250 
ALBERT BABB. 
causing such a relapse into mental torpor, that medicine as a 
science was almost wholly unknown. So low in the intel¬ 
lectual scale did those countries sink, which in recent times 
have figured so prominently in polite literature and scientific ! 
attainments, that when Francisco Pizarro with a handful of 
Spanish adventurers overrun and subdued Peru he found a 
regal power in the New World which far surpassed, in the 
arts of civil government and quiet domestic amenities, any- 
thing of the kind which had existed in all Europe since the | 
coming of Christ, excepting, perhaps, the Moorish supremacy 
located in the southern half of Spain, with its seat in the pic- ! 
turesque Alhambra. 
The Arabs were the most learned people in medicine at 
that time, for while our ancestors were trying to charm away 
diseases and to cast out the supposed evil spirits by monkish 
trickery, the astute and perspective followers of Mahomet ! 
and the Koran were assiduously prying into nature for new 
therapeutical agents, and at Alexandria studiously dissecting | 
the human body. Finally the lamp in their lighthouse died j 
out, and there was not one beacon left burning to guide the 
intellectually-bewildered seamen of the Old World. 
Centuries rolled by, but it was not till about the year 1600 
of the Christian era that Europe began to shake off the coma 
and apathy which had so long before enshrouded her. Al- I 
though there was thence a general awakening into intellectu¬ 
ality, yet it was as late as A. D. 1810 when any advance in 
the etiology of our particular disease was made. In that 
year Bayle demonstrated the existence of small peculiar 
nodules widely disseminated in the organs of consumptives. 
His statement aroused to new endeavors the pathologists of 
his day and they sought eagerly for the ultimate cause of 
tuberculosis. 
Laennec, noticing the frequency of scrofulous glands in 
his phthisical subjects, called everything tubercular which 
was caseous in its nature, but Virchow, finding caseation oc¬ 
casionally in inflammatory processes and in cancerous ulcera¬ 
tion, pronounced the miliary tubercle alone pathognomic of 
tuberculosis. 
