The Legacy of Greece: Essays By: Gilbert Murray, W. R. Inge, J. Burnet, Sir T. L. Heath, D'arcy W. Thompson, Charles Singer, R. W. Livingston, A. Toynbee, A. E. Zimmern, Percy Gardner, Sir Reginald Blomfield
Philosophy
The Legacy of Greece: Essays By: Gilbert Murray, W. R. Inge, J. Burnet, Sir T. L. Heath, D'arcy W. Thompson, Charles Singer, R. W. Livingston, A. Toynbee, A. E. Zimmern, Percy Gardner, Sir Reginald Blomfield
Greece -- Civilization
Until the end of the fifteenth century progress in anatomy was almost
imperceptible. During the fifteenth century more Galenic and Hippocratic
texts were recovered and gradually turned into Latin, but still without
vitally affecting the course of Anatomy. The actual printing of
collected editions of Hippocrates and Galen came rather late, for the
debased taste of the Renaissance physicians continued to prefer
Dioscorides and the Arabs, of whom numerous editions appeared, so that
medicine made no advance corresponding to the progress of scholarship.
The Hippocratic works were first printed in 1525, and an isolated
edition of the inferior Galen in 1490, but the real advance in Medicine
was not made by direct study of these works. So long as they were
treated in the old scholastic spirit such works were of no more value
than those of the Arabists or others inherited from the Middle Ages.
Even Hippocrates can be spoilt by a commentary, and it was not until the
investigator began actually to compare his own observations with those
of Hippocrates and Galen that the real value of these works became
apparent. The department in which this happened first was Anatomy, and
such revolutionaries as Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1518), who never
published, and Vesalius (1514-1564), whose great work appeared in 1543,
were really basing their work on Galen, though they were much occupied
in proving Galen's errors. Antonio Benivieni (died 1502), an eager
prophet of the new spirit, revived the Hippocratic tradition by actually
collecting notes of a few cases with accompanying records of deaths and
post-mortem findings, among which it is interesting to observe a case of
appendicitis.[100] His example was occasionally followed during the
sixteenth century, as for instance, by the Portuguese Jewish physician
Amatus Lusitanus (1511-_c._ 1562), who printed no fewer than seven
hundred cases; but the real revival of the Hippocratic tradition came in
the next century with Sydenham (1624-1689) and Boerhaave (1668-1738),
who were consciously working on the Hippocratic basis and endeavouring
to extend the Hippocratic experience.
[100] Benivieni's notes were published posthumously. Some of the
spurious Greek works of the Hippocratic collection have also case
notes.
Lastly surgery came to profit by the revival. The greatest of the
sixteenth-century surgeons, the lovable and loving Ambroise Paré
(1510-1590), though he was, as he himself humbly confessed, an ignorant
man knowing neither Latin nor Greek, can be shown to have derived much
from the works of antiquity, which were circulating in translation in
his day and were thus filtering down to the unlearned.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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