144 The Evolution of Medical Science. 



some of its branches. Evolution, however, as you are aware, 

 is differentiation. To early man, therapeutics was all there 

 was of Medicine. Practically, to most people in our own 

 day this is equally true. To medical men, on the contrary, 

 the vastness of the branches is almost appalling. 



Quite early, surgery began to differentiate, and cases 

 that primitive ignorance thought to be curable by medica- 

 tion were found to give way only to an operation. Steadily 

 have such cases multiplied, and with the progress of knowl- 

 edge more and more of such are discovered. Surgery itself 

 has given off numerous branches to the care of specialists, 

 until important facts have so multiplied that no living man 

 can longer master them. At a very early date surgery 

 gave birth to anatomy as a distinct branch of science, and 

 the bad treatment this received at the hands of theology 

 has already been referred to. Galen tells us that the first 

 cultivators of anatomy constituted a distinct social caste.* 

 They never wrote out discovered facts, but kept them 

 within their own families by tradition. In his day, much 

 knowledge had been acquired, thanks to the liberality of 

 the earlier Egyptians. They had not, however, up to this 

 time, been able distinctly to distinguish muscles from 

 nerves in their various finer ramifications. They knew 

 that the great nerves of sensation came from the brain. 

 They knew the principal bones, muscles and viscera. They 

 did not know of the solar plexus and its system of nerves. 



The study of anatomy gave birth to physiology as a nat- 

 ural sequence. Errors in the former, led to the wildest 

 kind of conclusions in the latter. Until the discovery of 

 the relations of veins and arteries to eacli other and to the 

 heart, but little that could be dignified by tlie title of 

 science was possible here. Through all the dark years of 

 Galen's supremacy this discovery was not made. Mondino 

 in 1315, came near it. Vesalius, in the middle of the 16th 

 Century, traced them out ; and for telling the world that 

 Galen blundered he was persecuted most mercilessly, but 

 fortunately escaped tlie fate of liis contemporary Servetus, 

 part of whose heresy was the sanie.t Poor Servetus was 

 a heretic to Christ as well as to Galen, and was burnt at 

 the stake therefor. Later on, Sylvius discovered the 

 valves of the veins, and their absence in the arteries, while 



* History of the Inductive Scieiices, vol. 2, p. 440. 

 t Opp. Cit., pp, 445, 44. 



