Project Gutenberg #1566
The Evolution of Modern Medicine
William Osler
1921Osler's lectures tracing medicine from antiquity to modern scientific practice, prepared chapter by chapter from Project Gutenberg HTML.
Project Gutenberg #1566 Public domain in the United States Cover source Local typographic cover created for MojiMori from public-domain source metadata
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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.