Currents and counter-currents in medical science : With other addresses and essays / By Oliver Wendell Holmes.

  • Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 1809-1894.
Date:
1861
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Currents and counter-currents in medical science : With other addresses and essays / By Oliver Wendell Holmes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

    30/434 (page 10)
    great religious destructive, may be guessed by the relish with which he tells the story how certain Pa- vian students exhumed the body of an elegans scortum, or lovely dame of ill repute, the favorite of a monk of the order of St. Anthony, who does not seem to have resisted temptation so well as the founder of his order.* We have always ranked the physician Rabelais among the early reformers, but I do not know that Vesalius has ever been thanked for his hit at the morals of the religious orders, or for turning to the good of science what was intend- ed for the benefit of clergy. Our unfortunate medical brother, Michael Serve- tus, the spiritual patient to whom the theological moxa was applied over the entire surface for the cure of his heresy, came very near anticipating Harvey.| The same quickened thought of the time which led him to dispute the dogmas of the Church, opened his mind to the facts which contradicted the dogmas of the Faculty. Harvey himself was but the posthumous child of the great Elizabethan period. Bacon was at once his teacher and his patient. The founder of the * Op. cit., Lib. V. Cap. 15, p. 663. t Non per parietem cordis mediam, ut vulgo creditur, sed magno artificio, a dextro cordis ventriculo, longe per pulrnones tractu, et a vena arteriosa, in arteriam venosam transfunditur. — Bostock's Physi- ology, note to p. 211. I cite the passage on account of the calling in question of the claims of Servetus by Amede'e Pichot. (Life ana Labors of Sir Charles Bell, London, I860, p. 3.)