Mediaeval Medicine : Part 10

The Evolution of Modern Medicine
by William Osler

(Page 13 of 16)

Never was the opinion of sensible men on this subject better expressed than by Sir Thomas Browne: "Nor do we hereby reject or condemn a sober and regulated Astrology; we hold there is more truth therein than in ASTROLOGERS; in some more than many allow, yet in none so much as some pretend. We deny not the influence of the Starres, but often suspect the due application thereof; for though we should affirm that all things were in all things; that Heaven were but Earth Celestified, and earth but Heaven terrestrified, or that each part above had an influence upon its divided affinity below; yet how to single out these relations, and duly to apply their actions, is a work often to be effected by some revelation, and Cabala from above, rather than any Philosophy, or speculation here below."

As late as 1699, a thesis was discussed at the Paris Faculty, "Whether comets were harbingers of disease," and in 1707 the Faculty negatived the question propounded in a thesis, "Whether the moon had any sway on the human body."

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw, among intelligent men, a progressive weakening of the belief in the subject; but not even the satire of Swift, with his practical joke in predicting and announcing the death of the famous almanac maker, nor contemptuous neglect of the subject of late years sufficed to dispel the belief from the minds of the public. Garth in the Dispensary satirizes the astrological practitioners of his day:

The Sage in Velvet Chair, here lolls at Ease
To promise future Health for present Fees
Then as from Tripod solemn Sham reveals
And what the Stars know nothing of foretell. (Canto ii.)

The almanacs of Moore and Zadkiel continue to be published, and remain popular. In London, sandwich men are to be met with carrying advertisements of Chaldeans and Egyptians who offer to tell your fortune by the stars. Even in this country, astrology is still practiced to a surprising extent if one may judge from advertisements in certain papers, and from publications which must have a considerable sale. Many years ago, I had as a patient an estimable astrologer, whose lucrative income was derived from giving people astral information as to the rise and fall of stocks. It is a chapter in the vagaries of the human mind that is worth careful study. Let me commend to your reading the sympathetic story called "A Doctor of Medicine" in the "Rewards and Fairies" of Kipling. The hero is Nicholas Culpeper, Gent., whose picture is here given. One stanza of the poem at the end of the story, "Our Fathers of Old," may be quoted:

Wonderful tales had our fathers of old -
Wonderful tales of the herbs and the stars -
The Sun was Lord of the Marigold,
Basil and Rocket belonged to Mars.
Pat as a sum in division it goes -
(Every plant had a star bespoke) -
Who but Venus should govern the Rose?
Who but Jupiter own the Oak?
Simply and gravely the facts are told
In the wonderful books of our fathers of old.

James J. Walsh of New York has written a book of extraordinary interest called "The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries." I have not the necessary knowledge to say whether he has made out his case or not for art and for literature. There was certainly a great awakening and, inspired by high ideals, men turned with a true instinct to the belief that there was more in life than could be got out of barren scholastic studies. With many of the strong men of the period one feels the keenest mental sympathy. Grosseteste, the great Clerk of Lincoln, as a scholar, a teacher and a reformer, represents a type of mind that could grow only in fruitful soil. Roger Bacon may be called the first of the moderns - certainly the first to appreciate the extraordinary possibilities which lay in a free and untrammeled study of nature. A century which could produce men capable of building the Gothic cathedrals may well be called one of the great epochs in history, and the age that produced Dante is a golden one in literature.

Humanity has been the richer for St. Francis; and Abelard, Albertus and Aquinas form a trio not easy to match, in their special departments, either before or after. But in science, and particularly in medicine, and in the advance of an outlook upon nature, the thirteenth century did not help man very much. Roger Bacon was "a voice crying in the wilderness," and not one of the men I have picked out as specially typical of the period instituted any new departure either in practice or in science. They were servile followers, when not of the Greeks, of the Arabians. This is attested by the barrenness of the century and a half that followed. One would have thought that the stimulus given by Mundinus to the study of anatomy would have borne fruit, but little was done in science during the two and a half centuries that followed the delivery of his lectures and still less in the art. While William of Wykeham was building Winchester Cathedral and Chaucer was writing the Canterbury Tales, John of Gaddesden in practice was blindly following blind leaders whose authority no one dared question.

The truth is, from the modern standpoint the thirteenth was not the true dawn brightening more and more unto the perfect day, but a glorious aurora which flickered down again into the arctic night of medievalism.

To sum up - in medicine the Middle Ages represent a restatement from century to century of the facts and theories of the Greeks modified here and there by Arabian practice. There was, in Francis Bacon's phrase, much iteration, small addition. The schools bowed in humble, slavish submission to Galen and Hippocrates, taking everything from them but their spirit and there was no advance in our knowledge of the structure or function of the body. The Arabians lit a brilliant torch from Grecian lamps and from the eighth to the eleventh centuries the profession reached among them a position of dignity and importance to which it is hard to find a parallel in history.

About the Author

William Osler (1849 - 1919) was a Canadian physician. He has been called one of the greatest icons of modern medicine and the Father of Modern Medicine (which is what he himself considered Avicenna to be).