birds and animals. We shall again refer to this work when discussing the doctrine of "Signatures," but the reader may be interested by the following description of the unicorn, in which it is hard to say whether the saint is consciously or unconsciously humorous. "As the serpent in the Garden of Eden avoided the man and gazed at the woman, so this animal flees from men and follows females. A certain philosopher, skilled in the ways of beasts, had long hunted a unicorn, but could not catch him, whereat he marvelled greatly. But one day he went hunting with a company of men and women, and the unicorn, seeing the girls, slackened his pace, sat on his hind legs, and stared at them. And the philosopher, when he had diligently considered this, saw that the animal might thus be caught, so he came up behind him and captured him. For the unicorn, when he sees a girl, marvels that she has no beard, and yet has the form of man, and if there are several girls he marvels the more and is caught the more easily. Get a unicorn's liver and make it into an ointment with yolk of egg. There is no leprosy of any kind which this will not cure, if the patient uses it often, unless his death is foreordained, or God willeth not that he be healed. Make a belt of unicorn's skin, and wear it next your own, and no pestilence or fever will harm you.”

She ascribes greater virtues to arnica than does the wildest homœopath: "If any one touches a man or woman with green arnica they will burn in love for him, and as the herb dies the man or woman touched will become infatuated by the love with which he is inflamed, ita quod stultus deinceps erit". (The saint, says her biographer, never learned Latin but wrote it by Divine inspiration.) "Henbane: Where there are suren' in a man which ulcerate his flesh rub him in the same place with its juice, and the 'suren' will die." Probably a reference to scabies; for the words "syro," "syrones" were used even in the last century to denote the acarus, and other parasites. "Nightshade (belladonna?) is hot and dry, and whoso has pain at the heart or has fainting fits (in corde unmechtig ist) let him boil nightshade in water

and apply it hot to the heart and he will be better. And whoso has toothache let him place the same on his cheek where the pain is, and it will cease. And when the feet swell, place nightshade warmed in a little water thereon and the tumour will subside; and whoso has pain in his legbones let him apply hot nightshade to his legs, and tie a cloth over, and he will be better."

The monasteries, as we have seen, were the mediæval dispensaries, and the clergy were not only often regular members of the medical profession, but held that the treatment of the numerous so-called supernatural diseases belonged especially to their order. In times of pestilence bishops wrote pastoral letters exhorting their flocks to avoid bodily and cleave to spiritual aids, for it is better to fall into the hands of God than into the hands of man. Plagues are Divine punishments, and the temptation to use physical means of cure must be avoided as a snare and a sin, "lest haply they be found even to fight against God". It was perhaps well that they abstained from recommending medicines, if we may judge from the following example given by Guy of Chauliac. Speaking of opiates, he observes that in administering such drugs the dose and time must be carefully considered. "It was this that made the physicians suspect those lozenges which the Lord Bishop of Riegs recommended to the Lord Bishop of Marseilles, who suffered from a painful strangury, after taking whereof he died in his sleep." He then gives the prescription, which included five drachms of opium, and one of henbane! As an agreeable contrast to the above, it is interesting to find that in 1255 Walter de Kirkham, Bishop of Durham, ordered all the clergy of his diocese to solemnly exhort mothers from the pulpit not to take their babies to bed with them, for through this habit many were suffocated, an excellent piece of episcopal advice which might be repeated with advantage.

In modern times the clergyman and the Lady Bountiful are the most prominent of amateur practitioners, and we may conclude with two mediæval examples of these forms of unpro

fessional medicine. The following is the seventy-third Observation of Antony Benivieni (1440-1502), a physician whom we shall meet again shortly: "An acquaintance of mine, Michelotti, was troubled with hernia, and went to a priest who professed to cure that disorder. Without reducing the rupture, the latter immediately put on a tight bandage. The bowel remained so compressed for a week, and became inflamed, causing the patient great pain. Suddenly the pain ceased and he became delirious, so, at last, I was sent for. Having felt his pulse, which was hardly perceptible, and seen his pale face and sunken eyes, I ordered the priest to be summoned. Then I removed the bandage, and saw the whole part blackened, with an ulcer showing the putrid intestine. He died in a few hours, leaving us a useful example and warning not to entrust our sick bodies to priests, who are only required to cure the soul, but to the more learned physicians.'

