The issuance of these books shows the intense interest in medicine in the sixteenth century, but there are other details which serve to show how thorough and practical were the efforts of the authorities in securing the best possible medical practice. In 1524 there was founded in the City of Mexico a hospital, which still stands and which was a model in its way. That way was {325} much better than the mode of the construction of hospitals in the eighteenth century, for instance, when hospitals and care for the ailing reached the lowest ebb in modern times. Other hospitals besides this foundation by Cortez soon arose, and the wards of these hospitals were used for purposes of clinical teaching. Clinical or bedside teaching in medicine is supposed to be a comparatively recent feature of medical education. There are traces of it, however, at all times in history and while at times when theory ruled the practical application of observation waned, it was constantly coming back whenever men took medical education seriously. Its employment in Mexico seems to have been an obvious development of their very practical methods, which began with the teaching of first aid to the injured and developed through special studies of the particular diseases of the country and of the methods of curing them by native drugs. A chair of botany existed already in connection with the university, and this, with the lectures on medicine, constituted the medical training until 1599, when a second medical lectureship was added. During the course of the next twenty years altogether seven chairs in medicine were founded, so that besides the two lectureships in medicine there was a chair of anatomy and surgery, a special chair of dissection, a chair of therapeutics, the special duty of which was to lecture on Galen _"De Methodo Medendi,"_ a {326} chair of mathematics and astrology, for the stars were supposed to influence human constitutions by all the learned men of this time and even Kepler and Galileo and Tycho-Brahe were within this decade making horoscopes for important people in Europe, and, finally, a chair of prognostics. Most of the teaching was founded on Hippocrates and Galen, and lest this should seem sufficient to condemn it as hopelessly backward in the minds of many, it may be recalled that during the century following this time Sydenham, in England, and Boerhaave, in Holland, the most distinguished medical men of their time and looked on with great reverence by the teachers of ours, were both of them pleading for a return to Hippocrates and Galen. As a matter of fact, the medical school of the University of Mexico was furnishing quite as good a medical training as the average medical school in Europe at that time, at least so far as the subjects lectured on are concerned. Indeed, it was modelled closely after the Spanish universities, which were considered well up to the standard of the time.