fancies that he has been bewitched, he will fall ill, and he
will actually die unless he can be persuaded that he has been cured.
Thus, wherever sorcery is practised with the belief of its victims,
some system of exorcism or some protective magical art becomes, not
only necessary, but actually effective—a mental disease being met by
a mental remedy to match it.”[950] Hearne, when travelling in North
America, was entreated by an Indian to give him a charm against an
enemy (savages and primitive folk are great believers in white men as
magicians). Hearne complied, and for fun, drew on a sheet of paper
some circles, signs, and words. The Indian took care to let his victim
know that he had “medicine” against him, and the poor wretch fell sick
immediately, and shortly afterwards died. Cockayne quotes from Wier an
account of a woman who wore an amulet to cure bad eyes, which were made
worse by her constantly flowing tears. Some one who hated sorceries
induced her to open and examine the charm. When unfolded, the paper
showed nothing but these words: “May the devil scratch thine eyes
out, and —— in the holes.” As soon as the woman saw how she had been
deceived, she lost faith, took to crying again, and her eyes became as
bad as ever.[951]
LAW AGAINST SORCERY.
At the accession of James I. of England, a law against witchcraft was
passed, which continued in force for more than a century. We quote it
in full (1 Jac. i. c. 12):—
“If any person or persons shall use, practise, or exercise any
invocation or conjuration of any evil and wicked spirit, or shall
consult, covenant with, entertain, employ, feed, or reward any evil and
wicked spirit, to or for any intent or purpose, or take up any dead
man, woman, or child out of his, her, or their grave, or any other
place where the dead body resteth, or the skin, bone, or any part of
any dead person, to be employed or used in any manner of witchcraft,
sorcery, charm, or enchantment, or shall use, practise, or exercise any
witchcraft, enchantment, charm, or sorcery, whereby any person shall be
killed, destroyed, wasted, consumed, pined, or lamed in his or her body
or any part thereof, every such offender is a felon without benefit of
clergy.”
MAGIC AND MEDICINE.
Pliny says that the art of magic first originated in medicine, and that
under the guise of promoting health it insinuated itself among mankind
as a higher and more holy branch of the medical art. Then it added the
religious element, and lastly incorporated with itself the astrological
art, and so enthralled the senses of man by a three-fold bond.[952]
MAGIC IN VIRGIL AND HORACE.
The sorceress of Virgil is a witch whose ancestry we shall have no
difficulty in tracing anthropologically. We can discover her lineage
from the parent witches of savage tribes, and we detect her offspring
in the sorceress of our own times. She burns vervain and frankincense,
chaunts a solemn lay, binds the victim’s image with fillets of three
colours, and in binding the knots makes the attendant say, “Thus do
I bind the fillets of Venus.” One wax and one clay image are placed
before the fire, and as the clay image hardens, so does the heart of
Daphnis harden towards his new mistress; and as the wax softens, so is
the heart of Daphnis made tender towards the sorceress. She buries the
relics of what had belonged to Daphnis beneath her threshold; bruises
poisonous plants from Pontus to enable him to transform himself into a
wolf, and orders her attendant to cast the ashes of these herbs over
her head into a running stream, at the same time taking care not to
glance behind her.[953] Horace also describes the concoction of a charm
in a perfectly orthodox style whose family history is intelligible
enough to the student of comparative sorcery. There is nothing in the
classic witchcraft which does not exist to-day in the islands of savage
peoples, and the methods of medicine-men in primitive forests.
IMAGES OF WAX, ETC., IN SORCERY.
A very widespread and ancient method of compassing a person’s death
by witchcraft is that of making a figure in wax, or other plastic
material, to represent the victim of the incantation. The object seems
to be the concentration of will-power to effect the wishes of the
user of the charm. There is an innate belief that words are creative
symbols; it may be derived from the perception of the power of man to
effect that which he desires earnestly to effect, so that “whenever a
good or evil wish,” as Dr. Tylor says, “is uttered in words, it becomes
a blessing or curse.” This idea lies at the root of what is called
“Christian science healing,” _i.e._ healing by good wishes. In its evil
form we have an ancient example in Ovid’s sorceress:[954]—
King James, in his _Dæmonology_, says that “The devil teacheth how to
make pictures of wax or clay, that by roasting thereof the persons
that they bear the name of may be continually melted or dried away by
continual sickness.”
