How much the physician of the Catholic Charles V. had
in common with the great religious destructive, may be guessed by the
relish with which he tells the story how certain Pavian students exhumed
the body of an "elegans scortum," or lovely dame of ill repute, the
favorite of a monk of the order of St. Anthony, who does not seem to have
resisted temptation so well as the founder of his order. We have always
ranked the physician Rabelais among the early reformers, but I do not
know that Vesalius has ever been thanked for his hit at the morals of the
religious orders, or for turning to the good of science what was intended
for the "benefit of clergy."
Our unfortunate medical brother, Michael Servetus, the spiritual patient
to whom the theological moxa was applied over the entire surface for the
cure of his heresy, came very near anticipating Harvey. The same
quickened thought of the time which led him to dispute the dogma of the
Church, opened his mind to the facts which contradicted the dogmas of the
Faculty.
Harvey himself was but the posthumous child of the great Elizabethan
period. Bacon was at once his teacher and his patient. The founder of
the new inductive philosophy had only been dead two years when the
treatise on the Circulation, the first-fruit of the Restoration of
Science, was given to the world.
And is it to be looked at as a mere accidental coincidence, that while
Napoleon was modernizing the political world, Bichat was revolutionizing
the science of life and the art that is based upon it; that while the
young general was scaling the Alps, the young surgeon was climbing the
steeper summits of unexplored nature; that the same year read the
announcement of those admirable "Researches on Life and Death," and the
bulletins of the battle of Marengo?
If we come to our own country, who can fail to recognize that Benjamin
Rush, the most conspicuous of American physicians, was the intellectual
offspring of the movement which produced the Revolution? "The same hand,"
says one of his biographers, "which subscribed the declaration of the
political independence of these States, accomplished their emancipation
from medical systems formed in foreign countries, and wholly unsuitable
to the state of diseases in America.
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