Page:The Harveian oration 1896.djvu/53

THE DECLINE OF MEDICINE 49

Philosophy went its way independently of him. The Peri- patetics never learned to dissect, nor the Stoics to use scientific arguments. What was worse, the theoretical and traditional method infected Medicine itself. For a thousand years after Galen’s death there were well-educated and learned Greek physicians, some of them acquainted with anatomy, in the Western and more especially in the Eastern empire. Practical medicine possibly advanced, as practical surgery certainly did, but scientific progress there was none. All was copying and compiling from the ancients, from Galen most of all; though he never enjoyed among the Greeks that position of absolute predominance which was his lot among the Arabs and in mediaeval Europe.

To inquire into the causes of this decay of originality and progress in medicine would be a question which I feel incompetent to discuss. All assigned causes seem to me somewhat inadequate, beyond the trite remark that the Greek genius seemed in some way exhausted. We know only that there are in the history of thought germinal epochs when new thoughts and new discoveries arise, often followed by long tracts of time in which men are capable only of repeating and copying, not of originating ; just as in a plant there are nodes where alone buds, leaves, and flowers are put forth, and then internodal spaces with none of these. The botanist cannot explain the one, nor can the historian the other. But in regard to medicine I cannot see that this barrenness and the long reign of dogma were, as sometimes supposed, the fault of Galen’s system. Other writers have shared the same faults, but by no means the same fate. It has not been their lot to reign supreme over the medical world for so many centuries. The fault was, as I said before, in the time; it was the subservient spirit of the Arabians and the mediaeval Europeans, and not his own demerit, that raised Galen to that bad eminence. It was the same with Aristotle, who, through no fault of his own, became, in another field, the intellectual monarch of the Middle Ages. In the case of both these great, though of course unequally great, men the excessive adoration

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