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Cornell University Library 
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 A century of medicine at Padua. 
 
 3 1924 012 250 282 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
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 the Cornell University Library. 
 
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A CENTURY OF MEDICINE AT PADUA. 
 
A CENTURY OF MEDICINE 
 AT PADUA. 
 
 By 
 
 SIR GEORGE NEWMAN, K.C.B., M.D.. D.C.L. 
 
 Emeritus Lecturer on Public Health 
 at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London. 
 
 BRITISH PERIODICALS, LTD., 
 170, FLEET ST., LONDON. E.C.4. 
 
 1922. 
 
 PRICE ONE SHILLING. 
 
TO 
 
 THE MEDICAL STUDENTS 
 
 OF 
 
 ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S HOSPITAL, LONDON 
 
 ON THE STAFF OF WHICH 
 
 WILLIAM HARVEY 
 
 SERVED AS PHYSICIAN, 1609—1643. 
 
A Century of Medicine at Padua. 
 
 I stood alone, musing, in the deserted quadrangle 
 of the old University at Padua on a sunny spring 
 morning in the year of oiir Lord, 192 1. The day 
 had just begun. Outside the college gates the 
 contadini unladened their panniers and displayed 
 their goods, and "the forum all alive with buyers 
 and with sellers was humming like a hive." But 
 within there was peace, and my thoughts lingered 
 on the academic past of this ancient Mother and of 
 her illustrious children who had gone forth from 
 this place to the ends of the earth. 
 
 It was in 1595 that Shakes,peare put into the lips 
 of Lucentio in The Tamin^wf the Shrew the words : 
 
 "Sinc6 fpr the great desire I had 
 To see fair Padua, nursery of arts, 
 I am arrived for fruitful Lombardy 
 The pleasant garden of great Italy 
 .... for I have Pisa left 
 And am to Padua come, as he that leaves 
 A shallow plash to plunge him in the deep 
 And with satiety seeks to quench his thirst." 
 
 That was Padua's time of zenith as the first medi- 
 cal school of Italy, the country which was the birth- 
 
8 A CENTURY OF MEDICINE 
 
 place of the medical university of the West. In the 
 eleventh century Salerno, in the twelfth Bologna, 
 and in the thirteenth Padua, as our American 
 cousins say, 'blazed the trail' and prepared for the 
 grand sweep of the Renaissance. Before the close 
 of the Middle Ages Italy possessed a score of ex- 
 amples of universitas, schola, or studium generale. 
 The terms fluctuated as did the students, and some- 
 times a pope and sometimes an emperor was patron. 
 The condition of their existence — ^for they can 
 scarce be said to have been founded — ^was dependent 
 at first upon a variety of factors, not the least being 
 the migration of students, the presence of libraries 
 or teachers, national politics, commercial activities, 
 and the willingness or otherwise of communes to 
 receive them and provide accommodation at a low 
 cost. Thus it came about that the university at 
 Padua was a daughter of Bologna, initiated by a 
 secession of students from the elder institution in 
 1222. Six years later a secondary migration took 
 place to Vercelli beyond Milan, leaving the studium 
 at Padua bereft, but not extinct, and faced with the 
 tyranny of Ezzelino. 
 
 The revival of Padua came inxa^, due to the com- 
 mune granting additional privileges ariffto further 
 immigration from Bologna . In the fourteenth century 
 the city conceded full university rights, and the 
 studium developed into two universities, that of the 
 jurists and that of the humanists — ^the universitas 
 artistarum (including medicine) being subordinate to 
 the universitas juristarum, which was the larger, 
 richer and more dominant. In each university the 
 students were enrolled as "nations," each nation 
 electing concilarii, who formed with the Rectors the 
 
AT PADUA. 9 
 
 executive of the university. In the fifteenth cen- 
 tury collegia, or hostels, were established and Padua 
 rose to be one of the great universities of the learned 
 world. To it flocked men from all parts of Europe. 
 
 There were two particular reasons -why Padua 
 flourished as the seat of a university. First, she 
 made her way in the Lombard league and became 
 the head of the towns of the Marches. As in 
 Florence so in Padua, there were internecine strug- 
 gles between guelf and ghibelline, though the terms 
 did not bear the same or even a continuous mean- 
 ing. Chroniclers in the thirteenth and fourteenth 
 centuries were anti-imperial and yearned for a re- 
 publican golden age. The House of Este (ancestors 
 of our own royal dynasty), the families of 
 Camposanpiero, of Romano, and of Carrara were 
 destined at different times to rule in Padua, and 
 their feuds and fortunes, and their conflicts with 
 the people, spell out the long story of her struggle 
 for independence. Victory placed her in a pre- 
 dominant position among her peers, and her favour- 
 able situation in the plains of Lombardy made her 
 not only something of a health resort, to which her 
 healing springs contributed, but a natural emporium 
 for the wool and thread spinning industries. Thus 
 in the thirteenth century she was ready to cultivate 
 the arts of peace, and her Bishop being then in 
 Bologna enticed two of its professors to join 
 Albertus Magnus, the teacher of Thomas Aquinas, 
 at Padua. So began the long line of distinguished 
 teachers who made her fame. 
 
