24 HARVEY AND GALEN
editor and commentator of Galen, and supplied emendations of his text, which I am told are still valued. He also wrote a Methodus Medendi according to the system of Galen. But it was Caius again who made in his admirable works on the Sweating Sickness the first original contribution to clinical medicine of which our country can boast. Indeed, the best of the numerous writings on this disease were due to men who were distinguished for their scholarship. The same was true of syphilis, a disease in which the direct teaching of the ancients could be of no service, but of which men trained in Greek scholarship, such as Leoniceno of Vicenza and others, whom it would be tedious to mention, have left the best descriptions.
The study of Galen again led inevitably to that of Hippocrates, the great master of clinical description. Cornarius and many of the great humanists edited and translated his works ; Rabelais gave lectures at Montpélier on Hippocrates and Galen, which we may hope were lively 1. These labours, together with the long-forgotten work of Celsus, prepared the way for the revival of Hippo- cratic medicine in the seventeenth century, with which will always be connected the illustrious name of Sydenham.
It will then appear that the revival of medicine in all its departments was essentially a revival of Greek science. For the third time in history the Greek spirit gave new life to the intellectual progress of another race ; as it had before to the Romans and then to the Arabs, so now to the modern Europeans. Out of this great revival grew the new birth of medicine, which through the scholars and the anatomists led up to what was in anatomy its culminating point, the
1 Rabelais lectured in 1531. In author of two Latin verses on the
the next year he published the subjects of his lectures, viz. the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, and the Ars Medica of Galen, with other treatises, in Latin, and a new recen- sion of the Aphorisms in Greek. They form a tiny volume beauti- fully printed by Gryphius of Lyons, Rabelais himself was apparently the
title-page—
- Hic medicae fons est exundantissimus
artis,
Hine, mage ni sapiat pigra lacuna, bibe’—
and a Greek epigram. (Eiippocratis et Galeni libri aliquot,
ex recognitione Fr. Rabelaesi, Lyons,
1532.)
