FIFTH: PERIOD OF THE RENAISSANCE

(Continued)

CHAPTER VI

MEDICINE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

THE observant student of medical history finds

Bacon

much of exceeding interest to him in the seventeenth century of the Christian era. was still making his pronunciamentos against false methods in scientific procedures, which the so-called scientific men of his day, for the most part, declined to follow. Van Helmont was busy with his retort, acids, and alkalies. The former left no pupils and had few followers; the latter had a few followers in the profession who were charmed with his empirics, and enthusiastic over the prospects of great things in chemical discoveries. Guy Patin, famous at this time, was one of these, a French physician, who made himself notorious by pouring ridicule upon the vanity of medical theories and pretensions, whose purpose seemed to have been to get as much amusement out of life as possible. While adhering to the Galenic ideas of medical practice for the most part, he exhausted his fund of invective, wit, and witticisms against the Empirics whom he called

"Chemikers." His letters to Sylvius de la Boë are all that he contributed to medical literature, of which there are six hundred that have been preserved to amuse, if not to instruct, future generations.

Sylvius de la Boë, a celebrity of this period, a man without a rational idea in his head, at least a medical idea of that character, was born in Flanders, 1614. He belonged to the innovators, or the Chemikers, as Patin derisively called them, who used chiefly the chemical remedies which were brought into notice by van Helmont. Like most men of his type he aspired to formulate a new system, by contributing the animal spirits of Paracelsus, the Archæus of van Helmont, together with the concoctions of the retort, and the vortices of Descartes; thus equipped, Sylvius now comes forward with his erratic notions of philosophy of mind and matter, and mixes them together to form a very curious jumble, totally at variance with reason, if not with common sense. A single example will suffice to give the reader an idea of his theory and practice. "I consider the cause of intermittent fevers to be," he says, "that some part of the pancreatic juice stagnates in one or more of the

In his interesting History and Heroes of Medicine, Russell has given a very amusing and entertaining account of this popular Frenchman and his correspondence with Sylvius de la Boë, extending over a period of more than a third of a century, to which we refer the interested reader.

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pancreatic ducts, and as its habit is (more suo) it becomes acrid." At this point Russell takes him up, saying:

This acrid acrimony is dissolved by the lymph and poured into the small intestines. Here it comes in contact with the bile, and straightway an effervescence ensues, from which there arises a paroxysm of cold. This acrimony finds its way naturally, sooner or later, to the heart, and thence is distributed over the system. This, then, is the cause of ague-an acrimony produced by a stoppage of the pores of the pancreas or from some confusion among the vortices à la Descartes, giving rise to a fermentation à la van Helmont. Given the cause-and such a cause can anything be clearer than the true method of treatment? Surely the obvious antidote for an over-acid or acrimonious state of the blood is to pour into it an alkali which will neutralize this condition. This was his method of cure [continues Russell]. He assumed that the blood was too acid or too alkaline. For the former condition he gave largely of salts of ammonia, and for an excess of alkalies he gave opium in equal profusion.'

If any further treatment were needed in the course, it would be found in antimonial wine, on the assumption, purely theoretical, that that remedy would correct the excess of either acid or alkalies and restore the equilibrium of fermentation and vital distillations, as the case may be. In his learned medicinal history of this period Sprengel

gives examples of many of Silvius's prescriptions, and remarks:

And so the lives of thousands were sacrificed for the sake of an empty chimera! But the spirit of the age, the fashion, willed that the physician should see nothing in the animal economy but fermenting elements and chemical processes; and better far that the patient should die in the fashion than live according to the wisdom of the ancients.

But great as the folly was it fell far short of what it came to be at a later day.

THOMAS DOVER

As a curiosity of a medical man that appeared in England, early in the seventeenth century, was Thomas Dover, the notorious buccaneer, and inventor of the famous Pulvis Ipecacuanha Compositus, which survives to this day, as "Dover's Powder." A more eccentric character in the profession of medicine the annals of medicine rarely disclose.

Dover was a man of great ability without learning. He possessed the eccentricity of Paracelsus without the latter's genius and clever insight. Dover's operations were on a lower plain. He possessed a keen scent for profits and spoils. He was born in Warwickshire in 1660, and died in 1742; studied medicine; took a Bachelor's degree at Cambridge; began the practice of medicine at Bristol, and after engaging in a privateering