been denied by authorities who believe that it came
down from classical antiquity, but that it was not differentiated from
other scourges. The Latin name variola, like the English pox, was
applied indiscriminately to syphilis, small-pox, chicken-pox, etc.
Gonorrhea was also common. The spread of these diseases was assisted
by many causes besides the prevalent moral looseness; by lack of
cleanliness in public baths, for example.

{513} Useless to go through the whole roster of the plagues. Suffice
it to say that whatever now torments poor mortals, from tooth-ache to
cold in the head, and from rheumatism to lunacy, was known to our
ancestors in aggravated forms. Deleterious was the use of alcohol, the
evils of which were so little understood that it was actually
prescribed for many disorders of which it is a certain irritant. Add
to this the lack of sanitary measures, not only of disinfection but of
common cleanliness, and the etiology of the phenomena is satisfactorily
accounted for.

[Sidenote: Medicine]

If even now medicine as a science and an art seems backward compared
with surgery, it has nevertheless made considerable advances since it
began to be empirical. In the Middle Ages it was almost purely
dogmatic; men did not ask their eyes and minds what was the nature of
the human body and the effect of this or that drug on it, they asked
Aristotle, or Hippocrates, or Galen or Avicenna. The chief rivalries,
and they were bitter, were between the Greek and the Arabian schools.
[Sidenote: c. 1550] Galenism finally triumphed just before the
beginnings of experiment and research were made. The greatest name in
the first half of the century was that of Theophrastus Paracelsus,
[Sidenote: Paracelsus, 1493-1541] as arrant a quack as ever lived, but
one who did something to break up the strangle-hold of tradition. He
worked out his system _a priori_ from a fantastic postulate of the
parallelism between man and the universe, the microcosm and the
macrocosm. He held that the Bible gave valuable prescriptions, as in
the treatment of wounds by oil and wine.

[Sidenote: Surgery]

Under the leadership of Ambroise Pare [Sidenote: Pare, 1510-90] surgery
improved rather more than medicine. Without anaesthetics, indeed,
operations were difficult, but a good deal was accomplished. Pare
first made amputation on a large scale possible by inventing a ligature
for {514} large arteries that effectively controlled hemorrhage