MEDICI MEDICINE. 



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duke of Tuscany (afterwards the emperor Francis I.), 

 made a contract with the sister of John Gasto, the 

 widowed electress of the Palatinate, the last of the 

 name of Medici, by which he acquired the various 

 allodial possessions of her house, and also the cele- 

 brated works of art and antiquities collected by her 

 ancestors. Under the twenty-six years' reign of his 

 son, the wise and virtuous Leopold, Tuscany recov- 

 ered from a decline whicli had lasted for more than 

 a century. See Tuscany, and Clayton's Memoirs 

 of the House of Medici. 



MEDICI, LUIGI, DON, minister of the king of 

 Naples, descended from the ducal house of Ottojano, 

 was duke of Sarto, high steward of the king of 

 Naples, and, for some time, president of the ministry. 

 He succeeded Acton, and rendered service, in 1805, 

 by improving the state of the finances. During the 

 reign of Joseph Bonaparte and Joachim Murat, he 

 resided in England, and returned with the Bourbons 

 to Naples, where he was minister of the police, when 

 Murat, induced by false reports, purposely spread in 

 order to lead him to his ruin, passed from Corsica to 

 the Neapolitan territory. Medici ordered the coasts 

 to be watched, and Murat was taken and shot. The 

 minister's report on this event is contained in the 

 papers of that time (1815). In 1818, Medici con- 

 cluded a concordat with the pope. He now im- 

 proved the system of coinage, &c. In 1819, the 

 king, on his proposal, ordered " that all judges 

 should decide causes according to the literal mean- 

 ing of the laws, and, wherever this was not clear, 

 should follow reasonable interpretations, and not the 

 commentaries of jurisconsults ; after which, the rea- 

 sons of the sentence should be printed." To clear 

 the prisons, filled with captive robbers, Medici sent 

 2000 criminals to Brazil, according to a treaty con- 

 cluded with the court of Rio Janeiro. Yet his 

 administration, particularly the re-establishment of 

 convents, in 1819, met with much censure. The 

 people were dissatisfied with the new tax on landed 

 property (fundaria). The revolution broke out at 

 Nola, July 2, 1820. The ministry of the police had 

 previously been given to the prince of Canosa, who, 

 unlike Medici, united with the secret society of the 

 Calderari, in order to suppress the Carbonari, whilst 

 Medici had sent the most ardent members of these 

 societies to the insane hospitals. Medici gave in his 

 resignation, and retired to Rome, where he remained 

 for some time after the return of the king to Naples. 

 But when the violent measures of the prince of 

 Canosa appeared to be ill adapted to restore order, 

 the king, on the advice of Austria, resolved to form 

 a new ministry (June, 1822), the president of which 

 was prince Alvaro Ruftb, and the finances were once 

 more given to Medici: milder measures were now 

 adopted. To cover the deficit in the revenue, a loan 

 had been contracted with the house of Rothschild. 

 When the king, with prince Ruffo, went to the con- 

 gress of Verona, and afterwards to Vienna, Medici 

 was appointed president of the council of ministers. 

 He saw himself obliged to contract a new loan with 

 the house of Rothschild, for two millions and a half 

 pounds sterling, for which, customs and other in- 

 direct taxes were pledged. Under the reign of 

 Francis I., Medici retained his high post. He went 

 with his king to Madrid, and is said to have been 

 consulted respecting the regulation of the embar- 

 rassed finances of Spain. He died in 1830. 



MEDICINE; the science of diseases, and the art 

 of healing or alleviating them. It is founded on 

 the study of man's physical and moral nature, in 

 health and in disease. Created by necessity, the off- 

 spring of instinct, observation, time, and reflection, 

 it began in ages previous to the records of history ; 

 it has struggled at all times, and continues to 



struggle, with favourite theories ; has been influ- 

 enced by all systems of philosophy and religion, by 

 truth and superstition ; and has, with the slowness 

 which marks all the important advancements of 

 mankind, but lately emerged from some of the pre- 

 judices of thousands of years, and will long continue 

 subject to others. Like other sciences, medicine has 

 gained more from the single discoveries of close 

 observers than from centuries of theory. For the 

 few hundreds of years in which men have begun to 

 apply themselves more to actual observation, and the 

 human body has been carefully studied, medicine, 

 like all the natural sciences to which it is so near 

 akin, has made great progress. The higher kinds 

 of skill and knowledge, in the earlier stages of 

 nations, are in general exclusively appropriated by 

 the priests, and this has been the case with medicine 

 and the other branches of natural science. In the 

 sacred writings, mention is occasionally made of the 

 external application of oil and wine, and of the 

 effects of warm bathing in the treatment of the sick. 

 Amongst the Assyrians it was usual to carry those 

 afflicted with diseases to the gates of the temples, 

 where they might have an opportunity of imploring 

 the advice and assistance of those who passed by. 

 Machaon and Podalirius are mentioned in the Iliad 

 of Homer, as having been " good physicians," and 

 their skill in the cure of wounds is recorded with 

 great praise. They were the sons of a physician named 

 Esculapius, who, after his death, had been placed 

 amongst the demigods of Greece, and to whom the 

 Romans, many centuries afterwards, erected a temple 

 upon the island of the Tiber. Hippocrates is the 

 earliest author on medicine whose writings have 

 been preserved. He lived about the middle of the 

 fifth century before Christ, and was a man of very 

 superior talents and great medical acquirements. H is 

 writings maintained an unrivaled authority over the 

 minds of his successors for many centuries, and by 

 the consent of posterity, he has been styled the Fa- 

 ther of Medicine. The remedies which he employed 

 were principally evacuants, more especially purga- 

 tives, and he also prescribed diuretics and sudorifics. 

 He was accustomed to draw blood both by the lancet 

 and scarifications, employed cupping-glasses, inserted 

 issues, and used injections. Most of the active drugs 

 of the present day were unknown to him, all the 

 powerful metallic preparations, for instance, as well 

 as the spirituous and ethereal compositions; and ano- 

 dyne and narcotic remedies were but little valued. 



The doctrine of Hippocrates may be called the 

 empiric rationalism; and, numerous as are the 

 systems that have flourished since, in ancient and 

 modern times, mankind have always returned to his 

 principle of making observation the only rule in the 

 treatment of diseases. The doctrine of Hippocrates 

 was blended, by his immediate successors, with the 

 Platonic philosophy, whereby was formed the (so 

 called) ancient dogmatic system. In Alexandria, 

 which was, from 300 B. C., the seat of learning, 

 medicine was one of the branches studied, but soon 

 degenerated into mere dialectics and book learning. 

 Hence we find it soon followed by the empiric school 

 (286 B. C.), the methodic school (100 B. C.), the 

 pneumatic school (68 B. C.), and, at length, by the 

 eclectic school (81 A. D.), which took from all the 

 others. A philosophical and great mind was required 

 to put an end to so confused a state of medical science, 

 and such a mind appeared in Galen (q. v.) of Perga- 

 iniis. His system acquired an almost undisputed 

 pre-eminence during the middle ages, and down to 

 the sixteenth century. For some time (in the seventh 

 century), the intellectual Arabians cultivated the 

 sciences, and with them medicine. They also founded 

 their medicine on that of Galen, but fashioned the 

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