Linacre's influence on English medicine / by Sir George Newman.

  • Newman, George, Sir, 1870-1948
Date:
1928
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Linacre's influence on English medicine / by Sir George Newman. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    men whose faculties have had the highest and most harmonious culture”; and thus, he adds, many of the greatest physicians have influenced the pro¬ fession 'dess by their special work than by ex¬ emplifying those graces of life and refinements of heart which make up character . . . these have been the leaven which has raised our profession above the dead level of a business.”* Of these Linacre was one. Whether it was the flower of inborn char¬ acter or contracted from his brilliant friends or otherwise acquired, his personality comes down to us across 400 years with an aroma and a virility alike creative, winsome and enduring. THE FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN MEDICINE. By piecing together the scanty records which remain to us of Linacre’s personality and achieve¬ ments—his translations, his institutions, and him¬ self—we shall find that, like Petrarch, he stood on a frontier that divides two peoples, looking both to the past and to the future. ” As a humanist he followed where others had trodden. He joined with them in awakening the spirit of man to his literary inheritance. Though a medical practitioner in a pregnant time, he did not elucidate the processes of diseases; the great epidemics seemed to pass him by; he left no original work. But what he did as humanist and scholar-physician was, by adding to the heritage already there, to make possible the fuller interpretation of the Greek spirit. Though he did not himself even share in the consequent reconstruction, he laid the foundations on which we build, he sowed the seed of which we garner the fruit. “The medieval heritage of Greek science * Life of Sir William Osier, Harvey Cushing, 1925, i-,459-