To sum up--in medicine the Middle Ages represent a restatement from century to century of the facts and theories of the Greeks modified here and there by Arabian practice. There was, in Francis Bacon's phrase, much iteration, small addition. The schools bowed in humble, slavish submission to Galen and Hippocrates, taking everything from them but their spirit and there was no advance in our knowledge of the structure or function of the body. The Arabians lit a brilliant torch from Grecian lamps and from the eighth to the eleventh centuries the profession reached among them a position of dignity and importance to which it is hard to find a parallel in history. CHAPTER IV -- THE RENAISSANCE AND THE RISE OF ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY THE "reconquest of the classic world of thought was by far the most important achievement of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It absorbed nearly the whole mental energy of the Italians.... The revelation of what men were and what they wrought under the influence of other faiths and other impulses, in distant ages with a different ideal for their aim, not only widened the narrow horizon of the Middle Ages, but it also restored self-confidence to the reason of humanity."(1) (1) J. A. Symonds: The Renaissance in Italy; the Revival of Learning, 1877, p. 52. Everywhere throughout the Middle Ages learning was the handmaid of theology. Even Roger Bacon with his strong appeal for a new method accepted the dominant mediaeval conviction--that all the sciences did but minister to their queen, Theology. A new spirit entered man's heart as he came to look upon learning as a guide to the conduct of life. A revolution was slowly effected in the intellectual world. It is a mistake to think of the Renaissance as a brief period of sudden fruitfulness in the North Italian cities. So far as science is concerned, the thirteenth century was an aurora followed by a long period of darkness, but the fifteenth was a true dawn that brightened more and more unto the perfect day. Always a reflex of its period, medicine joined heartily though slowly in the revolt against mediaevalism. How slowly I did not appreciate until recently. Studying the earliest printed medical works to catch the point of view of the men who were in the thick of the movement up to 1480--which may be taken to include the first quarter of a century of printing--one gets a startling record. The mediaeval mind still dominates: of the sixty-seven authors of one hundred and eighty-two editions of early medical books, twenty-three were men of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, thirty men of the fifteenth century, eight wrote in Arabic, several were of the School of Salernum, and only six were of classical antiquity, viz., Pliny (first 1469), Hippocrates (1473) (Hain (*)7247), Galen (1475) (Hain 7237), Aristotle (1476), Celsus (1478), and Dioscorides (1478).(**) (*) This asterisk is used by Hain to indicate that he had seen a copy.--Ed.