An Epitome of the History of MedicinePark, Roswell
History
An Epitome of the History of Medicine
Park, Roswell
Medicine -- History
He did not limit himself to dissection of his own cases, but sought
autopsies in the cases of others. He examined the bodies of those who
had been hung, always thinking to find in them something of interest.
In this regard he was followed by one already mentioned,--namely,
Eustachius.
After these two the men who most cultivated pathology and anatomy in the
sixteenth century were Rembert Dodoens and Marcellus Donatus. The former
was born in 1517, in Mecheln, traveled extensively, was physician to
Maximilian II and the Emperor Rudolph, and died in 1585. The latter
lived and worked in the latter half of the sixteenth century, the dates
of his birth and death being somewhat uncertain.
The next man whom we must mention is one who did a great deal for
internal medicine, pathology, and anatomy. Jean Fernel, who has been
surnamed "the modern Galen," was born in Clermont in 1497. Even as a boy
he showed great aptitude, and very early made himself a reputation in
philosophy, law, and mathematics. In 1530 he was received as doctor,
with the unanimous applause of the entire faculty of Paris. He seems to
have been stimulated by this only to more extended study; in fact,
so hard did he work at his studies that his friends became seriously
alarmed for his health, and remonstrated with him; they received
for reply: "_Destiny reserves{116} for us repose enough_." He became
physician to King Henry II, of France, and in the midst of a very
extensive practice undertook to collect all the medical knowledge
scattered in the Greek, Arabic, and Latin works, in order to form from
it a body of doctrines. His work was written with a purity and elegance
of Latin that reminds one of Cicero. Throughout its pages he was
philosophic, and sought to unite the apparently irreconcilable doctrines
of Plato and Aristotle.
[Illustration: 0137]
He divided medical science into three great sections,--physiology,
pathology, and therapeutics. In his explanations of disease he was too
often fanciful, following the speculations mainly of Galen, and making
free use of the hypotheses of humors, temperaments, vital spirits,
etc.; but the following statement of his would do credit to a trained
pathologist of to-day: "As for myself, I shall never believe I have
profound knowledge of any affection if I do not know positively, just
as if I could see it with my eyes, in what part of the human body is
the disease, its primitive seat, what suspicion of organic lesions
constitute it, whence it proceeded, if it exists idiopathically or by
sympathy, or if it be kept up by some exterior cause. He who pretends to
be a rational physician must sound each of these subjects, and discern
them by certain signs." The problem which he thus set himself he
certainly, for his own part, considered as solved, although it was not
long before his solutions were set aside and the original uncertainty
reappeared.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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