 The second reason for the ultimate emergence of 
 the university at Padua was the protection of 
 Venice. Between them there had been an inter- 
 
lO A CENTURY OF MEDICINE 
 
 mittent history of concord and strife. In the four- 
 teenth century "great friendship" obtained, which 
 ended in the absorption of Padua in the Venetian 
 State, and her political history from the beginning 
 of the fifteenth century onwards melts into the 
 wider world of Venetian policy. Under the auspices 
 of thfe Signory, learning at Padua began to sow 
 seeds which in after years brought forth a rich 
 harvest. Within her walls were gathered many of 
 the great men of the time, and they fed her with 
 seminal thought. The Signory patronised and en- 
 couraged them, paid part or all of their salaries, 
 conferred honours and privileges on the Rector of 
 Padua, and required students of Venice to study 
 there. Indeed, as Dean Rashdall says, a period of 
 study at Padua was "required as a qualification for 
 the exercise of public functions at Venice. Padua 
 became, in fact, the university town, or, as M. 
 Renan styled it, the quartier latin of Venice ; while 
 the tolerance which under the protection of the 
 great commercial Republic long defied the fury of 
 the catholic reaction, attracted an exceptional 
 number of students, especially medical students, 
 from England and the Protestant countries." This 
 substantial protection of Venice, lying as it did out- 
 side the Papal States, drew the most famous teachers 
 of Medicine to Padua, provided exceptional facilities 
 and equipment for tTie anatomical dissection of the 
 human body, shielded non-Catholic students from 
 papal importunity, and was some surety of personal 
 safety, unavailable in the German universities and 
 even in other centres of learning in Italy. 
 
 There was yet one other far-reaching advantage 
 which Padua enjoyed from its allegiance to the Re- 
 
AT PADUA. II 
 
 public. For 400 years Venice was Byzantine in 
 thought and deed, and Byzantium had, as Sir 
 ClifFord Allbutt has reminded us, conserved and 
 embalmed and kept in safe custody that strange 
 amalgam, Greek Medicine — a broad and living 
 stream of medical knowledge and experience de- 
 rived from many remote sources. Byzantine in- 
 fluences reached Padua through Ravenna and 
 through Venice. The Tenth century tomb of 
 St. Mark at Venice was built in Byzantine style, 
 modelled on Santa Sophia, and a vast store- 
 house of Byzantine relic and treasure ; Venetian 
 mosaics were wrought by Greeks ; many madonnas 
 and saints of Venice are Greek in aspect ; its library 
 is Greek in foundation ; and before the early 
 Renaissance Venice was "rather a Greek than an 
 Italian city." Its argosies had sailed the seas, and 
 during the fourth Crusade Doge Enrico Dandolo 
 had won Constantinople, and thus the little Re- 
 public had vanquished the capital of the Eastern 
 Empire. Though steady penetration of Greek in- 
 spiration had been going on for generations the world 
 influence of Venice dates from that event. After 
 that she stood at the gate of the East. She became 
 the carrier of the nations. Her ships exported the 
 fruits of Lombardy and brought back the timber of 
 Dalmatia, the wares of Constantinople, the wines 
 of the ^gean, the spices of Egypt, and the silks of 
 Bagdad and the far Orient. And with this mer- 
 chandise came back manuscripts and drugs. 
 
 Greece thus came to Venice 200 years before her 
 imiversity existed at Padua, and for four centuries 
 the East had enriched her blood. Greek thought 
 had, of course, influenced Italy from the days of 
 
12 A CENTURY OF MEDICINE 
 
 the Greek colonies in Magna Graecia, 700 years be- 
 fore Christ, but here at Venice though the harvest 
 was late the aftermath was sure. The restoration 
 of Greek letters was prosecuted by a series of en- 
 voys, fugitives, merchants and manuscript collec- 
 tors. Cardinal Bessarion, a Greek, and the founder 
 of the Library of St. Mark, Leontius Pilatus, 
 Aurispa, who brought 238 manuscripts to Venice in 
 1423, Francesco Filelfo, who brought another 
 similar cargo four years later, Andrea Dandolo, the 
 Doge, chronicler and historian. Professor of Law 
 at Padua — ^these and many others came before the 
 Fall of Constantinople in 1453 and before the Medici 
 Academy had been established at Florence, and 
 they filled the libraries of northern Italy with 
 treasures of learning from the Bast. 
 