So the Governor-General of a Chinese province recently issued a
proclamation, whereby it was declared unlawful to bring about the death
of others by incantations. “You are forbidden,” said Governor Wang,
“if you have a grudge against any one, to practise the magic called
‘Striking the Bull’s Head,’ that is to say, writing a man’s name and
age on a scrap of paper, and laying it before the bull-headed idol,
and then buying an iron stamp and piercing small holes in this paper,
and finally throwing it at the man on the sly, with the intention of
compassing his death.”[955]
“So recently,” says the authoress of _Wanderings in China_, “as
December, 1883, a case was tried at the Inverness police court, in
which the cause of offence was the discovery of a clay image with
pins stuck through it in order to compass the death of a neighbour, a
discovery which resulted in an assault. Many similar cases have been
discovered both in England and Scotland.”[956]
“The demon-priests of Ceylon,” says Gomme,[957] “make use of images of
wax or wood, which represent the person to be injured. They drive nails
into the points which represent the heart, the head, etc., mark the
name of the intended victim on it, and bury it where he is likely to
pass over it.” Plato alludes to the same practice as obtaining amongst
the Greeks of his period.[958]
There are very similar Scotch practices.
It was anciently believed that diseases could be transferred from one
person to another. Says Pliny,[959] “Take the parings of the toe-nails
and finger-nails of a sick person and mix them up with wax, the party
saying that he is seeking a remedy for a tertian, quartan, or quotidian
fever, as the case may be; then stick this wax, before sunrise, upon
the door of another person. Such is the prescription they give for
these diseases.”
Gomme says[960] that St. Tegla’s well, about half-way between Wrexham
and Ruthin, is resorted to for the cure of epilepsy. The patient offers
a cock, or if a woman, a hen. The bird is carried in a basket, first
round the well, and then round the church. The patient enters the
church, creeps under the altar, and remains there till morning. Having
made an offering, he leaves the cock and departs. If the bird dies, it
is supposed that the disease has been transferred to it, and the man or
woman consequently cured.
* * * * *
The use of wax figures in enchantments is, as we have shown, very
ancient, and it has lasted up to the present time. Simœtha in
Theocritus says: “As I melt this wax by the help of the goddess, so may
Myndian Delphis be presently wasted by love.”[961] And Horace refers to
it:—
“Lanea et effigies evat, altera cerea.”
(Lib. i., Sat. 8, l. 30.)
Paracelsus advises the patient afflicted with St. Vitus’ dance to
make an image of himself in wax or resin, and by an effort of mind
to concentrate all his blasphemies and sins in it, “without the
intervention of any other person, to set his whole mind and thoughts
concerning these oaths on the image.” Having done this, he was to
destroy the image by fire.[962]
Pliny says[963] that abrotonum (which was probably southernwood), “if
put beneath the pillow, will act as an aphrodisiac, and that it is
of the very greatest efficacy against all those charms and spells by
which impotence is produced.” As an antaphrodisiac he recommends the
tamarisk, mixed in a drink or in food with the urine of an ox.[964]
Amongst the Tamils of Ceylon there is a ceremony performed with the
skull of a child, with the design of producing the death of the person
against whom the incantation is directed. Cabalistic figures are drawn
upon the skull after it has been duly prepared. The name of the person
to be destroyed by the charm is also written on the skull. Then a paste
is composed with his saliva, some of his hair, and a little earth on
which he has imprinted his footsteps, and this is spread upon a plate,
and taken with the skull to the cemetery of the place, where for forty
nights the evil spirits are invoked to destroy the denounced person.
The natives believe that as the paste dries on the plate, the victim of
the charm will waste and die.[965]
“Both Greeks and savages,” says Mr. A. Lang,[966] “have worshipped
the ghosts of the dead. Both Greeks and savages assign to their gods
the miraculous powers of transformation and magic, which savages also
attribute to their conjurors or shamans. The mantle (if he had a
mantle) of the medicine-man has fallen on the god; but Zeus, or Indra,
was not once a real medicine-man.”
In the Kalevala the hero of the poem wounds himself with an axe. The
wound can only be healed by one who knows the mystic words that hold
the secret of the birth of iron. Iron is the bane of warlike men; when
the wizard curses the iron as a living thing, the hero is healed.[967]
KNOTS.
