Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/412

proper, that it began to dawn upon the minds of some of the brighter men that this practice was harmful to the advance of medicine beyond the standards established by Galen. Vesalius, who was a contemporary of Paracelsus, fully appreciated how serious an obstacle to further progress in anatomical knowledge the teachings of Galen were, and it was he who made the first really successful attack on this great hindrance to further progress; but there is no evidence to show that he had the slightest idea that lecturing and writing about medical topics in Latin played any part in the perpetuation of the evil which he was fighting. To Paracelsus alone belongs the credit, so far as I know, of endeavoring, through the force of example and by spoken arguments, to break up the practice which we are here considering. I may be mistaken in the view which I have here expressed, but it is difficult for me not to believe that the habitual use of Latin as the proper vehicle for the transmission of facts and ideas belonging to the domain of medicine must have materially hindered the advancement of that science; for such use certainly tended to keep men's minds moving in fixed ruts, and those ruts all led straight toward the faulty teachings of Galen.