ate shared by many of the masters of medicine. There were
many phases of medical practice, however, that he insisted on in his
works. He believed that the best agent for the cure of the disease was
nature, and that the physician's main business must be to find out how
nature worked, and then foster her efforts or endeavor to imitate them.
He insisted, also that personal observation, both of patients and drugs,
was more important than book knowledge. Indeed, he has some rather
strong expressions with regard to the utter valuelessness of book
information in subjects where actual experience and observation are
necessary. It gives a conceit of knowledge quite unjustified by what is
really known.

What is interesting about all these men is that they faced the same
problems in medicine that we have to, in much the same temper of mind
that we do ourselves, and that, indeed, they succeeded in solving them
almost as well as we have done, in spite of all that might be looked for
from the accumulation of knowledge ever since.

It was very fortunate for the after time that in the period now known as
the Renaissance, after the invention of printing, there were a number of
serious, unselfish scholars who devoted themselves to the publication in
fine printed editions of the works of these old-time makers of medicine.
If the neglect of them that characterized the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries had been the rule at the end of the fifteenth and
during the sixteenth century, we would almost surely have been without
the possibility of ever knowing that so many serious physicians lived
and studied and wrote large important tomes during the Middle Ages. For
our forefathers of a few generations ago had very little knowledge, and
almost less interest, as to the Middle Ages, which they dismissed simply
as the Dark Ages, quite sure that nothing worth while could possibly
have come out of the Nazareth of that time. What they knew about the
people who had lived during the thousand years before 1500 only seemed
to them to prove the ignorance and the depths of superstition in which
they were sunk. That medieval scholars should have written books not
only well worth preservation, but containing anticipations of modern
knowledge, and, though of course they could not have known that, even
significant advances over their own scientific conditions, would have
seemed to them quite absurd.

Fortunately for us, then, the editions of the early p