RESEARCH IN MEDICINE 509 



Arabs had an insight into chemistry, and, though they pursued their 

 researches in the interests of alchemy and in the hope of finding the 

 " elixir of life " or means of transmuting metals, they made, neverthe- 

 less, valuable chemical discoveries and in this way aided the art of 

 pharmacy. 



We therefore enter the sixteenth century of the christian era with 

 little or nothing added during 2,000 years to Hippocrates's methods of 

 exact observation in clinical medicine and surgery, with no decisive 

 contribution to anatomy or experimental physiology for 1,300 years 

 and with the beginnings of chemistry as applied to medicine and phar- 

 macy removed by 600 years. 



But despite this absence of real progress, a thin thread of learning 

 and practise connected the medicine of Galen with the dawn of science 

 in the middle ages. This is evident in the story of medicine in the 

 monasteries and in the schools at Salerno and Montpellier in the twelfth 

 century, but it is a medicine of the Roman period tinctured with magic 

 and superstition and with no advance in theory or practise and certainly 

 no increase in science. 



The medicine associated with the revival of learning had its begin- 

 nings in the translation of Greek treatises on medicine through the 

 Arabic; and in the early universities, especially those of Padua and 

 Bologna and this revival of the exact methods of Hippocrates and 

 Galen, gave to medicine a basis more substantial than the traditions of 

 monastic medicine which had been perpetuated through ten centuries, 

 and upon which were founded those widely scattered, but epoch-making 

 advances which medicine reckons as its share in the general revival of 

 literature, art and the sciences. With the name of Luther, Michael 

 Angelo, Raphael, Titian, Copernicus, Columbus and Galileo we place 

 those of Vesalius, Pare and Harvey. These names represent the period 

 of the Renaissance, to which we look back with pride and satisfaction, 

 but seldom with a thought of the conditions of home and community 

 life. We are concerned usually with its deeds and achievements rather 

 than with its social and hygiene conditions. But it is to the latter that 

 I wish here briefly to direct attention. 



The homes and habits of the people were filthy. As late as the sixteenth 

 century in England, the streets of the populous cities were paved with straw and 

 rushes, which soon broke up into powdered dust. Householders swept the filth 

 of their apartments into the streets, and threw garbage there also, where, with 

 the ground of rush and straw, a most intolerably filthy condition was produced, 

 which rain modified, but did not remove. Moreover, people seldom bathed their 

 bodies or washed their clothes. Besides, the food they ate contributed to disease. 

 They lived chiefly on salt fish and flesh, with a modicum of stale vegetables. 

 The domestic animals, the source of their meat, were herded in enclosures of the 

 worst imaginable filth. Mutton was the chief flesh food of the people, but their 

 flocks in cold season were herded in basements, partly underground, places with- 

 out light and air except such as gained admittance from the door. Milch cows 



