Two of the most important results of the revival of learning were indeed such as are excluded from the scope of this brief sketch—namely, the reawakening of anatomy, which to a large extent grew out of the study of the works of Galen, and the investigation of medicinal plants, to which a fresh impulse was given by the revival of Dioscorides (A.D. 50) and other ancient naturalists. The former brought with it necessarily a more accurate conception of physiology, and thus led up to the great discovery of Harvey, which was the turning-point in modern medicine. The latter gave rise, on the one hand, to the modern science of botany, on the other to a more rational knowledge of drugs and their uses. At the same time, the discovery of America, and increased intercourse with the East, by introducing a variety of new plants, greatly accelerated the progress both of botany and pharmacology.
But it was not in these directions that improvement was first looked for. It was at first very naturally imagined that the simple revival of classical and especially of Greek literature would at once produce the same brilliant results in medicine as in literature and philosophy. The movement of reform started, of necessity, with scholars rather than practising physicians—more precisely with a group of learned men, whom we may be permitted, for the sake of a name, to call the medical humanists, equally enthusiastic in the cause of letters and of medicine. From both fields they hoped to expel the evils which were summed up in the word barbarism. Nearly all medieval medical literature was condemned under this name; and for it the humanists proposed to substitute the originals of Hippocrates and Galen, thus leading back medicine to its fountain-head. Since a knowledge of Greek was still confined to a small body of scholars, and a still smaller proportion of physicians, the first task was to translate the Greek classics into Latin. To this work several learned physicians, chiefly Italians, applied themselves with great ardour. Among the earliest were Nicolaus Leonicenus of Vicenza (1428–1524), Giovanni de Monte or Montanus (1498–1552), and many others in Italy. In northern Europe should be mentioned Gulielmus Copus (1471–1532) and Günther of Andernach (1487–1584), better known as Guinterius Andernacensis, both for a time professors at Paris; and, among the greatest, Thomas Linacre (about 1460–1524; see Linacre). A little later Janus Cornarius or Hagenbut (1500–1558) and Leonhard Fuchs (1501–1566) in Germany, and John Kaye of Caius (1510–1572) in England, carried on the work. Symphorien Champier (Champerius or Campegius) of Lyons (1472–1539), a contemporary of Rabelais, and the patron of Servetus, wrote with fantastic enthusiasm on the superiority of the Greek to the Arabian physicians, and possibly did something to enlist in the same cause the two far greater men just mentioned. Rabelais not only lectured on Galen and Hippocrates, but edited some works of the latter; and Michael Servetus (1511–1553), in a little tract Syruporum universa ratio, defended the practice of Galen as compared with that of the Arabians. The great Aldine Press made an important contribution to the work, by editiones principes of Hippocrates and Galen in the original. Thus was the campaign opened against the medieval and Arabian writers, till finally Greek medicine assumed a predominant position, and Galen took the place of Avicenna. The result was recorded in a formal manner by the Florentine Academy, sometime shortly before 1535: “Quae, excusso. Arabicae et barbarae servitutis medicae jugo, ex professo se Galenicam appellavit et profligato barbarorum exercitu unum totum et solum Galenum, ut optimum artis medicae authorem, in omnibus se sequuturam pollicita est.” Janus Cornarius, from whom this is quoted, laments, however, that the Arabians still reigned in most of the schools of medicine, and that the Italian and French authors of works called Practica were still in high repute. The triumph of Galenism was therefore not complete by the middle of the 16th century. It was probably most so, and earliest, in the schools of Italy and in those of England, where the London College of Physicians might be regarded as an offshoot of the Italian schools. Paris was the stronghold of conservatism, and Germany was stirred by the teachings of one who must be considered apart from all schools—Paracelsus. The nature of the struggle between the rival systems may be well illustrated by a formidable controversy about the rules for bleeding in acute diseases. This operation, according to the Arabian practice, was always performed on a vein at a distance from the organ affected. The Hippocratic and also Galenic rule, to let blood from, or near to, the diseased organ, was revived by Pierre Brissot (1470–1522), a professor in the university of Paris. His attempt at reform, which was taken to be, as in effect it was, a revolt against the authority of the Arabian masters, led to his expulsion from Paris, and the formal prohibition by the parliament of his method. Upon this apparently trifling question arose a controversy which lasted many years, occupied several universities, and led to the interposition of personages no less important than the pope and the emperor, but which is thought to have largely contributed to the final downfall of the Arabian medicine.
Paracelsus and Chemical Medicine.—Contemporary with the school of medical humanists, but little influenced by them, lived in Germany a man of strange genius, of whose character and importance the most opposite opinions have been expressed. The first noticeable quality in Paracelsus (c. 1490–1541), is his revolutionary independence of thought, which was supported by his immense personal arrogance. Himself well trained in the learning and medical science of the day, he despised and trampled upon all traditional and authoritative teachings. He began his lectures at Basel by burning the books of Avicenna and others; he afterwards boasted of having read no books for ten years; he protested that his shoe-buckles were more learned than Galen and Avicenna. On the other hand, he spoke with respect of Hippocrates, and wrote a commentary on his Aphorisms. In this we see a spirit very different from the enthusiasm of the humanists for a purer and nobler philosophy than the scholastic and Arabian versions of Greek thought. There is no record of Paracelsus’ knowledge of Greek, and as, at least in his student days, the most important works of Greek medicine were very imperfectly known, it is probable he had little first hand acquaintance with Galen or Hippocrates, while his breach with the humanists is the more conspicuous from his lecturing and writing chiefly in his native German.
Having thus made a clean sweep of nearly the whole of the dogmatic medicine, what did Paracelsus put in its place? Certainly not pure empiricism, or habits of objective observation. He had a dogma of his own—one founded, according to his German expositors, on the views of the Neoplatonists, of which a few disjointed specimens must here suffice. The human body was a “microcosm” which corresponded to the “macrocosm,” and contained in itself all parts of visible nature,—sun, moon, stars and the poles of heaven. To know the nature of man and how to deal with it, the physician should study, not anatomy, which Paracelsus utterly rejected, but all parts of external nature. Life was a perpetual germinative process controlled by the indwelling spirit or Archeus; and diseases, according to the mystical conception of Paracelsus, were not natural but spiritual. Nature was sufficient for the cure of most diseases; art had only to interfere when the internal physician, the man himself, was tired or incapable. Then some remedy had to be introduced which should be antagonistic, not to the disease in a physical sense, but to the spiritual seed of the disease. These remedies were arcana—a word corresponding partly to what we now call specific remedies, but implying a mysterious connexion between the remedy and the “essence” of the disease. Arcana were often shown to be such by their physical properties, not only by such as heat, cold, &c., but by fortuitous resemblances to certain parts of the body; thus arose the famous doctrine of “signatures,” or signs indicating the virtues and uses of natural objects, which was afterwards developed into great complexity. Great importance was also attached to chemically prepared remedies as containing the essence or spiritual quality of the material from which they were derived. The actual therapeutical resources of Paracelsus included a
