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are enough to show the originality and boldness of his mind, and his fate shows that this great man was born out of his due time. He was cited to Rome, judged, condemned, and imprisoned for many years. He died in 1292.

Roger Bacon may be compared to Aristotle. It is rather startling when one makes this comparison of the men, to contrast the consideration in which they were held when alive. We are inclined to ask, What is to be made of human advancement, if this is the result of 1600 years of progress? The answer which suggests itself in favour of the Middle Ages is this: the culture of Greece was an exceptional phenomenon; it was like an experiment carried on upon a small scale, with all the conditions under the command of the operator, to ascertain to what perfection an individual plant could be reared. What we may call the Rose of Pericles, was a specimen of unsurpassed, and possibly unsurpassable, perfection of culture; but after this effort, there was no other, and the plant decayed; while, on the other hand, men like Roger Bacon were the premature efforts of a nascent civilization, confined to no particular place or time, but embracing the whole of Europe, and extending onward to the present day. The Church may be said to have done right in condemning Bacon, because the great function which that institution was then performing, was the aggregation of individuals into communities. It claimed dominion over the king, as over the serf; it proclaimed the brotherhood of all mankind; and if any individuals opposed this claim, by promulgating some new opinion, it was necessary there should be a conflict-the Church must either take the light to hang in its own temple, or extinguish it. In the case of Roger Bacon, the lamp turned out to be too big for the church, and so it had to be broken. The breaking of such lamps scattered the sparks, and increased the conflict between independent thinking and submission to authority, which ended-or, at least, halted-at the Reformation. The

great fact, however, remained, that men were no longer to form schools, and think merely for themselves-they were to think for the masses. These masses were to be drawn up, even at the sacrifice of the centres of illumination, and the lesson was imperceptibly communicated, that now isolated progress was impossible; and that, before the great thinkers of the age could assume their proper place, the grand social problem must be solved, of reconciling individual freedom with submission to law.

It may be asked, What has all this to do with the history of medicine? Much, every way. Medicine, as a science, was concerned in it; still more, medicine as a practical art. Medicine moved along the lines of civilization as the electric wire accompanies the railroad. As the civilization of Italy and the South of France differed from that of the North, so did the development of medicine in these respective regions. This we must examine more closely; but before doing so, let us observe that, as members of the University, as a medical clergy, physicians departed to a hopeless distance from the true idea of medical or healing men. They occupied themselves with the questions of the schoolmen, and neglected entirely the practical duties of their profession. We cannot have a more pointed proof of this, than that afforded by Dr. Thomas Linacre (born 1460), the founder of the College of Physicians of London—that depository, or dormitory, of the medical clergy. "In the prime of his youth," says Hecker, "he had been an eyewitness of the events at Oxford, and survived even the second and third eruption of the sweating sickness (an epidemic of which we shall speak more afterwards, but which, we may here observe, spread more consternation, and committed more havoc than any former plague in England); but in none of his writings do we find a single word of this disease, which is of such permanent importance." How 1 Hecker, p. 185.

this great physician-physician to Henry VII. and Henry VIII. occupied himself, is told by Erasmus; who says, that this Greek and Latin scholar, mathematician, and physician, at the age of sixty, omitting the study of other things, (the sweating sickness for example,) had for the last twenty years been torturing himself in grammar, and that he would consider himself happy if it were permitted him to live until he had certainly established how the eight parts of speech were to be distinguished.1 Nor was Linacre peculiar in this; for, on the contrary, "the restorers of the medical science of ancient Greece, who were followed by the most enlightened men in Europe, occupied themselves rather with the ancient terms of art, than with actual observation, and in their critical researches overlooked the important events that were passing before their eyes." We cannot suppose the medical clergy had lost their human feelings; they must have felt the death of their relatives, friends, and neighbours, as keenly as the rude multitude who were driven almost, or altogether, to distraction by the dreadful pestilences which form one of the historical features of these ages. Not from want of feeling or indifference to the calamity, but from a sorrowful conviction “that no physic afforded any cure," must they have abdicated their office of standing between the people and the plague. And never was there a time when medical aid was more needed. Besides "the black death, or the great mortality which depopulated Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century, paralysing the mental powers, and inducing panics which led to the most frightful atrocities against the supposed authors of the plague-the unfortunate Jews, who were slaughtered or burned by thousands, (in Mayence alone 12,000 are said to have been put to a cruel death,"3) -there were no less than five eruptions of the sweating 3 Hecker, p. 44.

1 Erasmus. Quoted by Hecker.

2 Baker.

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sickness in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This disease first appeared in England, and hence was called the English disease. The reason for this preference is thus given by Dr. Kay, the founder of Caius College :-"Cause thereof none other there is than the evil diet of these three countries (England, Brabrant, and the coasts), which distroy more meates and drynkkes without al ordre, convenient time, reason, or necessity, than either Scotlande or al other countries under the sunne, to the great annoyance of their own bodies and wittes So he goes on to say that if Esculapius himself were to come to life, he could not save men having so much "sweating stuffe, so many evill humours laid up in store, from this displeasant, fearful, and pestilent disease." So fearful, indeed, was it, that it altogether appalled the people, who neglected the great Church festivals of Michaelmas and Christmas, and gave themselves up to despair.

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This sweating sickness broke out afterwards in various countries of Europe, and produced similiar results :-"The alarm which prevailed in Germany surpasses all description, and bordered on maniacal despair." Here it was treated, as we may say, more Germanico; that is, when one was taken ill, he or she was put to bed, covered with feather beds and furs; a stove was heated to furnace-pitch, windows and doors were closed, and to prevent untoward movements for relief on the part of the patient, some persons in health got on the top of them; and so the sufferer generally perished-stewed to death, as it is asserted. This folly worked its own cure; for some of the most strenuous advocates of this coarse Homoeopathy having died, there was a revulsion against this plan; and a more rational system was advised by two artizans, who had come to Stettin from England, where they had learned that a cooling method had been more helpful than the heating one.2

1 Caius, 306. Quoted by Hecker.

2 Hecker, 267.

Here we arrive at a most important fact in the History of Medicine. The people had come to distrust their physicians, and the physicians to distrust their physic. When piteously implored for aid, they replied that none could be given, because these diseases were the result of the evil conjunction of the stars. "We, the members of the College of Physicians at Paris, having, after mature consideration and consultation on the present mortality, collected the advice of the old masters" (who knew nothing about it), we are of opinion, that the constellations, with the aid of nature, strive, by virtue of their divine might, to protect and heal the human race."

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As there was no help to be got from these medical clergy, and as men will not submit to die like sheep without some effort to save themselves, it naturally happened that there arose a multitude of quacks, who took upon them the office left vacant by the physicians; and thus the medical profession separated itself into two parts, all the learning gathering about the negative pole, while all the active practical humanity appeared at the opposite-a fatal separation for the art as well as for its victims! For, let us repeat, there never was a time when wise medical observation and counsel were more wanted. Besides the dreadful epidemics, that swept like a blast of the destroyer's nostrils over all Europe, other poisons had been generated by the dissolution of morals, of more permanent operation, if not so suddenly destructive-more mischievous from the contamination of the constitution. Against such diseases, men required protection and antidotes. Antidotes were offered, but generally not by the hand of the skilful, prudent physician, but by that of the rash, false, greedy Empiric. This was a great evil under the sun, an evil which endures to the present day. Between the learned imbeciles on the one hand, and the ignorant Empirics on the other, there arose a sort of mixed

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