126 Greek Medicine 



more Galenic and Hippocratic texts were recovered and 

 gradually turned into Latin, but still without vitally affecting 

 the course of Anatomy. The actual printing of collected 

 editions of Hippocrates and Galen came rather late, for the 

 debased taste of the Renaissance physicians continued to prefer 

 Dioscorides and the Arabs, of whom numerous editions ap- 

 peared, so that medicine made no advance corresponding to 

 the progress of scholarship. The Hippocratic works were first 

 printed in 1525, and an isolated edition of the inferior Galen 

 in 1490, but the real advance in Medicine was not made by 

 direct study of these works. So long as they were treated in 

 the old scholastic spirit such works were of no more value 

 than those of the Arabists or others inherited from the Middle 

 Ages. Even Hippocrates can be spoilt by a commentary, and 

 it was not until the investigator began actually to compare 

 his own observations with those of Hippocrates and Galen that 

 the real value of these works became apparent. The depart- 

 ment in which this happened first was Anatomy, and such 

 revolutionaries as Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1518), who never 

 published, and Vesalius (1514-1564), whose great work appeared 

 in 1543, were really basing their work on Galen, though they 

 were much occupied in proving Galen's errors. Antonio 

 Benivieni (died 1502), an eager prophet of the new spirit, 

 revived the Hippocratic tradition by actually collecting notes 

 of a few cases with accompanying records of deaths and post- 

 mortem findings, among which it is interesting to observe a 

 case of appendicitis. 1 His example was occasionally followed 

 during the sixteenth century, as for instance, by the Portuguese 

 Jewish physician Amatus Lusitanus (i 15 1 i-c. 1562), who printed 

 no fewer than seven hundred cases ; but the real revival of the 

 Hippocratic tradition came in the next century with Sydenham 

 (1624-1689) and Boerhaave (1668-1738), who were consciously 



1 Benivieni's notes were published posthumously. Some of the spurious 

 Greek works of the Hippocratic collection have also case notes. 