 Two circumstances made their work more than 
 fleeting. In the fourteenth century Petrarch, "the 
 harbinger of day," as Gibbon calls him, and his 
 friend Boccaccio, were there at hand, hungry to as- 
 similate the Greek learning and fix it in Western cul- 
 ture. This they did. Their work was assisted and 
 made durable by Aldus Manutus, who at the end of 
 the next century set up his printing press at Venice 
 and for the first time put into type some of the princi- 
 pal works of Greek literature , Thus it came aboutthaf 
 at the end of the fifteenth century Padua, the Uni- 
 versity of Venice, found itself protected, equipped, 
 ready and waiting for a golden age. The Republic 
 and its merchants had secured for it independence 
 of thought and study, the tide of history travelling 
 on the great road from the Adriatic coast had left 
 its mark upon it, and liberal thinkers from other 
 nations began to bring their glory and honour into it. 
 
AT PADUA. 
 
 II. 
 
 13 
 
 The unique advantages which Venice thus be- 
 stowed on Padua attracted our own fellow country- 
 men to its University. Thomas Linacre, the 
 founder of the College of Physicians of London, and 
 the friend of Grocyn, John Colet, Sir Thomas More 
 and Erasmus, was one of the earliest of the English 
 students to seek, at the end of the fifteenth century, 
 a medical education at Padua. About 1485 he 
 travelled to Italy with his former master. Selling of 
 Canterbury, who had been appointed Ambassador 
 by Henry VII. at Rome. He visited Bologna and 
 lived at the Court of, Lorenzo the Magnificent at 
 Florence, sharing with his two sons, Piero and 
 Giovanni, the tuition of Politian and Chalcondyles. 
 A year later after visiting Rome he went to Padua, 
 where he took the degree of Doctor of Medicine. 
 On his return he translated Aristotle and Galen, 
 practised physic, became physician to the King, 
 and with his friends introduced the New Learning 
 to England. He was the outstanding type of medi- 
 cal humanist. Forty years later Edward Wootton 
 followed his example. He subsequently became 
 physician to Henry VIII. and was the first of our 
 English physicians to become an eminent natural- 
 ist and to include the study of zoology in the medi- 
 cal curriculum. Another of the early English stu- 
 dents at Padua was John Caius, who worked under 
 Montanus and Vesalius from 1539 to 1541, lodging 
 in the house of the latter. He became illustrious 
 both as anatomist and classical scholar. He was 
 professor of Greek in the university co-operating 
 with Realdus Colombus on the Greek text of 
 
14 A CENTURY OF MEDICINE 
 
 Aristotle. In 1543 he visited the libraries of Italy 
 collecting manuscripts with the object of bringing 
 to England the fullest knowledge obtainable of 
 Galen, of Celsus, and of the learning of the Renais- 
 sance. He was one of the re-founders of Gonville 
 and Caius College, Cambridge, physician to Queen 
 Elizabeth, and President of the College of Physi- 
 cians. He was the first to introduce the study of 
 practical anatomy in this country and the earliest 
 publicly to teach it. He also was a naturalist and 
 likewise an epidemiologist, having been the first to 
 describe the sweating sickness. Gesner told the 
 Queen that Caius was "the most learned physician 
 of his age." 
 
 Half a century passed before the arrival of 
 William Harvey, the most famous English student 
 who went to Padua. He was the son of Thomas 
 Harvey, yeoman, of Folkestone, and was born in 
 1578. He studied at Caius College, Cambridge, 
 and reached Padua probably in i6cx), attending the 
 lectures of Fabricius in anatomy, Minadous in 
 medicine, and Casserius in surgery. He was a 
 member of the more aristocratic universitas jurist- 
 arum, which admitted a few selected medical 
 students to its ranks. He was elected a concilarius 
 of the English nation and his coat of arms, or 
 stemma, was displayed in the court yard of the 
 University where it was discovered in 1893 — 
 "Gulielmus Harveus Anglus." He probably 
 graduated in 1602 and returned to England. His 
 Lumleian lectures on the Circulation of the Blood 
 were delivered before the College of Physicians in 
 the spring of 1616, the year of the death of Shake- 
 speare and Cervantes, and his immortal book, 
 
 The sentenoe five lines (ram loot, page 14, ehould read : 
 "He graduated In 1t02 and probably relumed to England." 
 
AT PADUA. 15 
 
 "Exercitatio Anatomica de motu cordis et san- 
 guinis in animalibus" was published at Frankfort 
 in 1628. He was appointed 'physician to St. 
 Bartholomew's Hospital and to Charles I., and died 
 in 1657. 
 
