has come to be known
in history as Maimonides, is of such significance in medical biography
that he deserves to have a separate sketch. Born in Spain, his life was
lived in the East, where his connection as royal physician with the
great Sultan Saladin of Crusades fame made his influence widely felt. He
is a type of the broadly educated man, conversant with the culture of
his time and of the past, knowing much besides medicine, who has so
often impressed himself deeply on medical practice. While the narrow
specialists in each generation, the men who are quite sure that they are
curing the special ills of men to which they devote themselves, have
always felt that whatever of progress there was in any given time was
due to them, they occupy but little space as a rule in the history of
medicine. The men who loom large were the broad-minded, humanely
sympathetic, deeply educated physicians, who treated men and their ills
rather than their ills without due consideration of the individual, and
who not only relieved the discomfort of their patients and greatly
lessened human suffering, and added to the sum of human happiness in
their time, but also left precious deeply significant lessons for
succeeding generations of their profession. Hippocrates, Galen,
Sydenham, Auenbrugger, Morgagni, these are representatives of this great
class, and Maimonides must be considered one of them.

Moses Ben Maimum, whose Arabic name was Abu Amran Musa Ben Maimum Obaid
Alla el-Cordovi, who was called by his Jewish compatriots Ramban or
Rambam, was born at Cordova in Spain, on the 30th of March in 1135 or
1139, the year is in doubt. It might not seem of much import now after
nearly eight centuries, but not a little ink is spilt over it yet by
devoted biographers.

We are rather prone to think in our time that the conditions in which
men were born and reared before what we are pleased to call modern
times, and, above all, in the Middle Ages, must have made a distinct
handicap for their intellectual development. Most of us are quite sure
that the conditions in medieval cities were eminently unsuited for the
stimulation of the intellect, for incentive to art impulse, for uplift
in the intellectual life, or for any such broad interest in what has
been so well called the humanities--the humanizing things that lift us
above animal necessities--as would make for genuinely liberal education.
We are likely to be set in the opinion that the environment