EARLY SUPERSTITIONS IN MEDICINE. 97 



This profound reverence for authority, this belief in supernatural 

 agencies, and this stagnation of true science, was the condition 

 which prevailed at the beginning of the sixteenth century. But 

 education gradually spread, and at this time thinkers arose, who, 

 dissatisfied with mere assumptions, or the baseless dicta of previous 

 authorities, commenced working at the rudiments of the science which 

 had hitherto rested on such imperfect foundations. 



Protestantism broke forth, marking the commencement of the age 

 of free inquiry, the spirit of which had so often been quenched in 

 blood to burst forth again irrepressibly, and henceforth to continue 

 and spread abroad with little interruption. The Italians and more 

 especially the republican Venetians appear to have been peculiarly 

 free from the prejudice against the dissection of human bodies 

 which generally prevailed ; the study of anatomy was warmly en- 

 couraged at Padua and Bologna; and, owing to this liberal spirit, 

 Mondino, in the fourteenth century, was enabled to demonstrate 

 human anatomy by actual dissection. But he was - so trammelled by 

 tradition and the authority of Galen, that he perpetuated numberless 

 errors, which would have been patent enough to an unprejudiced 

 mind. So powerful were these influences, even two hundred years 

 later, that Berenger, who boasted of having dissected one hundred 

 subjects at Bologna, and who added largely to anatomical knowledge, 

 ventured to dispute or correct but few of the propositions of his pred- 

 ecessors in the study. To Vesalius belongs the credit of daring to 

 expose the errors of the Galenian system. A Fleming by birth, he 

 early migrated to Yenetia, and lectured with immense success at 

 Padua, and afterward at Bologna and Pisa. So prominently does 

 his simple adherence to facts and disregard of tradition and prejudice, 

 exhibit him as superior to the more servile workers in the science of 

 medicine before his time, who were in reality mere commentators on 

 Hippocrates and Galen, that he has been called the father of human 

 anatomy. He elaborated a comprehensive system, which, although 

 necessarily incomplete, contained few mistakes, and he exposed and 

 corrected a vast number of errors, which, up to that time, had been 

 received without question. 



The beginning of the sixteenth century, when Luther nailed 

 his ninety-five propositions to the gates of Wittenberg, marked the 

 commencement of a new era in science, as well as in religion. The 

 spirit of Protestantism influenced the study of medicine, and Vesalius 

 did not stand alone. Linacre, who had studied at Padua before the 

 time of Vesalius, had just 'established the College of Physicians in 

 London, thus emancipating medicine to a great extent from priestly 

 influence. Hitherto the power of approving and licensing practi- 

 tioners had been committed to the bishops in their several dioceses, 

 and the practice of physic was accordingly engrossed by illiterate 

 monks and other ignorant empirics, who, as the charter of the 

 V 



