and the conditions of Society and the general
thought of the time, than would at first be suspected.

Observe the coincidences between certain great political and
intellectual periods and the appearance of illustrious medical reformers
and teachers. It was in the age of Pericles, of Socrates, of Plato, of
Phidias, that Hippocrates gave to medical knowledge the form which it
retained for twenty centuries. With the world-conquering Alexander, the
world-embracing Aristotle, appropriating anatomy and physiology, among
his manifold spoils of study, marched abreast of his royal pupil to
wider conquests. Under the same Ptolemies who founded the Alexandrian
Library and Museum, and ordered the Septuagint version of the Hebrew
Scriptures, the infallible Herophilus ["Contradicere Herophilo in
anatomicis, est contradicere evangelium," was a saying of Fallopius.]
made those six hundred dissections of which Tertullian accused him, and
the sagacious Erasistratus introduced his mild antiphlogistic treatment
in opposition to the polypharmacy and antidotal practice of his time.
It is significant that the large-minded Galen should have been the
physician and friend of the imperial philosopher Marcus Aurelius. The
Arabs gave laws in various branches of knowledge to those whom their
arms had invaded, or the terror of their spreading dominion had reached,
and the point from which they started was, as Humboldt acknowledges,
"the study of medicine, by which they long ruled the Christian Schools,"
and to which they added the department of chemical pharmacy.

Look at Vesalius, the contemporary of Luther. Who can fail to see
one common spirit in the radical ecclesiastic and the reforming
court-physician? Both still to some extent under the dominion of the
letter: Luther holding to the real presence; Vesalius actually causing
to be drawn and engraved two muscles which he knew were not found in
the human subject, because they had been described by Galen, from
dissections of the lower animals. Both breaking through old traditions
in the search of truth; one, knife in hand, at the risk of life and
reputation, the other at the risk of fire and fagot, with that mightier
weapon which all the devils could not silence, though they had been
thicker than the tiles on the house-tops. How much the physician of the
Catholic Charles V. had in common with the great religious destructive,
may be guessed by the relish with which he tells the story how certain
Pav