enturies that followed the delivery of his lectures and
still less in the art. While William of Wykeham was building Winchester
Cathedral and Chaucer was writing the Canterbury Tales, John of
Gaddesden in practice was blindly following blind leaders whose
authority no one dared question.

The truth is, from the modern standpoint the thirteenth was not the
true dawn brightening more and more unto the perfect day, but a glorious
aurora which flickered down again into the arctic night of mediaevalism.

To sum up--in medicine the Middle Ages represent a restatement from
century to century of the facts and theories of the Greeks modified here
and there by Arabian practice. There was, in Francis Bacon's phrase,
much iteration, small addition. The schools bowed in humble, slavish
submission to Galen and Hippocrates, taking everything from them but
their spirit and there was no advance in our knowledge of the structure
or function of the body. The Arabians lit a brilliant torch from Grecian
lamps and from the eighth to the eleventh centuries the profession
reached among them a position of dignity and importance to which it is
hard to find a parallel in history.

CHAPTER IV -- THE RENAISSANCE AND THE RISE OF ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY

THE "reconquest of the classic world of thought was by far the most
important achievement of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
It absorbed nearly the whole mental energy of the Italians.... The
revelation of what men were and what they wrought under the influence of
other faiths and other impulses, in distant ages with a different ideal
for their aim, not only widened the narrow horizon of the Middle Ages,
but it also restored self-confidence to the reason of humanity."(1)

(1) J. A. Symonds: The Renaissance in Italy; the Revival of
Learning, 1877, p. 52.

Everywhere throughout the Middle Ages learning was the handmaid of
theology. Even Roger Bacon with his strong appeal for a new method
accepted the dominant mediaeval conviction--that all the sciences did
but minister to their queen, Theology. A new spirit entered man's heart
as he came to look upon learning as a guide to the conduct of life.
A revolution was slowly effected in the intellectual world. It is
a mistake to think of the Renaissance as a brief period of sudden
fruitfulness in the North Italian cities. So far as science is
concerned, the thirteenth century was an aurora followed by a long
period of darkness, but