An introduction to the history of medicine : with medical chronology, bibliographic data and test questions / by Fielding H. Garrison.

  • Garrison, Fielding H. (Fielding Hudson), 1870-1935.
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An introduction to the history of medicine : with medical chronology, bibliographic data and test questions / by Fielding H. Garrison. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    sance artists, their status was peculiar. Many of them were frequented indiscriminately by men and women alike, all of whom sat and bathed together in one huge common vat or tank. Dtirer’s woodcut of 1496 (Die Badstube) represents a group of naked men in a common bath vat, some of whom are playing musical instru¬ ments, others conversing, while a third is draining a stoup of wine. This motif of wine bibbing and general pleasaunce was frequently utilized by the lesser masters, Hans Sebald Beham, Aldegrever, Hans Baldung Grien, Hans Bock, whose pictures show the com¬ mingling of nude men and women, with scenes of feasting, cupping, and venesection in the bath. A favorite theme of Lucas Cranach and Beham was the so-called “Jungbrunnen,” or “Fountain of Youth,” which represent a number of decrepit old women trundled in wheelbarrows to one side of a huge bath tank in which they are supposed to be rejuvenated; on the other side, they are promptly man-handled by a number of amiable youths, who hurry these reinvigorated dames up the bank to appropriate tents. These roguish pictures of the old German masters really point a moral. It was soon found that a general mixing of able-bodied men and women in a state of nature in common bathing pools could lead in the end only to general laxity of morals, and such places could not long be frequented by decent people. Laws were passed segregating the sexes, but the advent of leprosy, plague, and syphilis demonstrated, over and above this that, the idea of a common bath tank was bad in itself, since the latter became a simplemedium of infection. In connection with Renaissance art, we should mention Diirer’s celebrated wood-cut of a syphilitic (1496) j1 also the picture which he sent to his physician representing himself nude, with the legend, “Where the yellow spot is and my finger points, there am I sick within”; Orcagna’s grisly procession of lepers in his “Triumph of Death” (Pisa); the elder Holbein’s pic¬ ture of St. Elizabeth ministering to three lepers (Munich); Matthias Grtinewald’s representation of bubonic plague (Colmar Gallery, 1515), and Francesco Carotto’s St. Roch in the Verona Gallery (1528), showing the typical inguinal bubo. In the Uffizi Gallery at Florence there is a remarkable picture of Ferdinand I of Spain, painted by Lucas van Leyden in 1524, in which the artist has given the characteristic facies of adenoid vegetations, ‘without apparently knowing the existence of the condition in his subject. Of epidemic diseases, smallpox and measles began to appear in the northern countries, notably in Germany (1493) and Sweden (1578). In 1572 there was an epidemic of lead-poisoning (called colica Pictonum) in the South of France which resembled the 1 Encircled by 110 Latin lines by Theodoricus Ulsenius and printed at Nuremberg.