 Many English and Scotch students followed these 
 great examples and crossed the Alps to study at 
 Padua in the days before Leyden made disciples of 
 Englishmen. Their thirst for knowledge and their 
 ambition to drink at Italian sources emboldened 
 them to undergo the rigours of the enterprise. The 
 journey itself, as we know from the colloquies of 
 Erasmus, the journals of Luther and the diary of 
 Evelyn, was sufl&ciently tedious and formidable. 
 The sufferings of Erasmus during his continental 
 travels are described by him to Linacre and Colet 
 in his letters of 1500-1518, and nearly 150 years 
 later Evelyn gives us an account of his return 
 journey from Padua over the Simplon to London. 
 In the time of Erasmus the mode of progress was 
 by pack-horse, but Evelyn travelled also by coach. 
 Whatever the mode the monasteries, inns and cara- 
 vanserai furnished abundant discomfort, nor were 
 the dangers of the way inconsiderable. Seebohm 
 writes in the Oxford Reformers : 
 
 "One room serves for all comers, and in this one room, 
 heated like a stove, some eighty or ninety guests have al- 
 ready stowed themselves — ^boots, baggage, dirt and all. 
 Their wet clothes hang on the stove iron to dry, while they 
 wait for their supper. There are footmen and horsemen, 
 merchants, sailors, waggoners, husbandmen, children and 
 women — sound and sick — combing their heads, wiping their 
 brows, cleaning their boots, stinking of garlic, and making 
 as great a confusion of tongues as there was at the building 
 
1 6 A CENTURY OF MEDICINE 
 
 of Babel ! At length in the midst of the din and stifling 
 closeness of this heated room, supper is spread — a coarse 
 and ill-cooked meal,. — Which our scholar scarcely dares to 
 touch, and yet is obliged to sit out to the end for courtesy's 
 sake. And when past midnight Erasmus is shown to his 
 bed-chamber, he finds it to be rightly named — there is 
 nothing in it but a bed; and the last and hardest task of the 
 day is now to find between its rough unwashed sheets some 
 chance hours of repose. So, almost in his own words, did 
 Erasmus fare on his way to Italy." 
 
 There were three or four routes from England 
 to Padua, through France or Germany and over 
 the Alps, or by sea to Genoa or Naples, or by sea to 
 Venice and thence by road or canal. The usual 
 route was that of the Simplon to Milan and thence 
 by Bergamo, Brescia, and Verona. As the English 
 student of the sixteenth century, taking this route, 
 emerged from the hills and tramped or rode down 
 the valley of the Bacchiglione he saw before him a 
 brown walled city of the plains, embowered in a 
 garden of fields and vineyards. On the north he 
 would see, within the walls, the solitary square 
 spire of the thirteenth century Church of the 
 Eretami, immortalised by Mantegna and under the 
 shadow of which Giotto painted his frescoes on the 
 walls of the arena chapel ; in the middle of the 
 city rose the tower of the Palazzo del Podesta 
 and to its right hand the domes and minarets of the 
 glorious Franciscan Church of St. Antonio, the 
 beloved friar, which had been the pride of Padua 
 for 200 years, and which enshrines the work of 
 Donatello ; at the southern end, he could not over- 
 look the thirteenth century fortress of Ezzelino on 
 the wall, and the new campanile and glistening cupo- 
 las of St. Justina, the tomb of the saints ; and for the 
 
AT PADUA. 17 
 
 rest the stranger would look dow-n upon the grey 
 roofs and bell-towers of a medieval town. He would 
 pass into the city from the open country through 
 the Porta Giovanni, under the shadow of the 
 Duomo, or possibly over the Roman bridge through 
 the forbidding and imperious Porta Molino, and 
 once inside he would find himself in dark, tortuous 
 and narrow streets, arched and lined with arcades 
 (the portici) and over-hanging storeys with small 
 latticed windows. 
 
 The students' quarters lay to the east of the 
 University, itself an old palace of the Maltraversi, 
 situated in the heart of the city. Over the gateway 
 was the Lion of St. Mark with the legend, Gym- 
 nasium omnium Disciplinarum, and above the 
 escutcheon of the Doge of Venice the words. Sic 
 ingrede ut te ipso quotidie doctior evadas. The 
 student passed into a magnificent courtyard sur- 
 rounded by a Doric colonnade and an upper 
 loggia with Ionic columns — ^the loggia, the stair- 
 cases, and the aula magna, the hall of the Uni- 
 versity, bearing on their walls the escutcheons, 
 frescoed or sculptured, of former students. The 
 University was nicknamed II bo, perhaps be- 
 cause for a short period the palace had been used 
 as the ox inn {osteria del bo), perhaps because 
 the ox -tax of the city was paid into the University 
 coffers. Round about the University, then as now, 
 were situated the classrooms and technical labora- 
 tories, though in recent years the special medical 
 and surgical departments have grown up in the 
 vicinity of the hospital and Medical School in the 
 Via del Fallopio, not far from the famous Physic 
 Garden (and of which Fallopius ""was Keeper) 
 