Justin Martyr says that the Jews used magic ties or knots in their
exorcisms. The Babylonians did the same. When the god Marduk writes to
soothe the last moments of a dying man, Hea says, “Take a woman’s linen
kerchief, bind it round thy right hand; loose it from the left hand,
knot it with seven knots; do so twice.”[968]
The 113th chapter of the Koran was written by Mohammed when he was
suffering from an illness of a rheumatic character, and he believed
that it was caused by some evil person who had bewitched him. The
chapter runs thus:—
“Say, I fly for refuge unto the Lord of the daybreak, that he may
deliver me from the mischief of those things which he hath created; and
from the mischief of the night when it cometh on; and from the mischief
of woman blowing on knots; and from the mischief of the envious,
when he envieth.” Sales’ notes on this chapter explain the singular
expression about knots; he says: “That is, of witches, who used to tie
knots in a cord, and to blow on them, uttering at the same time certain
magical words over them, in order to debilitate the person they had
a mind to injure.” Wizards in the north who pretend to sell mariners
a wind do something similar, and the French _Nouër l’aiguillete_ is
of the same character. This bewitchment by the knot was called by
the Romans Nodus and Obligamentum. Mr. Cockayne says[969] the Saxons
translated it into lyb, _drug_, φάρμακον. It was believed that a man
might lose his power by being put under a knot, and there are cures for
this injury in the _Leechbook_. We find protections “contra maleficium
ligaturæ ut vocant.” Priests are warned not to make any alterations
in the mode of conducting the marriage service by any reason of these
knots.[970]
Of course, as in all other kinds of witchcraft, actual poisons often
had much to do with the magic.
WHITE MAGIC.
As there is White Magic, which according to popular belief is
beneficent, and Black Magic, which is diabolical and hurtful, so
there are white witches and black ones. The white can help, but not
hurt. Cotta says:[971] “The mention of witchcraft doth now occasion
the remembrance in the next place of a sort of practitioners whom our
custome and country doth call wise men and wise women, reputed a kind
of good and harmless witches or wizards, who by good words, by hallowed
herbes, and salves, and other superstitious ceremonies, promise to
allay and calme divels, practices of other witches, and the forces
of many diseases.” The last lingering remains of such wise women may
be found in the poorer quarters of all our great towns as well as in
country places; they sell herbs, and always have a special ointment
or salve which cures everything. This is called “Old Maids’ Salve,”
or some such name, and the sellers may often be known by the pile of
little chip or willow boxes displayed in a shop or front window in
back streets. “White” as they are, they often, it is suspected, give
improper advice to women.
A third species of witch was recognised—a mixture of white and black,
called grey witches, who could help and hurt.[972]
Blaise Pascal, when an infant a year old, was supposed to have been
bewitched by an old woman, who ultimately confessed that she had in
fact so influenced his health.
BLACK MAGIC.
The following “revelation” of the proceedings of sorcerers is from the
_Mysteries of Magic_ by Waite,[973] and was taken by him from the works
of Eliphas Lévi.[974]
“They procure either some of the hair or garments of the person whom
they wish to curse; then they choose an animal which they consider the
symbol of that person by means of the hair or garments; they place this
animal in magnetic rapport with the individual; they give it his name,
then they slay it with one blow of the magic knife, open its breast,
tear out the heart, which they envelop while still palpitating in the
magnetised object, and for three days they hourly pierce this heart
with nails, red-hot pins, or long thorns, pronouncing maledictions
at the same time on the name of the bewitched person. They are then
convinced (and often rightly) that the victim of their infamous
manœuvres experiences as many torments as if he had himself been probed
to the heart with every one of the points. He begins to waste away, and
at the end of a certain time dies of an unknown complaint.” Another
proceeding is to take a large toad, “baptism is administered to it, and
it is given the name and surname of the person whom it is desired to
curse; it is made to swallow a consecrated host whereon the formulæ of
execration have been pronounced; then it is enveloped in the magnetised
objects, bound with the hair of the victim, on which the operator has
previously spat, and the whole is buried either beneath the threshold
of the bewitched person’s door or in a place which he is bound to pass
daily.”[975]
The most important part of the body of a person to be bewitched is a
tooth, but the hair or blood will answer fairly well.
THE EVIL EYE.
The use of red coral for warding off the evil eye is at least as old as
the times of the ancient Romans; they used coral necklaces for their
babies as we do now, but not for ornament so much as for protection
from supernatural danger. In Italy, especially in the parts round
Naples, red coral charms in the shape of a partly closed hand, or
pieces of coral the shape of a tiny carrot, are worn for the purpose of
protecting the wearer from being bewitched by the _mal occhio_.
