1

amounting to more than 600 letters, all, or nearly all addressed to his professional colleagues in the provinces, there is hardly a single allusion to any improvement in medicine or any scientific discovery; the staple consists of light talk, court scandal, and abuse of antimony and the Cardinal Mazarin "animal rubrum capax et vorax omnium beneficiorum." Now, much as we shrink from the violent empirical method of the chemists, we must consider it better for the progress of the art and of our race, than the indolent acquiescence in routine practice. It had the sine quá non of progress-belief, and vitality. Pushing forward, even on the wrong road, is better than sleeping in the slough of despond. This vigorous experimentation with powerful drugs was the only way to arrive at powerful specifics—at least, the only way then known. Besides, we must not forget, when we wonder at the great clumsy limbs of these fossil authorities in medicine, that they were not out of place then and there, as they are here and now. In the struggle for existence that fiercely raged about them, they held their own by virtue of superior strength and better adaptation to the circumstances and the conditions of the period. Others of feebler nature went to the wall; multitudes became extinct; and so those that remain stand out in sharp singularity as if they were monstrous productions. To their companions, they were giants; to us, by the extinction of their contemporary specimens, they have the appearance of monsters. The very fact of their having lived, held their own, and become fossil, is a claim upon us to treat them with respect.

At the same time it must be admitted, that it is difficult to concede such a claim to some of the writers of this period, whose works have come down to us; those, namely, whose chief interest consists in exhibiting the utter anarchy of the time, when reasonings of no force could yet have possessed 1 Op. cit., Lettre 532.

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. 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. He also employed that dire poison, that horror of Guy Patin, Antimony, to rid the system of its excess of either alkaline or acid substances, which were deranging the power of distillation.

Sprengel, after giving an example of some of the receipts rendered popular by Sylvius, breaks forth: "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 patients should die in the fashion than live according to the wisdom of the ancients"! How far the spirit of that age differs from the spirit of this, is a question we shall not venture to moot.

While we agree with Sprengel that it is deplorable that human lives should be sacrificed to idle chimeras, we must avoid the error he seems to commit, of censuring Sylvius de la Boe and his school, for not following "the wisdom of the ancients. The ancients, or the school of tradition, were represented by Galen and his followers; and it would have been as impossible for a man of free and vigorous thought, who saw all around him new forms of disease, engendered by new habits, or imported from newly-discovered countries lying beyond oceans unknown to the ancients, to accommodate his system of treatment to the theories of Galen, as it was to reconcile the geography of Columbus with that of Aristotle or Strabo. Those who, like Guy Patin, acquiesced in traditional medicine, did not think about it at all. In the whole correspondence of Patin,

amounting to more than 600 letters, all, or nearly all addressed to his professional colleagues in the provinces, there is hardly a single allusion to any improvement in medicine or any scientific discovery; the staple consists of light talk, court scandal, and abuse of antimony and the Cardinal Mazarin "animal rubrum capax et vorax omnium beneficiorum." Now, much as we shrink from the violent. empirical method of the chemists, we must consider it better for the progress of the art and of our race, than the indolent acquiescence in routine practice. It had the sine quá non of progress-belief, and vitality. Pushing forward, even on the wrong road, is better than sleeping in the slough of despond. This vigorous experimentation with powerful drugs was the only way to arrive at powerful specifics—at least, the only way then known. Besides, we must not forget, when we wonder at the great clumsy limbs of these fossil authorities in medicine, that they were not out of place then and there, as they are here and now. In the struggle for existence that fiercely raged about them, they held their own by virtue of superior strength and better adaptation to the circumstances and the conditions of the period. Others of feebler nature went to the wall; multitudes became extinct; and so those that remain stand out in sharp singularity as if they were monstrous productions. To their companions, they were giants; to us, by the extinction of their contemporary specimens, they have the appearance of monsters. The very fact of their having lived, held their own, and become fossil, is a claim upon us to treat them with respect.

At the same time it must be admitted, that it is difficult to concede such a claim to some of the writers of this period, whose works have come down to us; those, namely, whose chief interest consists in exhibiting the utter anarchy of the time, when reasonings of no force could yet have possessed 1 Op. cit., Lettre 532.

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. 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. He also employed that dire poison, that horror of Guy Patin, Antimony, to rid the system of its excess of either alkaline or acid substances, which were deranging the power of distillation.

Sprengel, after giving an example of some of the receipts rendered popular by Sylvius, breaks forth: "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 patients should die in the fashion than live according to the wisdom of the ancients"! How far the spirit of that age differs from the spirit of this, is a question we shall not venture to moot.

While we agree with Sprengel that it is deplorable that human lives should be sacrificed to idle chimeras, we must avoid the error he seems to commit, of censuring Sylvius de la Boe and his school, for not following "the wisdom of the ancients." The ancients, or the school of tradition, were represented by Galen and his followers; and it would have been as impossible for a man of free and vigorous thought, who saw all around him new forms of disease, engendered by new habits, or imported from newly-discovered countries lying beyond oceans unknown to the ancients, to accommodate his system of treatment to the theories of Galen, as it was to reconcile the geography of Columbus with that of Aristotle or Strabo. Those who, like Guy Patin, acquiesced in traditional medicine, did not think about it at all. In the whole correspondence of Patin,

1

amounting to more than 600 letters, all, or nearly all addressed to his professional colleagues in the provinces, there is hardly a single allusion to any improvement in medicine or any scientific discovery; the staple consists of light talk, court scandal, and abuse of antimony and the Cardinal Mazarin "animal rubrum capax et vorax omnium beneficiorum." Now, much as we shrink from the violent empirical method of the chemists, we must consider it better for the progress of the art and of our race, than the indolent acquiescence in routine practice. It had the sine qua non of progress-belief, and vitality. Pushing forward, even on the wrong road, is better than sleeping in the slough of despond. This vigorous experimentation with powerful drugs was the only way to arrive at powerful specifics—at least, the only way then known. Besides, we must not forget, when we wonder at the great clumsy limbs of these fossil authorities in medicine, that they were not out of place then and there, as they are here and now. In the struggle for existence that fiercely raged about them, they held their own by virtue of superior strength and better adaptation to the circumstances and the conditions of the period. Others of feebler nature went to the wall; multitudes became extinct; and so those that remain stand out in sharp singularity as if they were monstrous productions. To their companions, they were giants; to us, by the extinction of their contemporary specimens, they have the appearance of monsters. The very fact of their having lived, held their own, and become fossil, is a claim upon us to treat them with respect.

At the same time it must be admitted, that it is difficult to concede such a claim to some of the writers of this period, whose works have come down to us; those, namely, whose chief interest consists in exhibiting the utter anarchy of the time, when reasonings of no force could yet have possessed 1 Op. cit., Lettre 532.