The truth is, that medicine, professedly founded on observation, is as
sensitive to outside influences, political, religious, philosophical,
imaginative, as is the barometer to the changes of atmospheric density.
Theoretically it ought to go on its own straightforward inductive path,
without regard to changes of government or to fluctuations of public
opinion. But look a moment while I clash a few facts together, and see
if some sparks do not reveal by their light a closer relation between the
Medical Sciences and the conditions of Society and the general thought of
the time, than would at first be suspected.
Observe the coincidences between certain great political and intellectual
periods and the appearance of illustrious medical reformers and teachers.
It was in the age of Pericles, of Socrates, of Plato, of Phidias, that
Hippocrates gave to medical knowledge the form which it retained for
twenty centuries. With the world-conquering Alexander, the
world-embracing Aristotle, appropriating anatomy and physiology, among
his manifold spoils of study, marched abreast of his royal pupil to wider
conquests. Under the same Ptolemies who founded the Alexandrian Library
and Museum, and ordered the Septuagint version of the Hebrew Scriptures,
the infallible Herophilus ["Contradicere Herophilo in anatomicis, est
contradicere evangelium," was a saying of Fallopius.
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