The last-named charm is evidently phallic.
The belief in witchcraft which still exists not only amongst the
ignorant and degraded, but also amongst cultivated and intelligent
persons, has recently been illustrated by two cases reported in the
press, which it may be well to quote in this connection.
“EXTRAORDINARY SUPERSTITION.
“An inquest was held yesterday at Lufton, a village near Yeovil, on the
body of Mary Jane Saunders, aged twenty-two, who died under peculiar
circumstances. The evidence of the sister of the deceased showed the
latter took to her bed last October. A doctor attended her, and in
November she went into Yeovil hospital. Deceased had not had her reason
for the last six weeks. Her father and mother called in a herbalist,
who remained one day and night. Her mother thought her daughter was
suffering from a ‘bad wish,’ and that it was in consequence of that she
was ill. Her mother had heard that the herbalist had cured two people
at Montacute of ‘bad wishes,’ and that was why they went to him. The
herbalist made some herb tea for deceased to get rid of the ‘bad wish.’
Her father and mother thought the deceased had been ‘overlooked.’
The father told the coroner he was ‘overlooked’ when he was a baby,
and had a spell on him, and some one did him good. The herbalist who
visited deceased said he thoroughly believed one person could put a
spell on another. It was in the Bible, but it was a pity it should be
so. The mother of deceased said they thought some one had cast a ‘bad
wish’ over the deceased, and they tried to get it taken away. They
paid 11_s._ for the herbalist’s medicine to remove the ‘bad wish.’ Dr.
Walters said deceased died of inflammation and softening of the brain,
and a verdict in accordance with that opinion was returned.”[976]
_The Daily Telegraph_ of November 21st, 1892, has the following:—
“TRIAL FOR WITCHCRAFT.
”BERLIN, Nov. 20.—The Court of Eichstaett in Bavaria has just given
judgment in the action for slander arising out of the extraordinary
case of exorcism which occurred some months ago in Bavaria, when a
certain Father Aurelian exorcised a boy named Zilk in his parish, who
was said to be possessed of a devil.
“Father Aurelian declared that the evil spirit entered the boy’s body
through the witchcraft of a Protestant woman named Herz, and the
latter accordingly instituted proceedings against him for slander. The
ceremony of exorcism was performed in presence of a Capuchin friar.
named Wolf, and other persons, and Father Aurelian, in the report which
he drew up of the case, declared that the devil only quitted the boy
after long resistance.
“Friar Wolf, who was one of a long list of witnesses called for the
defence, confirmed the correctness of the defendant’s report as to the
circumstances under which the exorcism had been performed.
“Father Pruner, the Provost of the Cathedral, who was called to give
evidence as to the theological aspects of the matter, testified that,
according to the teaching of the Church, the possibility of demoniac
possession was indisputable; and he gave an account of the doctrine
concerning demons and evil spirits. He declared that Father Aurelian
had recognised the signs of possession as taught by the Schools, and
had acted as he ought to have done under the circumstances. After
pointing out that even the Civil Law recognised the possibility of
covenants between mankind and the devil, he went on to affirm that the
Church could compel the devil to speak the truth. This was to support
the line of defence set up by Father Aurelian that before quitting the
body of the boy the devil himself, speaking through the possessed, had
informed him that Frau Herz had bewitched the boy by means of some
fruit which she had given him.
“Prior Schneider, who was summoned as an expert in demonology, also
explained his views on the spirit world.
“Herr Straub, the Public Prosecutor, said the question before the
Court was not whether Father Aurelian had transgressed the law in
exorcising the boy, but whether he had slandered the plaintiff. This,
he maintained, the defendant had done, and he demanded damages to
the extent of fifty marks, asking this small sum because it was not
contended that Frau Herz had suffered any material loss through the
allegations made against her.
“Frau Herz, in evidence, denied having bewitched the boy, and declared
that the fruit had not been given to Zilk by her, but by a maidservant.
Her own children had also partaken of the fruit without suffering any
ill effects. Ever since the slander spread by Father Aurelian, however,
she had been called ‘A witch’ by the whole neighbourhood, and her
children had been called ‘Witch-children’ by their comrades in school.