1 8 A CENTURY OF MEDICINE 
 
 founded in 1545, when the medieval herb als had 
 come into usel Between~tlie~ifie\rTnni3[mgs and 
 the ^JnirerSffy still run the old narrow streets and 
 arcades, which in the sixteenth century were 
 crowded with the students of all nations. There 
 still remains the ancient grandeur, the stigmata of 
 the fourteenth century, and the symbols of the art 
 and literature and architecture of the Renaissance. 
 Arrived in Padua the wandering student of the 
 sixteenth century was required to live under Spartan 
 conditions. He was often poor, and like Luther, 
 begged his bread. Food though cheap was inade- 
 quate and ill-assorted ; the houses were dismal, the 
 lattice windows were often filled with sheets of linen ; 
 the beds were rough and unkempt ; artificial light 
 was expensive and poor; and there was an almost 
 entire absence of healthy recreation and amuse- 
 ment — periodical wild orgies of students, "too 
 horrid and petulant mirth," being the natural re- 
 action. The medical session began on St. Luke's 
 Day in the autumn of each year and lasted until 
 August. During the ten months the whole human 
 body was twice dissected in public by the professor 
 of anatomy. These were formal occasions and the 
 attendance became so large that a sort of wooden 
 barrack or tabernacle was built to serve as an an- 
 atomical theatre. In 1593, after Fabricius had been 
 professor for thirty years, the Venetian authorities 
 erected for him a small circular theatre which still 
 exists, and here Harvey learned at his feet. The 
 lectures on anatomy were delivered at nine o'clock 
 in the morning, but others as early as six o'clock, 
 and in the summer almost at day break. In the 
 adjoining aula magna Galileo taught mathematics. 
 
AT PADUA. 19 
 
 though many of his popular astronomical lectures 
 were delivered in the open air. The courtyard and 
 the loggia hummed with the sound of many voices 
 as groups of eager students discussed the rapid 
 march of knowledge or the acquisition of new truth. 
 
 III. 
 
 In its golden age Padua was a very wonderful 
 place. Both place and age stood at the dawn. For 
 there and then the sixteenth century left its in- 
 delible imprint on the youth of all nations and on 
 the generations following. One of the oldest cities 
 in Italy Patavia came under the Roman supremacy 
 more than 200 years before Christ. In the fifth 
 century it was destroyed by Attila the Hun, and the 
 new city was taken by Agiluff the Lombard a 
 hundred years later. From the Lombards it passed 
 to the Franks, and during the guelf and ghibelline 
 quarrels it alternately submitted to, or was con- 
 quered by, the tyrants and emperors or the 
 Lombard league. In 13 18 it took to itself as lord 
 the head of the Carrara family, Jacopo, the patron 
 of Petrarch, whose family ruled it, until, in 1405, it 
 became a republic, passing within the dominion of 
 Venice in 1509. Under the shadow of the wings of 
 the Lion of St. Mark, faithful and beautiful daughter 
 of Venice it remained — ^the fair possessor of price- 
 less treasure in art and architecture. There it 
 stands to-day a monument and embodiment of the 
 Middle Ages, lying in the rich and fertile plains 
 which for centuries proved its snare — ^the snare 
 
20 A CENTURY OF MEDICINE 
 
 which wak predicted by Thucydides — between the 
 Euganean Hills and the sea, with all the Alps 
 lying to the north and to the south the long low 
 stretch of the Marches away to Ravenna. 
 
 The glory which is Padua is, however, not in stone 
 but in human endeavour : the birthplace of Livy 
 and of Mantegna ; the home of Petrarch ; the land of 
 the exile of Cosimo de Medici, patron of learning 
 (accompanied by his friend Michelozzo, the Floren- 
 tine sculptor) and of Palla Strozzi, the scholar and 
 collector of Greek literature, and, last and greatest 
 of the banished heroes, of Dante Alighieri ; the work- 
 shop of Giotto and Donatello and Squarcion6; the 
 university of Dandolo, Vesalius, Frai^CaJtorius, 
 Fabricius and Galileo; the medical school of 
 Linacre, Wootton, Cains and Harvey; the haunt 
 of Tasso and Ariosto and Boccaccio. What a galaxy ! 
 What immortal Works of art, literature and healing 
 spring from the deeds of these men. Is it surprising 
 that there should come to drink at this source a long 
 procession of thirsty -students and seekers of all 
 nations, over the Alps and over the sea? Is it 
 astonishing that Padua proved to be the foster 
 mother of some of the most dynamic of the new and 
 liv/ing forces of Medicine, and which gave it renais- 
 sance when the light of morning broke. over the 
 West ? f And we may remember that, when daylight 
 ca^ne, the Revival of Medicine passed in the direct 
 line from PadUST to Leyden, from Leyden under 
 Boerhaave to Edinburgh, and from Edinburgh 
 under Alexander Monro and William CuUen in the 
 eighteenth century to the great medical schools of 
 the New World — to Philadelphia, Columbia and 
 HarvarcT. 
 
