RELATIONS OF MEDICINE AND SURGERY 205 



den; but he is little more than a name. Nor does it do to peruse 

 Thomas Gale (1507-1586?) after Mondeville, Guy, Pare", Wiirtz, 

 or Maggi. In the Wounds Made by Gonneshot, the third part of 

 his Surgery, lies Gale's merit, that he also withstood "the gross 

 error of Jerome Brunswicke and John of Vigo, that they make 

 the wound venomous." 



With the sixtenth century my survey must end; from this time 

 medicine entered upon a new life, upon a new surgery founded on 

 a new anatomy and on a new physiology of the circulation of the 

 blood and lymph. These sciences, thus renewed, not only served 

 surgery directly, but by the pervading influence of the new accuracy 

 of observation, and the enlargement of the field of induction, also 

 indirectly modified the traditional medicine of physicians unversed 

 in methods of research, as we observe in the objective clinical 

 medicine of Sydenham. Our physiologists tell us that destruction 

 is easy, construction difficult; but in the history of medical dogma 

 this truth finds little illustration. So impatient is the speculative 

 intellect of the yoke of inductive research, so tenacious is it of its 

 castles in the air, that no sooner did Harvey, by revealing the me- 

 chanics of the circulation, sap the doctrines of the schools, than 

 some physicians instantly set to work to run up the scheme of 

 iatro-physics ; others to build a system of iatro-chemics, but upon 

 Von Helmont rather than on Willis and Mayow; while Hoffman 

 and his school resuscitated the strictum and laxum syllogisms of the 

 Greek Methodists. 



In this sketch of the past, a sketch necessarily indiscriminate, 

 but not, I trust, indiscreet, we have seen that up to the time of 

 Avicenna, medicine was one and undivided; that surgery was re- 

 garded truly, not as a department of disease, but as an alternative 

 treatment of any disease which the physician could reach with his 

 hands; that the cleavage of medicine, not by some natural and 

 essential divisions, but by arbitrary paltering to false pride and 

 conceit, let the blood run out of both its moieties; that certain 

 diseases thus cut adrift, being nourished only on the wind, dried 

 into mummy or wasted in an atrophy, and that such was medicine; 

 while the diseases which were on the side of the roots, if they lost 

 something of their upper sap, were fed from below, and that such 

 was surgery. 



Thus the physicians who were cut off from the life-giving earth, 

 being filled with husks and dust, became themselves stark and fan- 

 tastic. Broadly speaking, until the seventeenth century pathology 

 was a factitious schedule, and medicine a farrago of receipts, most of 

 them nauseous, many of them filthy; most of them directly mis- 

 chievous, all of them indirectly mischievous as tokens of a false 

 conception of therapy. A few domestic simples, such as the laxa- 