“Ultimately the Court gave judgment in accordance with the Public
Prosecutor’s demand, finding that Father Aurelian had uttered the
slander, and imposing upon him a fine of fifty marks with costs, or
five days’ imprisonment.”
How little power any cultivation of the mind, except that which is
purely scientific, has against this degrading superstition!
CHAPTER VI.
MEDICAL SUPERSTITIONS.
Death and the Grave.—Sorcerer’s Ointment.—Teeth-worms.—Disease
Transference.—Doctrine of Signatures.
SUPERSTITIONS CONNECTED WITH DEATH AND THE GRAVE.
There is a very common saying amongst ignorant persons, when they
suddenly shudder without reason, that some one is walking over their
grave. In New England it is believed that cramp in the feet can be
cured by walking over a grave. Earth taken at midnight from a newly
made grave is believed in some parts of England to have a curative
effect. Crawling round newly made graves is thought useful in sickness
in Devonshire. Churchyard grass has been used (as what has not?) as an
antidote to hydrophobia. Even in Afghanistan graves have a reputation
for curing diseases.[977]
“In the middle ages the necromancers profaned tombs and compounded
philtres and ointments with the grease and blood of corpses; they mixed
aconite, belladonna, and poisonous fungi therewith; then they boiled
and skimmed these frightful mixtures over fires composed of human
remains and crucifixes stolen from churches; they added the dust of
dried toads and the ashes of consecrated hosts; then they rubbed their
foreheads, hands, and stomachs with the infernal ointment, drew the
satanic pentacle, and evoked the dead beneath gibbets or in desecrated
cemeteries.”[978]
Baptista Porta gives the recipe for the sorceress’ ointment in his
_Natural Magic_. By means of this charm the witches were carried to
their Sabbath. It was composed of children’s fat, of aconite boiled
with poplar leaves, and some other drugs; soot must be mixed with
these, and the bodies of the sorceresses rubbed all over with the
compound as they went to the Sabbath naked. Another recipe from the
works of the same author runs thus:—
_Recipe—Suim, acorum vulgare, pentaphyllon, vespertillionis sanguinem,
solanum somniferum et oleum_, the whole to be well boiled and stirred
to the consistence of an ointment.[979]
Bits of the rope and chips from the gallows after the hanging of a
criminal have long had a reputation in England as cures for headache
and ague. The touch of a dead man’s hand at the place of execution was
formerly considered very efficacious for some complaints.
Dyer says that between Suffolk and Norfolk a favourite remedy for
whooping-cough is to put the head of the suffering child into a hole
made in a meadow for a few minutes. It must be done in the evening,
with only the father and mother to witness it.[980]
A knife that has killed a man is an amulet worn against disease in
China. A piece of skin taken with a black-handled knife from a male
corpse which has been buried nine days is an Irish love charm.[981]
People in North Hampshire sometimes wear a tooth taken from a corpse,
kept in a little bag, and hung round the neck, as a remedy for
toothache. Bones from churchyards have from old times been used as
charms against disease. Coffin water is considered good for warts, and
the water with which a corpse has been washed has been recently given
to a man in Glasgow as a remedy for fits.[982]
TEETH WORMS.
A very curious remedy for toothache is founded on the idea that the
disease is caused by a worm, and that henbane seed roasted will extract
the worm. _The Englishman’s Doctor; or the School of Salerne_, an
English translation of a book published in 1607, has a few lines on
this superstition which run thus:—
“If in your teeth you hap to be tormented,
By meane some little wormes therein do breed,
Which pain (if heed be tane) may be prevented,
Be keeping cleane your teeth, when as you feede;
Burne Francomsence (a gum not evil sented),
Put Henbane unto this, and Onyon seed,
And with a tunnel to the tooth that’s hollow,
Convey the smoke thereof, and ease shall follow.”[983]
Every druggist even at the present day sells henbane seed for the same
purpose; it is used by sprinkling it on hot cinders. The heat causes
the seed to sprout, and an appearance similar to a maggot is produced,
which is ignorantly supposed by the purchaser of the drug to have
dropped from the tooth to which the smoke is applied. Very strangely
this belief that toothache is caused by a worm is found all over the
world.[984]
That dental caries is actually caused by an organism (the _Leptothrix
buccalis_), which is found in teeth slime, and the threads of which
penetrate the tissue of the teeth after the enamel has been eaten away
by acids generated by the fermentation of the food, is not of course
known to peasants and ignorant persons; they seem, however, to have in
this instance anticipated a discovery in bacteriology.
