1 62 MEDICAL SCIENCES. 



instead of a franc." These precautions were evidently taken in order that 

 access to the professorships of St. Cosmo might be limited to students who, 

 by their learning and application to work, would be capable of sustaining 

 the aristocracy of the surgical body against the invading democracy of the 

 barbers. There was, moreover, very ample room for choice, as the College 

 of St. Cosmo comprised only ten sworn surgeons. The number of barbers, 

 upon the other hand, steadily increased, and from forty, in the middle of the 

 fourteenth century, it had risen to sixty at the close. The degree of esteem 

 in which each of the three classes of medical men was held may be gathered 

 from the characteristic fact that when the Paris Faculty appointed physi- 

 cians, surgeons, and barbers to attend the plague-stricken, it allotted a 

 salary of two hundred pounds-Paris to the first, of one hundred and twenty 

 to the second, and of eighty only to the third. 



By the fifteenth century the Arab school of medicine had lost ground, and 

 the sound doctrines of Hippocrates resumed their sway, owing to the succes- 

 sive checks inflicted upon the doctrines of Avicenna, Averroes, and Galen, 

 which fell into disfavour. These latter would have been still more discredited 

 if to the father of medicine had not been attributed the authorship of a mass 

 of works which he never wrote, and if the theosophical ravings of judicial 

 astrology had not taken the place of observation and method. The illus- 

 trious Marsilio Ficino of Florence, who was one of the oracles of his day, 

 himself retarded the progress of true science by upholding with the passionate 

 ardour of a Platonist the tenets of a science which was false and misleading. 



It is not astonishing, therefore, that medicine should have been subor- 

 dinated to the occult sciences, especially to astrology. These imaginary 

 sciences opened to inquisitive and restless minds horizons peopled with all 

 kinds of illusions ; with them dreams occupied the place of facts, and each 

 individual was supposed to hold a special rank in the universal harmonic 

 system. The destiny of a country or a city, like that of an individual, 

 was dependent upon the motion of such and such a planet. An epidemic 

 was caused by the conjunction of different stars, and as the inherent 

 principle of every illness was in the constellation beneath which the sufferer 

 was born, the doctor's first duty was to seek out the constellation, so as to 

 get a basis for his prognosis. The constellation once discovered, the most 

 remarkable conjectures were drawn from its position and sidereal influences. 

 Hooping-cough observed for the first time as an epidemic in 1414 and plica, 



