THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE.*
A LONG pedigree sheds no honour on a family whose blood has crept in knaves and villains from the Flood, and medicine has little reason to boast of her three-and-twenty centuries of authentic history. Scarcely more than four centuries out of the whole number can be contemplated without amazement and shame at the moral and in- tellectual obliquity they display. In the earliest periods of human existence, instinct probably discovered a few simple remedies against • The History of Medicine. Comprising a Narrative of its Progress from the Earliest Ages to the Present Time, and of the delusions incidental to its advance from Empiricism to the dignity of a science. By Edward Meryon, M.D., EGA, Sc. Volume I. Longman and Co.
disease, and a rude experience directed their application. It is the habit of some animals to resort to substances as physic, which are unfit to serve them as food ; and "I think," says Dr. Meryon, "it would require no great ingenuity to show that those diseases to which man in a state of nature would be most exposed, are precisely those in which the instinctive tastes are most developed." From this pri- mitive and natural condition, medicine by-and-by lapsed into an arti- ficial one, in which diseases were imputed to the anger of the gods, and all curative appliances were regarded as unavailing until the divine wrath was appeased, which could only be done through the mediation of the priests. These men, therefore, became the sole healers of the people, and they used all sorts of cunningly devised shows and mystic ceremonies to support their fraudulent pretensions. The priest-physicians in Greece were the Asclepiadse, or descendants of Escularus, many of whom were men of vigorous intellect ; but they occupied themselves rather in visionary speculations on the essence of things, the origin of the world, the nature of God, and the soul of man, than in developing a practical and useful system of medicine. They had a pretty shrewd knowledge of the value of hygienic observances, and they duly enforced them, but all the rest of their practice implied as abject a credulity on the part of their patients as now prompts educated English men and women to send a lock of their hair—it used to be something in a bottle—to the wise woman, that she may in mesmeric trance pronounce oracularly on the nature of their ailments. It was by one of their own fraternity, Hippocrates, a descendant of their common ancestor, that the system of the Asclepiadce was overthrown, to be revived in other forms, and rational medicine was splendidly inaugurated in the age of Pericles.
To Hippocrates belongs the transcendent merit of baying been the first' to apply the inductive method to the improvement of the art he professed. His accuracy in observing and fidelity in describing the phenomena and progress of disease have never been surpassed; inveighed nveighed with great warmth against the habit of framing vague hypotheses, and made it his chief aim to draw general conclusions from well-authenticated facts ; but with all the force of his genius he could not wholly free himself from the common tendency of his times. He did indulge in metaphysical excursions, and he pro- pounded an arbitrary scheme of pathology, which, however' he had the wisdom to set aside in practice whenever it appeared to be at variance with his observations. His followers almost down to our times did just the reverse ; they let g..ci the truth he taught, but clung to his errors with religious fidelity. Hippocrates regarded the body as composed of the four primary elements—fire, air, earth, and water, variously combined to produce the four cardinal humours, blood, phlegm, bile, and black bile, to the equipoise of which he at- tributed health, and to the loss of such balance, disease." This was the famous lieworal Pathology which predominated until the be- ginning of the eighteenth century, and which has left its mark in so many ways upon our language and literature. So also have the doc- trines of his renowned editor Galen, who lived six centuries after him, and whose system reigned supreme for thirteen centuries in Europe, Asia, and Africa. His knowledge of anatomy was consider- ably in advance of that of his predecessors, though it was derived chiefly from dissection of the lower animals. He cleared away one great obstacle to the discovery of the circulation of the blood, by proving that the arteries contain blood and do not contain air, as had previously been supposed; but he raised up ancther obstacle as great as that which he had removed. The veins were still believed to carry blood from the heart to the body, and to nourish its grosser organs, such as the liver and the spleen; but Galen affirmed that it could not be fit even for this function unless it imbibed some portion of that vital essence or spirit contained in the left ventricle, which exalted the nature of the arterial blood, and qualified it for nourishing the finer organs, such as the lungs.. It was necessary, then, that there should be a way by which the spirit might pass from the left ventricle to the venous blood in the right; and to meet this necessity holes were assumed in the partition dividing the two ventricles. "So deeply impressed," says Mr. Lewes, "were anatomists with reverence for what Galen had said, and what theory required, that they one and all saw the holes—which do not exist. Berenger de Carpi had, in- deed, an uneasy doubt on the subject, which he naively expressed in the admission that the holes were only to be seen with great diffi- culty; but by straining the eyes sufficiently he doubtless saw what Galen required him to see—as thousands daily see what they believe they ought to see." The error was accordingly perpetuated until the sixteenth century, when Vesalius, the father of modem anatomy, was bold enough to use his eyes and say what be saw. The differences in the actions of medicines arose, according to Galen, from each one being to a certain degree either hot or cold, or dry or moist, or consisting of minute or gross particles. The use of respiration