AT PADUA. 31 
 
 IV. 
 
 (a) 
 
 Who were these prophets of Medicine at Padua 
 and what did they do ? The forerunner was a young 
 Belgian of 22 years of age, seeing visions. His 
 name was Andreas Vesalius and he was born at 
 Brussels in 1515, his father being apothecary to 
 Charles V., and his mother an Englishwoman, 
 named Isabella Crabbe. He was educated at 
 Louvain and Leyden, and naturally turning ta 
 medicine, studied anatomy under Sylvius in Paris. 
 He served as a military surgeon in Flanders in 1536 
 and lectured in Italy in 1537. Subsequently in the 
 same year he set his face to Venice to seek the 
 patronage of its far-sighted rulers. In Decem- 
 ber he received the degree of Doctor of Medi- 
 cine at their University of Padua and was en- 
 trusted with the teaching of Anatomy. No sooner 
 was he installed as professor than he introduced, 
 in 1538, the new method of dissection and demon- 
 stration. This was the beginning of an incom- 
 parable century of Medicine at Padua. Instead of 
 merely reading Galen — ^whose books had fixed medi- 
 cal knowlege for 1,400 years — Vesalius began to 
 study the human body, to be guided by what he 
 found and what he could see rather than by Galen. 
 Nature, and not books, observation, and not 
 authority, was the new method. The young men 
 of Padua answered to the new voice and the new 
 way, they saw instinctively that it was right, and 
 an epoch began. The undisputed sway of the 
 written word ended, and Vesalius declared in un- 
 compromising fashion what he saw with his own 
 
Z2 A CENTURY OF MEDICINE 
 
 eyes and handled with his own hands. "I had to 
 put my own hand to the business," said he. Five 
 years he thus spent in untiring labour, always with 
 the vision yet not weaving webs of fancy, tracking 
 out the structure of the human body as it actually 
 is, dissecting it, demonstrating it to the crowds of 
 students who hung on his words, and finally record- 
 ing it in the folio pages of his Fabrica Huntani 
 Corporis, published at Basel in 1543, a lucid and 
 orderly survey of acquired facts. "This book," 
 said Sir Michael Foster, "is the beginning not 
 only of modern anatomy but of modern physi- 
 ology. . . Upon the publication of the Fabrica the 
 pall of authority was once and for ever removed." 
 It ended, for all time, the long reign of fourteen 
 centuries of precedent ; it began in a true sense the 
 renaissance of Medicine. It added immensely to the 
 knowledge of the body, it introduced a true method 
 of science, above ail, it engendered a new spirit. 
 Others had dissected before him in Alexandria, 
 at Salerno, and elsewhere. Mundinus in 13 15, and 
 Carpi in 1 5 2 1 , had advanced the study of Anatomy at 
 Bologna and proved themselves the forerunners of 
 Vesalius — the anatomical painters of the fifteenth 
 century, Verrochio, da Vinci, Diirer and Signorelli 
 had used surface anatomy. in the fine arts — ^but he 
 it was who established and tilled the ground they 
 had gained, and who opened the new book of Nature. 
 "Vesalius was the first to collect on a large scale," 
 says Dr. Klebs, "the accumulated mass of anatomi- 
 cal facts he had obtained from his predecessors, 
 notably Galen. By his own observations he was 
 able to correct some of them and to add new ones. 
 The descriptive, systematic and especially graphic 
 
ANDREAS VESALIUS. 
 
AT PADUA. 23 
 
 presentation of his great anatomic knowledge in a 
 most impressive outward form was bound to exert 
 a reformatory influence. This is without doubt 
 his own intellectual deed." His brilliant and 
 vigorous advocacy brought down upon him envy 
 and opposition, and in 1544 he left Padua to ' 
 become court physician to Charles V. and sub- 
 sequently to Philip. He died at Zante on his 
 way back from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 
 1564 — ^the year of the death of that other great 
 anatomist, the painter Michaelangelo. He was 
 succeeded in the professorship by Realdous 
 Colombus, one of his pupils, who, following 
 Michael Servetus the Martyr, correctly described 
 the pulmonary circulation. In 155 1 Colombus 
 was succeeded by Gabriel Fallopius, who studied 
 the anatomy of the pelvis, and who in his turn was 
 followed by Fabricius, Casserius and Spigelius — 
 all in the apostolic succession, all keeping alive the 
 Vesalian fire, all laying anew the foundations of 
 anatomy and physiology.. In England this was 
 done by John Caius, friend and pupil of Vesalius 
 at Padua. 
 
