We find in medicine, as in other branches of knowledge, that each succeeding century presents its added quota of imperishable facts, making it still more important than its predecessor. We may say that the fifteenth century had prepared the way for a reforming idealism which was the principal characteristic of the sixteenth; and that in the seventeenth century the realistic reaction against this same idealism showed itself in the church and the State by struggles against constituted authority, and in medical science by the domination of inductive philosophy. The idealism of the eighteenth century was not reformative and humanistic, but revolutionary and humanitarian. The unsettled character of the century's events may be charged, in some degree, to the American and French revolutions, with their interpretation (and their attempted attainment) of the{191} so-called "rights of man." The masses were now supposed to be released, and philosophers created new doctrines, which had a greater influence upon the times than ever had philosophical doctrines before. Rousseau, for instance, aroused a revolution in politics and education, while skeptics and materialists alike strove for general enlightenment, which was sadly needed. Among the higher classes extravagance and immorality prevailed extensively, among the lower classes poverty and ignorance. In Germany the rulers even sold their subjects, as when Hesse-Cassel sold to the English seventeen hundred mercenary soldiers, and other States sold smaller numbers. A criminal code, published in 1769, contained seventeen copper-plate engravings, illustrating various methods of torture. A physician was always present when torture was inflicted, to see that the victim's sufferings were not greater than he could bear. This inhuman mode of eliciting testimony was last practiced in Europe in 1869, in the Swiss Canton of Zug. Popular education was a myth, and the children of bondmen were not permitted to learn. No wonder the French revolution was hailed with joy along the Rhine, where it swept away at once and forever the petty rulers, abbots, and bishops, who were the "bloodsuckers" of the people. The numerous wars of the century had no great influence upon the development of medicine, except in the direction of surgery. The eighteenth century was revolutionary also in the introduction of freedom of religious thought, so that clerical physicians disappeared entirely from the ranks, save a few who officiated as lithotomists, like Frère Come, or as oculists, like Wrabetz, the latter of whom was even a professor in Prague.