618 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



cine in Ispahan. His medical works seem to have been the chief 

 guide in this branch in Europe for almost five centuries; their sway 

 was not broken until the beginning of the seventeenth century. It is 

 strong and yet painful testimony to the inherent stupidity of mankind, 

 physicians not excepted, that the doctrines of Avicenna are little more 

 than what is found in Galen somewhat modified by Aristotle; and, as 

 wc have seen, Galen represents no great advance upon Hippocrates. 

 Alas for the human race that it has always been so much easier to 

 memorize than to think and to investigate ! The medical science and 

 practise of the Arabs was confined chiefly to surgery and the empirical 

 treatment of internal diseases. There was no lack of victims in view 

 of the constant wars in which the califs were engaged, and no lack 

 of opportunity for the study of disease in its various forms in the 

 hospitals which some of them founded in various parts of their domains. 

 Both medical science and philosophy, though not metaphysics, had 

 run their course by the time the Alexandrian era opened. A not in- 

 considerable number of new facts were collected in Alexandria, but 

 the ability or the will to arrange them into an orderly system was lack- 

 ing; at least we must adopt this view with the scant evidence to the 

 contrary before us. For more than a thousand years the one question 

 asked was not, What does nature say ? What are the facts in the case ? 

 but, What does the master say? Beginning with the first christian 

 centuries, Europe and western Asia more and more became organized 

 into a society to suppress the increase of knowledge. It would not 

 be easy to say in which century this organization did the most effective 

 work, though there is no doubt that its most effective instrument was 

 the inquisition. As everybody knows, it was not theology alone that 

 was conservative; law and medicine were equally so. Geothe pays his 

 respects to this attitude of mind when he says in Faust : 



Hear, therefore, one alone, for that is best, in sooth, 

 And simply take your master's words for truth. 

 On words let your attention center ! 

 Then through the safest guide you'll enter 

 The temple-halls of certainty. 

 And again: 



Prepare beforehand well your part 



With paragraphs all got by heart, 



So you can better watch and look 



That naught is said but what is in the book: 



Yet in this writing as unwearied be 



As did the Holy Ghost dictate to thee. 



This conservatism was a characteristic of the times; the protestant 

 revolution was hardly more than the beginning of a struggle for emanci- 

 pation in a single direction. It did not enlarge the intellectual horizon 

 of the lawyer or the physician. There is much evidence to show that 