DISEASE TRANSFERENCE.
When primitive folk found that diseases could be communicated from one
person to another, that contagious and infectious complaints spread
through a district with terrible rapidity and fatal effects, they
began to argue that it must be possible to transfer diseases to other
creatures than man. And so we find stomach-ache transferred from the
patient to a puppy or a duck.[985] Hooping-cough is transmitted to dogs
by hairs of the patient given between slices of bread-and-butter. Ague
and scarlet-fever are transmitted to the ass on which the sufferer
sits; toothache is passed on to a frog by spitting in its mouth. Even
trees are considered able to relieve patients of ague. Mr. Tylor says:
“In Thuringia it is considered that a string of rowan berries, a rag,
or any small article touched by a sick person, and then hung on a bush
beside some forest path, imparts the malady to any person who may touch
this article in passing, and frees the sick man from the disease.
This gives great probability to Captain Burton’s suggestion, that the
rags, locks of hair, and what not hung on trees near sacred places, by
the superstitious, from Mexico to India, and Ethiopia to Ireland, are
deposited there as actual receptacles for transference of disease.”[986]
Innumerable transference superstitions are met with concerning warts,
and these have doubtless arisen from the very remarkable manner in
which they sometimes disappear. In some cases what are taken to be
warts by those not skilled in skin diseases are merely a papular
eruption of a fugitive kind, which suddenly appears on the back of the
hands and as suddenly vanishes. As real warts, however, often arise
from constitutional causes, they will naturally disappear with improved
general health; and this fact has been the fruitful parent of a host of
superstitions.
Mr. Black gives several of these. He says: “Lancashire wise men tell
us for warts to rub them with a cinder, and this tied up in paper,
and dropped where four roads meet (_i.e._, where the roads cross),
will transfer the warts to whoever opens the parcel. Another mode of
transferring warts is to touch each wart with a pebble, and place the
pebbles in a bag, which should be lost on the way to church; whoever
finds the bag gets the warts.”[987]
A common Warwickshire custom is to rub the warts with a black snail,
stick the snail on a thorn bush, and then, say the folk, as the snail
dies so will the wart disappear.
ANTIDOTES.
Another old medical superstition is that every natural poison carries
within itself its own antidote. Galen, Pliny, and Dioscorides say that
the poison of Spanish fly exists in the body, and the head and wings
contain the antidote. “A hair of the dog that bit you,” is the ancient
way of stating a belief that the hairs of a rabid dog are the true
specific for hydrophobia. The fat of the viper was long regarded as the
remedy for its bite. In black-letter books on Demonology we learn that
“three scruples of the ashes of the witch, when she has been well and
carefully burnt at a stake, is a sure catholicon against all the evil
effects of witchcraft.”[988]
THE DOCTRINE OF SIGNATURES.
By nothing have the annals of medicine been more disgraced than by
the absurd and preposterous “Doctrine of Signatures.” Dr. Paris, in
his _Pharmacologia_, describes it as the belief that “every natural
substance which possesses any medicinal virtues, indicates, by an
obvious and well-marked external character, the disease for which it
is a remedy or the object for which it should be employed.” Thus the
plant which is common in our woods, called “Lungwort” (_Pulmonaria
officinalis_), was anciently considered good for chest complaints,
because its leaves bear a fancied resemblance to the surface of the
lungs. The root of the “mandrake,” from its supposed resemblance to
the human form, was a very ancient medicine for barrenness, and was so
esteemed by Rachel (Genesis xxx. 14).
Pliny, Dioscorides, and other writers attribute peculiar virtues to
the mineral _Lapis Ætites_, or eagle-stone, because the nodule within
the stone rattles when it is shaken. “_Ætites lapis agitatus sonitum
edit, velut ex altero lapide prægnans._” The yellow drug _turmeric_
was held to be a cure for jaundice because it is yellow. Poppies have
their capsules shaped somewhat like a skull, therefore they were
considered appropriate to relieve diseases of the head. _Euphrasia_,
our eye-bright, was a famous application for eye diseases, because its
flowers are somewhat like the pupil of the eye. Nettle-tea by the same
rule is a country remedy for nettle-rash (urticaria). The petals of the
red rose bear the “signature” of the blood, the roots of rhubarb and
the flowers of saffron those of the bile.
