the fathers of Medicine. The
Arabians, sprung from the East, the storehouse of drugs and simples, and
skilled in Chemistry, were the founders of the Pharmacopoeia,[262] but
with this exception they did nothing to advance Medicine beyond the point
where the Greeks had left it. The treatises of Haly, Avicenna, and
Maimonides were little better than faint transcriptions of the writings of
the great forerunners. Their teaching was random and spasmodic, whereas
the system of Hippocrates was conceived in the spirit of Greek philosophy,
moving on by select experience, always observant and cautious, and
ascending by slow and certain steps to the generalities of Theory. Indeed
the science of Medicine in the hands of Hippocrates and his school seems,
more than any other, to have presented to the world a rudimentary essay, a
faint foreshadowing of the great fabric of inductive process, subsequently
formulated by the genius of Bacon. At various epochs Medicine had been
specially stimulated by the vivifying spirit of Greek science; in the
Roman school in the days of Celsus, and in the Arabian teaching likewise.
Fuller acknowledgment of the authority of Greek Medicine came with the
Renaissance,[263] but even this long step in advance did not immediately
liberate the art from bondage. A new generation of professors arose who
added fresh material to the storehouses, already overflowing, of pedantic
erudition, and showed the utmost contempt for any fruit of other men's
labour which might not square exactly with the utterances of the founders.
This attitude rendered these professors of Medicine the legitimate objects
of ridicule, as soon as the leaven of the revival began to work, and the
darts of satire still fly, now and then, at the same quarry. Paracelsus,
disfigured as his teaching was by mysticism, the arts of the charlatan,
and by his ignorant repudiation of the service of Anatomy, struck the
first damaging blows at this illegitimate ascendency, by the frequent
success of his empirical treatment, by the contempt he heaped upon the
scholastic authorities, and by the boldness with which he assailed every
thesis which they maintained. Men of more sober intellect and weighty
learning soon followed in his track. Fernelius, one of the physicians
Cardan met in Paris, boldly rejected what he could not approve by
experience in the writings of Hippocrates and Galen, and stood forth as
the advocate for free inquiry, and Joubert of Montpelier,