"
His teaching of medicine was no doubt chiefly clinical, and received with
the same kind of faith as that which accepted his words from the pulpit.
His notions of disease were based on what he had observed, seen always in
the light of the traditional doctrines in which he was bred. His
discourse savored of the weighty doctrines of Hippocrates, diluted by the
subtle speculations of Galen, reinforced by the curious comments of the
Arabian schoolmen as they were conveyed in the mellifluous language of
Fernelius, blended, it may be, with something of the lofty mysticism of
Van Helmont, and perhaps stealing a flavor of that earlier form of
Homoeopathy which had lately come to light in Sir Kenelm Digby's
"Discourse concerning the Cure of Wounds by the Sympathetic Powder."
His Pathology was mythology. A malformed foetus, as the readers of
Winthrop's Journal may remember, was enough to scare the colonists from
their propriety, and suggest the gravest fears of portended disaster.
The student of the seventeenth century opened his Licetus and saw figures
of a lion with the head of a woman, and a man with the head of an
elephant. He had offered to his gaze, as born of a human mother, the
effigy of a winged cherub, a pterocephalous specimen, which our Professor
of Pathological Anatomy would hardly know whether to treat with the
reverence due to its celestial aspect, or to imprison in one of his
immortalizing jars of alcohol.
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