land and by large numbers of practitioners of medicine who saw in this procedure an easy and safe method of bettering their fortunes. The public at large were greatly impressed with this new and wonderful manner of detecting disease, and for a long period—indeed, for more than half a century—this piece of clap-trap charlatanry continued to thrive, and to reflect only discredit upon the medical profession. There came a time, however, when people generally began to suspect that uroscopy was not all that the charlatans claimed it to be, and these suspicions were voiced in the popular saying, "The pulse is good, the urine is normal, and yet the patient dies." The writers who were the most active in showing up the hollowness of the claims of the uroscopists were Scribonius of Marburg, Germany, Peter Foreest (1522-1597) of Alkmaar, Holland, and Leonardo Botallo of Asti, in Piedmont (born in 1530). The latter authority, it may be recalled, owes his chief distinction to the fact that he rediscovered what has been erroneously named in his honor the "foramen Botalli"—i.e., the ductus arteriosus in the foetus. He also attained some distinction in another direction. He revived the violent disputes about venesection by recommending a resort to this therapeutic procedure in nearly all illnesses. He went so far as to advocate four or five bloodlettings in the course of an acute attack, in each one of which operations from three to four pounds of blood should, as he believed, be abstracted. Indeed, he claimed that in an extreme case it might be perfectly proper to abstract as much as seventeen pounds(!). Inasmuch as Botallo's practice was largely confined to the strong soldiers of Northern Italy it is easier to understand how such extravagant bloodletting did not more often prove fatal than it did. When, soon afterward, the Paris Faculty condemned the practice in the strongest possible terms, Botallo's followers characterized sarcastically the French physicians as "pigmy bloodletters" (petits saigneurs).
But the efforts of Scribonius, Botallo and others to put an end to the uroscopy scandal were—I fully believe—not the only or perhaps even the most potent factors in
