Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/408

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statement which shows clearly that in Germany the university students of that period must have been a very rough set of men: "In 1625 the Senate of the University of Leipzig was obliged to warn its students that they must cease disturbing wedding festivals and handling the guests roughly, that they must no longer make obscene remarks to married women and maidens, etc. And in 1631 a physician named Lotichius, in writing to a friend, made the statement that 'in our German high schools the students seem to prefer strife to the reading of books, daggers to copy-books, swords to pens, bloody encounters to learned discussions, incessant boozing and noisy reveling to the quiet pursuit of their studies, and public-houses and brothels to students' work-rooms and libraries.'" In 1660 the students at Jena, on one occasion, carried on a regular battle with the police, and as a result of this encounter several persons were killed. In the light of this evidence, therefore, it is not surprising that the science of medicine made comparatively little advance in Germany until after the eighteenth century was reached.

Iatrochemists and Iatrophysicists.—During the seventeenth century there was a great deal of disputing among physiologists about the nature of certain processes like assimilation and retrograde metamorphosis, about the manner in which blood is formed, about digestion, and about the rôle played by the lymph vessels. According to Haeser a large proportion of the physicians of that day were confident that chemistry was entirely competent to solve these riddles, and yet, on the other hand, there were not a few who believed that the science of physics, which was then much further advanced than that of chemistry, was quite as competent to explain all the phenomena. At first the split into these two factions was confined to men who were interested in questions of a purely physiological nature, but in a short time the practitioners of medicine were also drawn into the controversy; and from that time onward it became customary to employ the terms, "iatrochemists" and "iatrophysicists" in speaking of the partisans of the two schools of medicine (the iatrochemical