HISTORY OF MEDICINE. 397 



per view of the hydraulic apparatus in the animal economy, 

 and seemingly of the whole of the system of animal bodies. 

 From this period only, therefore, physicians were in a condition 

 of attempting a system. They have since made considerable 

 progress in it ; and it is now our business to give you some 

 account of the general state of medicine, from that time to the 

 present. 



When, after many ages of darkness, which had destroyed al- 

 most the whole of ancient literature, learning was again restored 

 in the fifteenth century, so, from causes which are well known, 

 it was the system of Galen alone that the physicians of those 

 days became acquainted with ; and during the course of the six- 

 teenth century, the study of physicians was almost solely em- 

 ployed in explaining and confirming that system. Early, indeed, 

 in the sixteenth century, the noted Paracelsus had laid the 

 foundation of a chemical system which was in direct opposition 

 to that of Galen ; and, by the efficacy of the medicines employ- 

 ed by Paracelsus and his followers, their system came to be re- 

 ceived by many : but the systematic physicians continued to be 

 chiefly Galenists, and kept possession of the schools till the 

 middle of the seventeeth century. It is riot, however, necessary 

 to enter here into any further detail respecting the fate of those 

 two opposite sects ; for the only circumstance concerning them 

 which I would wish at present to point out, is, that in the writ- 

 ings of both, the explanations they severally attempted to give 

 of the phenomena of health or sickness, turned very entirely 

 upon the state of the fluids of the body. 



Such was the state of the science of physic till about the 

 middle of the seventeenth century, when the circulation of the 

 blood came to be generally known and admitted ; and when 

 this, together with the discovery of the receptacle of the chyle, 

 and of the thoracic duct, finally exploded the Galenic system. 

 About the same period, a. considerable revolution had taken 

 place in the system of natural philosophy. In the course of 

 the seventeeth century, Galileo had introduced mathematical 

 reasoning ; and Lord Bacon having proposed the method of in- 

 duction, had thereby excited a disposition to observe facts, and 

 to make experiments. These new modes of philosophizing, it 

 might be supposed, would soon have had some influence on the 



