An outline of the history of art in its relation to medical science : being the substance of an introductory address delivered at the Medical and Physical Society of St. Thomas's Hospital, October, 1885 / by William Anderson.

  • Anderson, William, 1842-1900.
Date:
[1887?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An outline of the history of art in its relation to medical science : being the substance of an introductory address delivered at the Medical and Physical Society of St. Thomas's Hospital, October, 1885 / by William Anderson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    tance with the viscera of the lower animals, date from this time. It is perhaps less marvellous that a physiology, a pathology, and a complex scheme of therapeutics should have been founded upon so audacious a fraud as Chinese anatomy^ than that the gigantic system of quackery should even in our own day number far more believers than all the science of the West. Fortunately for the reputation of true Chinese art, which at one time was far in advance of that of contem- porary Europe, it can scarcely be convicted of association with medicine, for the diagrams in question were the work of unskilled hands and as clumsy and untruthful as the pseudo- medical lore to which they form a fitting appendage. Chinese medicine was adopted by Japan, together with the art and letters of the middle kingdom, but the younger nation has added much of its own to the borrowed fund, and has been the first to perceive the error of its ways. It is remarkable that the earliest known drawings relating to pathology were the work of a famous Japanese painter of the twelfth century, who has given us a series of illustrations of disease, nearly all of which were probably drawn from life. In this curious col- lection we may trace representations of carbuncle, enlargement of the patellar bursa, paraplegia, gangrene, acne rosacea, in- testinal fistula, gastric fistula (a man whose mouth is obliterated is shown introducing food throug'h an aperture in the region of the stomach), and other conditions, while many drawings that are less open to identification still appear to be conscien- tious attempts to hand down the appearances presented to the artist. The roll, a copy of which is preserved in the British Museum, is worthy of a closer study than can be devoted to it here. As might be conjectured, the establishment of medicine upon a scientific basis in Europe, after the long intellectual paralysis induced by a blind reverence for antiquity, was a tedious and oscillating process. Until the beginning of the fourteenth century, when the restrictions against dissection were abolished, the writings of Hippocrates, of Galen, of Aretaeus, of Paulus Egineta, and a few other venerated but unsound authorities, constituted the foundation of the theory and practice of the physician. Anatomy was traditional