BIOLOGY IN HUMAN AFFAIRS 



formances during youth and manhood. I shall not apologize 

 to the professional scholar into whose hands the book may- 

 fall, for recalling familiar facts, since such a reconnaissance, 

 emphasizing as it does the merit of modern work, may 

 serve to bolster up his faltering spirit on some Blue 

 Monday. 



Apart from what is found in the works of Aristotle, the 

 biology of the ancients was medicine. The medicine, for a 

 thousand years of our era, -was that of the second century 

 Greek physician Galen, a healer who was ignorant of even 

 the correct number and placement of the bones of the human 

 body. The Byzantines made some surgical advances, and 

 the Arabs developed the use of drugs in the treatment of 

 disease; yet Galen remained the only real medical authority 

 of Christendom during the whole of this black millenium. 

 The frightful superstition of the times smothered all 

 originality of thought; hence, the infrequent and relatively 

 unimportant discoveries recorded led to no philosophical 

 changes. The greater part of Europe, in fact, was in such a 

 state intellectually that, by the beginning of the thirteenth 

 century, the whole great legacy of learning left by the 

 Greeks was becoming a distorted tradition. To restore 

 classical authority was an objective of humanism; and at 

 least one physician of this period should be acceptable as 

 a colleague to the Humanists of to-day, for Arnald of 

 Villanova dedicated his life to divesting the current 

 leechcraft of its accumulation of worse errors and to re- 

 establishing in pristine purity the teachings of Hippocrates 

 and Galen. But there was a better way than that of Human- 

 ism. Reference to authority, whether of Greece or of 

 Arabia, could not lead onward. The course of progress is 

 inquiry, and all through the next three centuries a few 

 doughty souls took this course. They should command 

 our respect, even though they made no outstanding dis- 

 coveries; for they sought for truth where truth can be 



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