Sometimes, however, even learned physicians and surgeons quote lay prescriptions with approval. Thus Lanfranc, after describing how to make a truss with a piece of sheet iron and a bandage, adds: "Give the patient also every day five drachms of powdered valerian root in wine. This powder has a marvellous effect, as I have often proved. I got the receipt from one who had it of a certain noble lady, who treated all ruptures therewith."

NOTE.

Guibert de Nogent, De Pignoribus Sanctorum, lib. i. The attempt of St. Francis to cure Louis XI. is related by Comines, and Raynauld, An. Ecclesiast., 1483.

The Opera S. Hildegardis are published in Migne's Patrologia; see also Renard, Histoire de Sainte Hildegarde, Paris, 1865; Dahl, Die Heilige Hildegardis, Mainz, 1852. The story of the philosopher is not found in some MSS.

A good specimen of a medical pastoral is that by the Blessed Ernestus, first Archbishop of Prague, De Remediis Spiritualibus in Peste Adhibendis, written 1349, during the "black death" (in Balbinus, Miscel. Hist. Regni Bohemiæ, vol. viii.). But the secular powers outdid the spiri

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tual in this direction. Thus the Emperor Justinian justifies the severity of his law against blasphemy (Novella, xxviii.) by saying that that habit is a common cause of plagues, famines, and earthquakes: and nearly a thousand years later Kaiser Maximilian attributes a like origin to a disease which might with some show of reason be considered a Divine punishment, declaring in his edict against profane language (1495) that "this is the undoubted cause of that horrible disease known as the 'malum francicum' which has recently appeared among us".

For Bishop Kirkham see the Sacrorum Conciliorum Collectio, xxiii. 901.

XLIII. THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING.

THE Renaissance or age of reformation has been compared to a tree which puts forth fresh buds and blossoms in springtime while the withered leaves of the previous autumn still hang thick upon its branches, and the image may very fairly be applied to the changes which then took place in the healing art. Though we date the beginning of a new epoch in this as in other departments of human knowledge from the invention of printing and the revival of Greek in the middle of the fifteenth century, nearly 200 years elapsed before the new spirit could be said to have become predominant in medicine. The fruits of the physical sciences ripen more slowly than do the more direct products of the intellect, and it was not till a century after Raphael and Luther that the world was ready for Harvey and Galileo. The influences of the age, however, manifested themselves during this interval in many ways, the more important of which will now be briefly considered.

To take first the revival of classical learning. This begins, from the point of view of the medical historian, with the year 1443, when Thomas of Sarzana, afterwards Pope Nicholas V., discovered in the church of St. Ambrose, at Milan, a manuscript of the De Medicina of Cornelius. Celsus, which had disappeared for many centurics. It was one of the first medical books printed, and gave the physicians

of the age their earliest opportunity of studying the best side of the Hippocratic medicine undimmed by the medium of imperfect translations. Ten years later came the fall of Constantinople, and the dispersal of Greek teachers and Greek manuscripts throughout Western Europe. Among the scholars and critics who now sprang up on every side physicians hold a prominent place. At Ferrara, Nicholas Leonicenus translated the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, and pointed out the many errors in that oracle of the middle ages the Natural History of Pliny the Elder. At Strasburg and Paris, Günther of Andernach, professor at once of Greek and of anatomy, translated Galen, Alexander, and Paulus into classical Latin. At Metz, Anutius Foesius devoted forty years of his life to producing a worthy edition of the works of the Father of Medicine. Meanwhile, our own Linacre was studying physic at Padua and Greek at Florence, where he perhaps took from the Platonic Academy established by the Medici the model of that more famous Royal College of Physicians which he himself founded in London (1518). These are but a few of the medical philologists of the age, and it is interesting to notice that representatives of the Teutonic nations, England and Germany, now become the rivals, and even the teachers of the French and Italians, John Kaye (Caius) lecturing on Aristotle at Padua, while Günther of Andernach taught anatomy at Paris.

The substitution of the works of Celsus and Hippocrates for bad translations from Galen and Avicenna was a great advance, and had, as we shall soon see, a marked effect on medical practice. But the revival of learning gave birth to something of yet greater import and of far wider influence— the spirit of criticism, which, beginning with the disputes of grammarians, gradually invaded every department of human thought and action. When not only passages, but whole treatises, hitherto believed to have been written by Galen or Hippocrates, were shown to be doubtful or spurious, it was natural that men should look for some higher criterion of medical truth than imperfect manuscripts, or still more