 Three years after the issue of the Fabrica at 
 Basel there appeared from the printing press at 
 Venice a remarkable book, De Contagione by 
 Hieronymous Fracastorius, poet and physician, of 
 Verona. He was born in that city in 1483 and was 
 sent to Padua for his medical education. After the 
 Venetian, War of 1509 he settled as a medical prac- 
 titioner at Verona and cultivated the love of science. 
 
24 A CENTURY OF MEDICINE 
 
 literature and philosophy he had acquired at Padua. 
 He lived the greater part of the year on the Caphian 
 Hills overlooking Lago di Garda, and here, at the 
 age of 47, he brooded over the severity of the times 
 and the cruelty aiid injustice of which he had been 
 the witness in his native city, the aftermath of the 
 wars between Francis I. and Charles V., and be- 
 tween the imperial and republican factions of 
 Verona. He has left us a stanza of his sombre 
 thoughts : 
 
 To what estate, O wretched Italy, 
 Has civil strife reduc'd and moulder'd thee ! 
 Where now are all thy ancient glories hurl'd ? 
 Where is thy boasted Empire of the world ? 
 What nook in thee from barbarous Rage is freed 
 And has not seen thy captive children bleed ? 
 
 But Fracastorius had a more constructive message 
 to leave behind than this sad note. For here in his 
 country villa he wrote the two medical books which 
 brought him fame. The first was a poem, Morbus 
 Gallicus, printed at Verona in 1530, the second was 
 De Contagione in 1546. In his medical practice 
 Fracastorius had seen many cases of syphilis, 
 plague, epidemic typhus and consumption, and his 
 book is a record of his views as to the contagion of 
 these diseases by seeds or semina, which could, he 
 believed, be generated spontaneously. He de- 
 scribed three separate modes of infection, (a) by 
 personal contact, (b) by intermediate agents, 
 fomites, and (c) by aerial convection. He likens the 
 first form to putrefaction passing from one grape or 
 pear to another (as he had observed it in his garden), 
 the seminaria contagionum being carried from one 
 to another. The second mode is, he says, the same 
 
AT PADUA. 25 
 
 in principle though the seeds, or virus, may remain 
 intact and active for long periods. Infection con- 
 veyed by air is more subtle and penetrating, and 
 takes many different forms, some attacking animals 
 and others man ; some the old and others the young, 
 some one organ of the body as the eye, others 
 deeper organs, like the lungs. Fracastorius com- 
 pared the process of contagion with fermentation of 
 wine, two centuries before Pasteur, and he differ- 
 entiated poisons from infections, showing that the 
 former are not able to multiply or reproduce in the 
 individual an agent capable of attacking another 
 person . He introduced the term ' ' syphilis ," and was 
 one of the earliest to describe the disease ; he also 
 described typhus fever and differentiated it from 
 plague and other current pestilences ; and he argued 
 that consumption was a contagious disease con- 
 tracted by habitual residence with a consumptive, 
 and that the infection may remain attached to cloth- 
 ing or house. 
 
 Mercurialis said that Fracastorius first opened 
 men's eyes to the nature of contagion, and Dr. 
 Charles Singer considers that he was the first writer 
 to place "the theory of infectious diseases on a firm 
 and rational foundation." His doctrine of spon- 
 taneous generation was disproved by Redi, and some 
 of his views were dispelled by the invention of the 
 microscope. His works were widely read and con- 
 stituted the culmination of the medical conceptions 
 of the Renaissance in regard to infection. He 
 gathered up the evidence of three centuries and 
 stimulated future study in these matters by 
 Fallopius at Padua, and the great Jerome Cardan 
 of Pavia. His conceptions were studied critically 
 
26 A CENTURY OF MEDICINE 
 
 in England by Sydenham, put into operation by 
 Richard Mead and Sir John Pringle in the 
 eighteenth century, and scientifically proved dur- 
 ing the nineteenth by Pasteur, Koch and their dis- 
 ciples. Fracastorius died 'mid Caphian Hills' in 
 1553, and monuments were erected to his memory 
 at Padua. "The age in which he lived," wrote his 
 biographer, "saw nothing equal to his learning but 
 his honesty." 
 
 (c) 
 
 There is a small Tuscan town in the valley of the 
 Paglio, near Orvieto, named Acquapendente, and 
 there in 1537 was born in humble circumstances 
 Hieronymous Fabricius. Though his parents were 
 poor they contrived to send their boy to Padua to 
 study medicine under Fallopius. His progress was 
 so rapid that in eight or nine years he was called to 
 the famous chair of Vesalius, but though the latter 
 was professor for only five years Fabricius of 
 Acquapendente reigned for upwards of forty, re- 
 ceiving from the Venetian republic the supreme 
 honour of the gold chain of the Order of St. Mark. 
 It was for him they built the new Anatomy theatre 
 to celebrate thirty years' service, and in that theatre 
 Tie taught Harvey. 
 
