Hunter after the latter had quit cabinet-making in Scotland and had gone to live with his elder brother in London. He wrote a work on "The Anatomy of the Human Body," and was surgeon to St. Thomas and Westminster Hospitals, London. Lithotomy was his specialty. He was regarded as one of the most skilful all-round operators of his time. Alexander Pope was his intimate friend, and declared him to be "the most noted and the most deserving man in the whole profession of Chirurgery."

1 Biographia Medica.

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 wore 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.1

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.