THE PHYSICIANS AS DISCOVERERS. 253 



During this great period the attraction of magnet and 

 amber had been dealt with, first by the philosophers, then 

 by the priests, now by the physicians. To the theo- 

 logians of the last three centuries of this era, the subject 

 is a favorite mine of metaphor from which saints and 

 popes have not disdained to draw. The metallurgists, 

 headed by Agricola, make both the stone and the resin 

 the subject of their didactic description; and, contrariwise, 

 the mystics and magicians heap upon the already-existing 

 mystery of it, new and endless mysteries of their own 

 devising. Only occasionally does a master mind, dominat- 

 ing all known sciences, like that of Sarpi, or some keen 

 student of nature ahead of his times, as Robert Norman, 

 achieve genuine progress. 



A review of all that has been handed down to us makes 

 it clear that to the members of the medical profession 

 more than to those of any other, is due the impetus which, 

 at the end of the sixteenth century, brought the world to 

 the point where the next step beyond meant the incoming 

 of electricity as a new science. Yet it may well be 

 doubted whether the work of searching out and establish- 

 ing it could have fallen into hands less adapted thereto 

 by past training. Medicine is an inexact science. In 

 no field of human endeavor has the imagination been 

 more severely taxed to frame hypotheses to accord with or 

 account for seemingly endless adventitious phenomena. 

 "Medicine," says Bacon, 1 speaking of it as it existed in 

 his time, u is a science which hath been more professed 

 than labored, and yet more labored than advanced ; the 

 labor having been, in my judgment, rather in circle than 

 in progressing. For I find much iteration, but small 

 addition." And as to its practitioners, he says, "in the 

 inquiry of diseases they do abandon the cures of many, 

 some as in their nature incurable and others as past the 

 period of cure ; so that Sylla and the Triumvirs never 

 proscribed so many men to die, as they do by their 



: De Augmeutis, ii., x, 3. 