A person who believes himself bewitched by execration and the interment
of a toad, should carry about him a living toad.
Southey says,[989] “The signatures [were] the books out of which the
ancients first learned the virtues of herbs—Nature—having stamped
on divers of them legible characters to discover their uses.” Every
healing plant, it was thought, bears in some part of its structure
the type or signature of its peculiar virtue. Oswald Crollius is
supposed to have been “the great discoverer of signatures.” Some of
these strange fancies are as fantastic as those of Swedenborg. Walnuts
were considered to be the perfect signature of the head, the shell
as the skull and the convolutions of the kernel as those of the two
hemispheres of the brain, the outer skin would represent the scalp. So
the signature doctors used the husks for scalp wounds, the inner peel
for disorders of the _dura mater_, and the kernel was “very profitable
for the brain and resists poisons.” The peony when in bud being
something like a man’s head was “very available against the falling
sickness.” Poppy-heads for the same reason were used “with success” in
general diseases of the head. Lilies-of-valley were known by signature
to cure apoplexy; as Coles says, “for as that disease is caused by the
dropping of humours into the principal ventricles of the brain, so the
flowers of this lily hanging on the plants as if they were drops, are
of wonderful use herein.”
Capillary herbs naturally announced themselves as good for diseases of
the hair. The stone crop “hath the signature of the gums,” and so was
used for scurvy. The scales of pine-cones were used for the toothache,
because they resemble the front teeth. Prickly plants like thistles
and holly were used for pleurisy and stitch in the side. Saxifrage was
good for the stone; kidney beans ought to have been useful for kidney
diseases, but seem to have been overlooked except as articles of diet.
CHAPTER VII.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
The Sciences accessory to Medicine.—The great
Schools of Medical Theory.—Boerhaave and his
System.—Stahl.—Hoffman.—Cullen.—Brown.—Hospitals.—Bichat and the
New Era of Anatomy.—Mesmer and Mesmerism.—Surgery.—The Anatomists,
Physiologists, and Scientists of the Period.—Inoculation and
Vaccination.
The medical history of the eighteenth century affords but a meagre
result, notwithstanding the brilliant talents and indefatigable
industry of the famous men who devoted their energies to the healing
art. Their great aim was to create systems of medicine which should be
philosophical and complete.
It is not only in what is strictly the art of healing that the
members of the medical profession have ever been amongst the
greatest benefactors of the world, but in what are known as the
accessory sciences many of the most distinguished, enlightened, and
self-sacrificing of the heroes of science have been affiliated to
the profession of medicine. Not only the heroes, but the martyrs
of medicine, crowd the scientific calendar. The seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries were fertile in the efforts to apply the
results of discoveries in the physical sciences to the relief of
human suffering. If these efforts were but partially successful, so
far as medicine—considered apart from surgery—was concerned, it was
not in consequence of less industry in that department, but because
speculation and theorising about the causes of disease monopolised
the attention which, if devoted to observation of facts, would have
been fertile in result. Schools, Systems, and Sects were the chief
product of the medical activity of the eighteenth century. Although not
perhaps of much direct benefit to medicine, indirectly the study of the
sciences accessory to it must have been of considerable benefit as an
educational factor in the training of the intellect of physicians.
THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF MEDICAL THEORY.
Whewell, in his _History of Scientific Ideas_,[990] classifies the
successive biological hypotheses under the heads: (1) THE MYSTICAL
SCHOOL; (2) THE IATRO-CHEMICAL SCHOOL; (3) THE IATRO-MATHEMATICAL
SCHOOL; (4) THE VITAL-FLUID SCHOOL; (5) THE PSYCHICAL SCHOOL.
THE MYSTICAL SCHOOL found its most distinguished representative
in Paracelsus; it derived its doctrine of the _Macrocosm_ and the
_Microcosm_ from the Neoplatonists, and was largely imbued with alchemy
and magic, the doctrines of the Cabala and the fanciful interpretations
of the Bible. Later Paracelsists, Rosicrucians, and other speculators
of the same character, such as Sir Kenelm Digby, brought the Mystical
School of Medicine down to the seventeenth century. Our modern
Theosophists are striving to restore much of the mystical teaching of
Paracelsus and his followers. Again we meet the “astral bodies,” “the
elementary spirits,” the cabalistic interpretations of the Bible, and
the astrological absurdities of a pre-scientific period.