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MEDICINE 349 with his descriptions, they were looked upon as exceptions to the general rule, or as evi- dence of the degeneracy of the human race. Such was the state of things when, about the year 1543, Vesalius, professor of anatomy in the university of Padua, published his great work on anatomy, in which he pointed out the errors of Galen, and maintained that his de- scriptions were taken, not from human dis- sections, but from those of apes. The age was one of anatomical discovery, and Colum- bus, the successor of Vesalius at Padua, Eusta- chius at Rome, and Fallopius, confirmed and increased the discoveries of Vesalius. The prejudices against human dissection were miti- gated, subjects became comparatively abundant, and printing and engraving served to spread abroad and perpetuate the discoveries that were made. After the fall of Constantinople, learned Greeks carried a knowledge of their language and literature to the western world. Previous to this date the Greek medical wri- ters had been read only through the medium of faulty Arabic translations; but medical men now availed themselves of this new source of information, and translations of Galen, Hip- pocrates, Dioscorides, and others were made directly from the Greek. Thomas Linacre, physician to Henry VIII. and to Mary, distin- guished himself in this career ; he established professorships at Oxford and Cambridge for illustrating the works of Hippocrates and Ga- len, and laid the foundations of the royal col- lege of physicians at London. Among those distinguished in the same .path were Mercuriali, Foes, and J. Fernel ; and the attention of phy- sicians as of the learned throughout Christen- dom was directed to rescuing and illustrating the remains of antiquity rather than to original research. While medicine was thus recover- ing the ground it had lost, surgery also was im- proving. Physicians in the middle ages being invariably priests, whom a canon of the church forbids to shed blood, surgical operations com- monly fell into the hands of an inferior and ig- norant class of barber surgeons, who frequently were itinerants. Gradually matters improved ; the clerical physicians occasionally operated, while the barber surgeons struggled to raise themselves to a higher rank. Gui de Chauliac, a learned priest who published about the year 1363 the earliest modern work on surgery, op- erated himself; while in the 16th century the great anatomists Vesalius, Fallopius, &c., were likewise distinguished surgeons. But surgery received its greatest impulse from Ambroise Par6, who commenced his career as a barber surgeon. At that period wounds received from firearms were considered poisonous, and it was customary on this account to cauterize their track with boiling oil. In 1536, on one occa- sion, while serving as surgeon with the French army in Provence, Park's supply of oil failed him. He could not sleep for anxiety, but in the morning he found that those who had not been cauterized were doing better than those who had, and this soon led to a revolution in practice. The application of the ligature in- stead of the actual cautery to restrain haemor- rhage after amputations was another of his discoveries. While the authority of Galen was disputed by the anatomists on matters of fact, his opinions were attacked by a new school of physicians, who were the offshoot of the prevailing study of alchemy. Of this school Paracelsus obtained the greatest notoriety. He publicly burned the works of Galen and Avi- cenna at Basel, but had nothing to substitute for them but wild and incoherent speculations. Perhaps it was partly owing to the growing spirit of independent observation that we first hear during the 15th century of a number of new diseases. Whooping cough, scurvy, the sweating sickness, and syphilis were now first described. Of scurvy we must believe that the causes which produce it at present must have produced it from all time ; and that if it sel- dom occurred in ancient times, it must have been because of the different modes of living and the short duration of the voyages. With syphilis the case is different ; the theory of the American origin of the disease is now shown to be unfounded, and whether it had existed obscurely for a long time, or whether it arose, as some think, from a degeneration of the lep- rosy so prevalent in the middle ages, its sudden explosion at Naples at the end of the 15th cen- tury and its rapid spread throughout Europe are equally unaccountable. The great anato- mists of the 16th century had paved the way for the discovery of the circulation of the blood. Csesalpinus, in his Speculum Artis Medicos Hip- pocraticurri) had shown a knowledge of the system of the circulation of the blood. Servetus had proclaimed the lesser circulation through the lungs ; the valves of the heart, of the aorta, and of the veins were known ; it was proved by experiments on living animals that when an artery was tied the blood no longer flowed, and the pulse ceased on the side most distant from the heart ; that when a vein was tied it swelled below the ligature, while it became empty on the side toward the heart. And yet the last step was not made. At length William Harvey, after having for about 10 years taught the circulation of the blood in his lectures, in 1628 published his doctrine to the world; and though meeting at first with opposition from some of the older members of the profession, it made rapid progress and was universally adopted during the lifetime of its discoverer. In 1661 Malpighi by the aid of the microscope showed the course of the globules of the blood in the smaller vessels, and 30 years later Leeu- wenhoek was able to follow the circulation into the minutest capillaries. The true theory of respiration soon followed the discovery of the circulation. The ancients taught that the minute bronchial tubes inosculated with the pulmonary veins, and that the air thus found its way into the heart. In 1661 Malpighi demonstrated the vesicular substance of the lungs, and about the