monly spoken of as the dark ages, little progress was made in the study or the practice of medicine. The Arabs in Spain established the first apothecary shops and through their studies in alchemy accumulated a varied knowledge of remedies. Avicenna, one of their learned men, made a detailed and systematic compilation of the writings of the earlier Greek physicians and of their Arabian successors. During this period, the works of the old masters were taught in the University of Salerno. This university also issued diplomas in medicine to women. In the thirteenth century, we find that Frederick II of Naples decreed that no one should be allowed to practice the healing art until he had received his diploma and had served one year with an experienced doctor. The final examination was intended to test the knowledge of the applicant about the writings of Hippocrates, who had lived sixteen hundred years before, and of Galen, who had been dead over a thousand years. Each candidate, under oath, was required to promise to obey the laws of the state, live a pure life, give his service to the poor, and not to share in the profits of the apothecary.

Throughout Europe about the time of the discovery of America, the practice of medicine was almost exclusively done by the monks and the clergy of the lesser orders. Their religious scruples did not permit them to let blood. Surgery gradually fell to those who had diplomas. These learned men practiced almost exclusively among the wealthy, and in addition to the letting of blood for bodily distempers, bandaging their wounds, they shaved their heads. The surgeons of the rich were also their barbers and the barbers of the poor were their surgeons. The common people, also, had their wise

women who attended them in sickness, applied homemade ointments to their wounds, and supplied them with charms to ward off malign influences.

Strange compounds were prescribed. A remedy for consumption as set forth in an old volume was prepared by taking thriftgrasse, betony, peygrasse, fane, fennel, Christmaswort, and making them into a potion with clear ale. The breath of a donkey was supposed to drive out poison. A bleeding nose was to be cured by slipping a key down the patient's back. For stopping a cough the patient was advised to spit into the mouth of a frog. These foolish prescriptions were to be undertaken in certain phases of the moon.

When we consider the prevalence of such absurd notions and learn of the absence of sanitation in city and in country and read of the filth surrounding military camps, we wonder that the race ever survived. In truth, it was not an unusual thing for plagues to devastate entire countries. In the reign of William and Mary, England was swept by an epidemic of smallpox. The queen herself fell a victim to the scourge. For treatment, the patient was given a black powder supposed to have been made from the ashes of burnt toads. During this age bleeding was practiced for every kind of disorder, either by opening blood vessels or by applying blood-sucking leeches. It is said of one great French doctor, that in his hospital he used 100,000 leeches.

During these centuries of stupidity, valuable experiences were accumulated and the foundations were laid for discoveries which add to the usefulness of the physicians of the most remote hamlets of our day. These old-time doctors were taught to follow blindly the traditions which were handed down to them. Their knowl

edge of the human body was too limited to permit them to reason intelligently about the causes of disease and the nature and effect of their remedies; they had no instruments; they were ignorant of the common principles of everyday science as we know them and they had never learned the methods of investigating new problems.

As a new age dawned a period of rapid progress followed in medicine, as in other departments of knowledge, introducing us to a long procession of men of great brilliance. Andreas Vesalius published an elaborate book on anatomy which stimulated the teaching of that subject in all the universities; Montanus of Padua lectured to his students at the bedsides of his patients, in which practice he was followed by Sylvius of Holland and the great Boerhaave of Leyden. They taught men how to study the progress of disease, how to learn the effects of disorders by examining the bodies of the dead, and how to apply new discoveries in physics and chemistry in the art of healing. William Harvey, an English physician, in 1628, published to the world his doctrine of the circulation of the blood. With the invention of the microscope the nature of the tissues of the body was better understood, and after the invention of the stethoscope by Laennec, a French physician, the diagnosis of diseases of the chest was established upon sound principles.

The invention of printing aided in the circulation of these new discoveries and in the wider distribution of the writings of the older investigators and practitioners. Medical schools multiplied. Better equipped men began to interpret anew the experiences of their predecessors and to carry on the search for new remedies. The uses of Peruvian bark were learned from the natives of South

America, about 1649, introducing a surer method for handling fevers. In 1798, Jenner announced to the world a method for controlling smallpox by vaccination. This list of beacon lights in medicine might be continued at great length but the details of the story of progress belong to the history of medicine and the biographies of its illustrious men.

With the recognition promptly given to those who have made new discoveries, there has come about that change in attitude which has made of every physician of our day a scientific investigator and has filled our clinics and laboratories with young men eager to add some new contributions to this important science and it has crowded our hospitals with practitioners whose chiefest desire is the perfection of some details of their art. The doctor of to-day is the very prince of professional men. The service which he renders may not be of a higher order than the services which are rendered by men in other professions but his spirit is one of greater and more devoted unselfishness.

Well were it for the candidate if, before making his final choice, he could take time to read the life histories of some great physicians. If he would succeed, he must remember that he is to enter the ranks of men, many of whom have mastered much of the accumulated inheritance of this age by long and patient study, and that when he enters upon the practice of his profession he must go before a public which for generations has been accustomed to be ministered to ungrudgingly by those who were moved chiefly by motives other than the tangible rewards of their profession.