RELATIONS OF MEDICINE AND SURGERY 191 



how they blend this way and that to build the ideas and institutions 

 of men, we may wonder at their creative activity, or weep over the 

 errors and the failures, the spoliation and the decay, which have 

 marred or thwarted them; and if we contemplate not the whole but 

 some part of men's sowing and men's harvest, such a part as medi- 

 cine, the keener is our sorrow and disappointment, or our joy and our 

 hope, as we admire the great ends we have gained or dwell upon the 

 loss and suffering which have darkened the way. "In the develop- 

 ment of medicine/' said Helmholtz, "there lies a great lesson on the 

 true principles of scientific progress." 



Pray do not fear, however, that to fulfill the meaning of the title 

 of this address, I shall describe to you the history of medicine and the 

 history of surgery, and on this double line compare and combine my 

 researches; in the time allotted to me no such survey is possible. 

 In the seventeenth century the handicrafts of anatomy, chemistry, 

 and physiology so penetrated medicine that the separate influence of 

 surgery is less easily discernible. My purpose, therefore, is to pass in 

 review certain eminent features of the history of these departments of 

 knowledge up to the end of the sixteenth century, and to compare 

 them with a view to edification ; your fear will be rather that I may 

 tell my story with the unrighteousness of a man with a moral. 



In his address on "Morgagni," at Rome, in 1894, Virchow said that 

 medicine is remarkable in its unbroken development for twenty-five 

 centuries; as we may say, without irreverence, from Hippocrates to 

 Virchow himself. The great pathologist 's opinion, however, seems 

 to need severe qualification; if it be so, the stream has more than once 

 flowed long underground. The discontinuity of medicine from Egypt 

 to Crotonaand Ionia is scarcely greater than from Galen to Avicenna; 

 during which period, in spite of a few eminent teachers in the 

 Byzantine Empire, it sank, in the West at any rate, into a sterile and 

 superstitious routine. 



Classical medicine, the medicine of the fifth century, B. c., is 

 represented for us by the great monument of the Scriptures collected 

 under the name of the foremost teacher of the age, Hippocrates; in 

 genius perhaps the greatest physician of all past time. The treatises 

 of the Canon may be divided into medicine, surgery, and obstetrics. 

 The medical treatises, when read in an historical spirit, command 

 our reverent admiration. Written at a time when an inductive phy- 

 siology was out of reach, we are impressed nevertheless by their 

 broad, rational, and almost scientific spirit. Medicine, even when not 

 dominated by contemporary philosophy, has always taken its color 

 from it; and the working physiology of Hippocrates was that hu- 

 moral doctrine, originally derived from Egypt and the East, which, 

 as enlarged by Galen, ruled over medicine till recent times. Hippo- 

 crates, while distinguishing between the methods of outward and 



