Currents and counter-currents in medical science : an address delivered before the Massachusetts Medical Society, at the annual meeting, May 30, 1860 / by Oliver Wendell Holmes.

  • Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 1809-1894.
Date:
1860
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Currents and counter-currents in medical science : an address delivered before the Massachusetts Medical Society, at the annual meeting, May 30, 1860 / by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    was in the age of Pericles, of Socrates, of Plato, of Phidias, that Hippocrates gave to medical knowledge the form which it retained for twenty centuries. With the world-conquering Alexander, the world-em- bracing philosopher Aristotle, appropriating anatomy and physiology, among his manifold spoils of study, marched abreast of his royal pupil to wider conquests. Under the same Ptolemies to whom we owe the Al- exandrian Library and Museum, and the Septuagint version of the Hebrew Scriptures, the infallible He- rophilus* made those six hundred dissections of which Tertullian accused him, and the sagacious Erasistratus introduced his mild antiphlogistic treat- ment in opposition to the polypharmacy and antido- tal practice of his time. It is significant that the large-minded Galen should have been the physician and friend of the imperial philosopher Marcus Au- relius. The Arabs gave laws in various branches of knowledge to those whom their arms had invad- ed, or the terror of their spreading dominion had reached, and the point from which they started was, as Humboldt acknowledges, the study of medicine, by which they long ruled the Christian Schools,! and to which they added the department of chemical pharmacy. Look at Vesalius, the contemporary of Luther. Who can fail to see one common spirit in the radical ecclesiastic and the reforming court-physician ? Both * Contradicere Herophilo in anatomicis, est contradiccre evangelium,' was a saying of Fallopius. t Cosmos, II., 587.