was to cool the blood by means of the inspired air. On some points he fell into inconsistencies in consequence of-his desire to harmonize the doctrines of Hippocrates with those of Plato and Aristotle. For instance, the Italian surgeons in the thirteenth cen- tury were divided in their opinions concerning the treatment of wounds. One sect, finding in the writings of Galen that "moisture and relaxation of tissues are more natural than dryness and tension," treated wounds with moist applications ; whilst their opponents, find- ing in another part of the same author that "dryness approaches more nearly to the natural state than moisture,," employed desiccating remedies. Galen, we see, was an intrepid theorymonger, and what with faculties, spirits, occult qualities, and so forth, he never was at a loss how to account for any phenomena. After the death of Galen medicine ceased to make progress. Amidst the Gothic invasions the medical sects "dwindled down to individuals, who achieved for medicine what the monastics effected for ancient classical literature : they maintained it in the condition of a small but continuous stream, in the midst of so much charlatanism that no man could talk nonsense so gross, or profess supernatural powers so incredible, but that the ignorance of the community would give credit to his assertions." All through the dark and the middle ages the " stream " remained as slender as it could well be without ceasing to be continuous. Sophistical reasoning and slavish adhe- rence to authority suffocated rational inquiry. Astrology, alchemy, magic, and cabalistic arts predominated; all physical phenomena were ascribed to occult causes; in short, as Sir john Herschel re- marks, "If the logic of that gloomy period could be justly described as 'the art of talking unintelligibly on matters of which we are igno- rant,' its physics might, with equal truth, be summed up in a delibe- rate preference of ignorance to knowledge in matters of every day's experience and use.' Sometimes, however, the false arts served indirectly to advance the true. Alchemy led the way to chemistry, and enriched medicine with new remedies, and at least one crotchet of scholastic divinity may be supposed to have done something for the progress of anatomy ; for "the skeleton received, perhaps, an adven- titious attention in consequence of the popular belief that, in man, some one particular bone existed of an imponderable, incombustible, and indestructible nature, around which, as a nucleus, all other tissues and organs would collect and reassume their vital actions at the resurrection. Accordingly., every bone was tested by fire, for the purpose of discovering the hypothetical one." When the mental stagnation of Europe was broken by the Refor- mation, Remus, Argentier, and Botal joined in freeing medicine from the yoke of authority and ancient prejudices. Botal, who seems to have been the prototype of Le Sage's Dr. Sangmdo, revolutionized the practice of medicine by a freedom of bleeding that was quite un- precedented. He bled largely and repeatedly, both young and old, male and female, in all diseases, whether low in type or acute. "The young he bled freely, on account of the rapid reproduction of blood in youth ; the old, because he saw in the practice a conduciveness to rejuvenescence. He bled freely in low and wasting diseases, even of a malignant nature, because a richer and better blood was formed; in dysentery, because Ile recognized in it an affinity to inflammation of the lungs, in which all physicians bled; in all forms of flatulency, because of its power to relieve obstructions; in short, he had a reason for bleeding in every special distemper, and when reproached for the indiscriminate routine of practice, he argued that the more water you draw from a well the purer and better is that which filters in. From him originated the system of bleeding in pregnancy, which is continued to this day." We rather imagine that Botal was a man of happy despatch, like Van Helmont, under whose hands, as his bio- grapher relates "the sick never languished long, being always killed or cured in three days." Botal's patients were probably more often killed,than cured ; but they did not die in vain, for his practice set medical men observing and thinking, so that good came of it in the end—a great consolation for his victims, could they have foreseen it. The basis, and no small portion of the superstructure of scien- tific surgery, was laid by Botal's contemporary, the famous Ambroise Pare, who possessed the rare gift of seeing things as they were, and not as his preconceived notions would have them to be Sharing the common belief that gunshot wounds were, by their nature, poisonous, he used to treat them with boiling oil; but having failed once to apply the usual remedy, he was surprised to find that his patients were much the better for the omission. Thereupon, he renounced the ordinary practice, and from that time gunshot wounds have re- ceived a more rational treatment. Pare was the first to revive the practice known to the Arabians of stopping the flow of blood from arteries by tying them. The French Faculty of Medicine ridiculed the innovation as the system of banging life upon a thread, and de- clared its preference for the use of boiling pitch which had stood the test of so many centuries; but wounded persons could not be brought to see the force of such reasoning. Anatomy was prosecuted with great assiduity and precision of detail throughout the whole of the sixteenth century, and the way was cleared for Harvey's grand dis- covery, which be first publicly taught in 1619.
Having brought down the history of medicine to the period when it was constituted as a science with the laws of nature for its basis, Dr. Meryon proposes in his next volume to apply the test of biology to modem opinions and practices. We commend his present volume to the general as well as to the professional reader, as both instruc- tive and amusing, though it leaves much to be wished for with regard to the style iii which it is composed.
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