jealous rivals, could have successfully bid defiance to those who considered it sacrilegious to dissect the dead body of a fellow man; and yet, without the knowledge which may only in this way be gained, how was it practicable for any individual, no matter how clever he might be, to lay the foundations for a further advance in medical knowledge? It seems to me therefore plain that Galen did all that lay in his power to advance the science of medicine; and whatever words of condemnation I may have employed in the text, when speaking of the Galenists, refer solely to those physicians of later centuries who were of such a narrow-minded type, so rigidly crystallized in the belief that Galen's teachings had reached the limit of all possible knowledge in the science of medicine, that they did not hesitate to class the efforts of men like Vesalius as acts of unpardonable impiety. Galenism, then, refers to the very widely prevalent tendency among physicians of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to uphold the teachings of Galen as the only trustworthy code upon which they should depend for their guidance. In short, Galenism, at the period named, meant for medicine a complete arrest of development.
I have now arrived at a point in the history of medicine where, owing to the limited amount of space at my command, the difficulty of deciding as to what subjects and what individual workers in the field of medicine—a field now grown to very great proportions—shall receive consideration in my sketch. Having decided from the very outset that my best efforts shall be directed, consistently with a strict adherence to historical truth, toward making my account readable, I now find it absolutely necessary to jettison—if I may be permitted to use such a nautical expression—much really valuable cargo, and to put ashore, before continuing our voyage, many passengers of undoubted worth. Nobody need bemoan the loss of all these valuable treasures, for the great majority of them, I am confident, will be cared for properly by those authors who are privileged to treat this whole subject with some degree of thoroughness; and the reader, if he is familiar with
