The Harveian oration, 1880 : delivered June 25th / by John W. Ogle.

  • John Ogle
Date:
1881
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Harveian oration, 1880 : delivered June 25th / by John W. Ogle. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    23/224 page 13
    various viscera of the body, and also to the bones ; and the votaries of Medicine were divided into numerous contro- versial sects, wrangling with each other as to points, the nature of which precluded all possibility of agreement, such as hidden and final causes, and other philosophical and metaphysical questions. In course of time the knowledge of Human was greatly advanced by that of Comparative Anatomy, and notably by the dissection of apes; and the nervous system was con- siderably studied. Aretaeus, who was probably a contemporary of Galen and lived in the time of Nero, thought, like Hippocrates, that the heart contained the essence of the soul and life of man, and was the immediate cause of the breathing in animals, by its action on the lungs ; he also taught that the portal system in the substance of the liver anastomosed with the branches of the vena cava. We now come to the time of the learned and ingenious and reverent Galen (lo), who lived in the first century of our era, the friend of Marcus Aurelius (of whom in England we have heard so much of late *), whose philosophico-medical system prevailed, notwithstanding the discovery of the cir- culation of the blood, until the middle of the eighteenth century. Galen was a close and astute observer of material objects and operations. He was the first to practise reliable experi- ments, and he was for the most part an ardent supporter and expounder of the doctrines of Hippocrates, greatly mixed up as they were with fantastic and hypothetical systems of Medicine (so-called), and founded on the Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. He adopted the current theories as to humours and the four elements, and believed in the three kinds of spirits—the vital, the animal, and the natural—all flowing from the one great cause,* Nature; and he was a vigorous opponent of From the lips of M. Renan.
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image