EDITORIAL OBSERVATIONS. 
307 
“ The Greeks confined themselves to epigrams ; but it was otherwise 
with the Romans. Physicians came at a late date into Rome, and had a 
difficulty in keeping their ground there. The elder Cato hated them, 
and prevented his son consulting them. And yet the rude censor prac¬ 
tised medicine in his own fashion; he possessed infallible secrets and effica¬ 
cious panaceas. His method was simple enough, and, absolute master of 
his house, he treated man and beast alike. Pliny gives us these details, 
and Pliny, we know, was not favorable to doctors. In Martial’s epigrams, 
to say nothing of other Latin poets, the doctors are ill-treated enough, 
and, we must admit, not without justice. The profession was in the 
hands of slaves, and degraded by venal souls, easy instruments, and too 
often accomplices of corruption, debauchery, immorality, and crime. 
Decay had then invaded everything. 
“Next came the barbarians and universal confusion; and we lose 
sight of medicine during the first centuries of the middle ages. To the 
Arabs we are indebted for a sort of Renaissance ; but it was in the first 
universities that the practice of medicine took the direction and the 
proper character which it bears still to this day. Now appeared the true 
physician, and by his side an adversary far more formidable than his 
opponent of antiquity. 
“Before the middle age, the art of medicine was decaying fast; and 
as it passed through this long period it still continued in decay. The 
traditions of the Greeks were gradually lost; the exercise of the art fell 
into the hands of monks and clergy, for the most part very ignorant, and 
hence superstitious practices and absurd proceedings—the supernatural 
and marvellous being put in the place of experience and good sense. It 
was a time of miracles and prodigies—the sorcerers rivalling the saints; 
and while the plague and the lepra committed ravages among the people, 
the resources of medicine were useless to arrest the scourges. The Jews 
at this time were hated and persecuted ; but yet they were run after for 
their medical knowledge, and for the drugs obtained by them from the 
East through traffic with the Arabs. 
“ The Renaissance awakened a spirit of inquiry. The records of an¬ 
tiquity, once again opened, were discoveries as of a new world. And 
then began the general strife against orthodoxy. Heretics and Pro¬ 
testants were to be found elsewhere besides in the Church. Aristotle 
and Galen were treated like the Pope, and so commenced the long quarrel 
between ancients and moderns. 
“ This struggle, also, medicine has passed through; but it gained an 
infinite number of enemies; and chiefly the charlatans. At an early 
hour these industrious gentry seized upon medicine, which offered so 
vast a field for the exercise of their ingenuitv. Prom Montaigne down 
to Rosseau—not to mount higher or go down later—we find a concert of 
invectives against medicine, the noise of them being still audible, though 
weak. Infinite variations were played continually on the same strain. 
It has taken three centuries to reduce the pretensions of physicians to 
their true proportions. Chemistry, which appeared at the first dawn of 
the Renaissance , explained all the phenomena of the animal economy by 
the principles of a gross chemistry—seeing there nothing but fermenta¬ 
tion, distillation, and effervescence of humours at work in the living 
laboratory. Then later, after the discoveries of Galileo and Newton, 
mechanics, with its levers and instruments, explained the forces; and 
after Harvey, hydraulics. Thus arose the sub-sects—iatro-chemists, 
iatro-mechanicians, and iatro-mathematicians. These were materialists, 
who soon found their opponents, the spiritualists. Truth was with neither 
sect; but the spiritualists have rendered most service to medicine, Stahl 
