THE MARCH OF MEDICINE—WINTROBE 375 
the world by publicly committing the Canon of Avicenna to the flames 
of a students’ bonfire. 
This period was marked by the work of Vesalius who laid the 
foundations of modern anatomy, William Harvey who discovered 
the manner of circulation of the blood, and Thomas Sydenham who 
demonstrated the value of accurate description of the signs and 
symptoms of disease in the place of vague theories. The Italian, 
Morgagni, laid the foundations of morbid anatomy by examining great 
numbers of bodies after death. He carefully and systematically re- 
corded everything which he found abnormal and tried to correlate this 
with the signs and symptoms in the individuals before they died. The 
best type of medical practice requires this even today, for our knowl- 
edge is still very incomplete. 
The new approach in medicine gradually proved its value. Follow- 
ing the example of his teacher, John Hunter, Edward Jenner had the 
courage to test the Gloucestershire tradition that milkmaids who had 
contracted cowpox from milking did not get smallpox. Countless lives 
have been saved and much disfigurement and blindness prevented by 
the method of vaccination which developed from Jenner’s simple exper- 
iment. The discovery by James Lind of the importance of fruit juices 
in the prevention of scurvy was significant not only medically but also 
politically and economically, for the might of the British Navy de- 
pended on the health of the British “limeys,” as their sailors came to be 
called. 
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY HOSPITALS AND SANITARY CONDITIONS 
But progress was extremely slow. In the eighteenth century, 
hospitals were for the care rather than the cure of their inmates. So 
prevalent were erysipelas, pyemia, septicemia, and gangrene in these 
institutions that they came to be known as the “hospital diseases.” 
Such pestilences would come upon the patients and kill them like flies. 
At the Hotel Dieu in Paris, six unhappy patients, in various states of 
physical and mental disorder might be heaped all in one bed. No one 
who had a home would go to a hospital; nor did they need to, for after 
all such hospitals offered no facilities except for the spread of disease. 
Sanitary conditions were equally horrible. In the towns of eight- 
eenth-century England the streets were made as narrow as was feasible 
and were often barely passable from mud or tolerable from stench. 
“In places where house drainage was connected up with sewers these 
generally ran directly into the local river, canal, or stream with the 
natural result that such water became a stinking open drain.” (4) 
Water was inadequate in supply. While famine and leprosy and plague 
were no longer as important factors as they had been, intermittent and 
remittent fevers, dysentery, malaria, typhus, scurvy, cholera, yellow 
fever, influenza, measles, diphtheria, and scarlet fever were rampant. 
