imself aloof from the various
schools of the day, calling no man master save Hippocrates. He might
be called a rational empiricist. He made war on the theoretical
practitioners of the day, particularly the Methodists, who, like some
of their modern followers, held that their business was with the disease
and not with the conditions out of which it arose.

No other physician has ever occupied the commanding position of
"Clarissimus" Galenus. For fifteen centuries he dominated medical
thought as powerfully as did Aristotle in the schools. Not until the
Renaissance did daring spirits begin to question the infallibility of
this medical pope. But here we must part with the last and, in many
ways, the greatest of the Greeks--a man very much of our own type, who,
could he visit this country today, might teach us many lessons. He would
smile in scorn at the water supply of many of our cities, thinking
of the magnificent aqueducts of Rome and of many of the colonial
towns--some still in use--which in lightness of structure and in
durability testify to the astonishing skill of their engineers. There
are country districts in which he would find imperfect drainage and
could tell of the wonderful system by which Rome was kept sweet and
clean. Nothing would delight him more than a visit to Panama to see what
the organization of knowledge has been able to accomplish. Everywhere
he could tour the country as a sanitary expert, preaching the gospel
of good water supply and good drainage, two of the great elements in
civilization, in which in many places we have not yet reached the Roman
standard.

CHAPTER III -- MEDIAEVAL MEDICINE

THERE are waste places of the earth which fill one with terror--not
simply because they are waste; one has not such feelings in the desert
nor in the vast solitude of the ocean. Very different is it where the
desolation has overtaken a brilliant and flourishing product of man's
head and hand. To know that

. . . the Lion and the Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep

sends a chill to the heart, and one trembles with a sense of human
instability. With this feeling we enter the Middle Ages. Following the
glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, a desolation came
upon the civilized world, in which the light of learning burned low,
flickering almost to extinction. How came it possible that the gifts
of Athens and of Alexandria were deliberately thrown away?