 Fabricius was a distinguished surgeon and 
 scholar as well as anatomist. Above all he was a 
 naturalist and taught the comparative structure of 
 all animals. He wrote a book, De formatione ovi, 
 in which he described the development of the chick 
 in the egg, and in his De Respiratione, on which 
 Tie was working when Harvey came to Padua, he 
 
AT PADUA. 
 
 27 
 
 sets out his knowledge of the mechanism of breath- 
 ing and of locomotion. On the subject of the circu- 
 lation he was a Galenist, though he added new 
 knowledge as to the form, position and distribution 
 of the valves of the veins, which he described as 
 "little doors." His book on Venarum ostiolis was 
 published in 1574.. He believed that these valves 
 delayed the flow of blood — ^which Galen-like he as- 
 sumed was "crude" blood travelling from the heart 
 to the tissues — so that the limbs should not become 
 congested with too great a flow of blood. Fabricius, 
 who also wrote on the eye and ear, the structure 
 and functions of the skin, the larynx and speech, 
 was an enthusiastic teacher and investigator, with 
 generous sympathies and a keen sense of the re- 
 sponsibilities of his position, an all-round workman 
 — anatomist, physiologist, surgeon, embryologist, 
 historian. He exerted immense influence on 
 generations of students and vastly extended the 
 reputation of Padua. 
 
 It was from this man that Harvey learned com- 
 parative anatomy, physiology and embryology, and 
 from him too he also learned to be a medical human- 
 ist. But the venerable old man was a Galenist and 
 the dead hand of the Pergamite lay heavy upon him. 
 "So strong was the hold upon his mind of concep- 
 tions coming down from the past," said Sir Michael 
 Foster, "that Fabricius 's eyes were blinded to the 
 facts staring him in the face, and his ears were deaf 
 to voices crying out new views." He was 62 when 
 Harvey went to sit at his feet ; he was followed in 
 the chair by his faithful servant Casserius, and in 
 1616 by Spigelius, who both carried on his work. 
 But the succession passed to Harvey. 
 
28 A CENTURY OF MEDICINE 
 
 What exactly was the discovery which Harvey 
 made? Let us consider it in the briefest possible 
 form. Galen and Vesalius had both taught that 
 the blood current acquired nutritive properties in 
 the liver, that some of it when in the heart passed 
 through the wall from the right to the left ventricle, 
 and that air became mixed with the blood in the 
 left ventricle. In 1553 Michael Servetus declared 
 that no blood passed through the interventricular 
 septum and that the blood was aerated by its pas- 
 sage through the lung. Twenty years later 
 Cisalpinus of Pisa had grasped the principle that 
 the heart received blood from the veins and pro- 
 pelled it through the arterial sj'Stem. Lastly, 
 Fabricius of Padua had described the structure and 
 position of the valves of the veins, though he had 
 not understood their purpose. Thus matters stood 
 when Harvey came to Padua. He listened to 
 Fabricius, he then studied the matter for himself in 
 man and animals, he considered the structure of the 
 circulatory system and its purpose, and he 
 "weighed" (to use his own term) the physical 
 factors affecting it. And briefly this is what he 
 found. He first showed the nature and purpose of 
 the heart beat, that the heart undergoes a contrac- 
 tion and a constriction, and forces all its contained 
 blood into the arteries, the right ventricle into the 
 pulmonary artery to the lungs and the left into the 
 great artery (aorta) to the body, and no blood passes 
 through the intervening wall. Secondly, he found 
 that the blood coursing through the body was pass- 
 ing from the heart in the arteries and 'climbing 
 back' to the heart in the veins by the support of their 
 valyes, "a motion, as it were, in a circle." "The 
 
WILLIAM HARVEY. 
 
AT PADUA. 29 
 
 blood in the animal body," he wrote, "is impelled 
 in a circle, and is in a state of ceaseless motion ; that 
 this is the act or function which the heart performs 
 by means of its pulse ; and that it is the sole and 
 only end of the motion and contraction of the heart . ' ' 
 Thirdly, he saw that though the blood undergoes 
 changes in the lung — ^the lesser circulation, and in 
 the body tissues — ^the great circulation, it is one 
 and the same blood. "Sense and reason alike assure 
 us that the blood contained in the left ventricle is 
 not of a different nature from that in the right. . . . 
 It is the same blood in the arteries that is found in 
 the veins . ' ' That is Harvey 's three-fold discovery . 
 Its effect was amazing. For his mode of proce- 
 dure vindicated for ever the experimental method ; 
 his finding placed the blood in the forefront of 
 physical life, and gave it an altogether new mean- 
 ing, chemical and physiological ; lastly, the demon- 
 stration of the circulation gave a true conception to 
 nutrition. Here was an end to "spirits" and 
 "vapours," here was the operation of physical and 
 physiological law. There was but one link missing, 
 how the blood passed from the arteries to the veins. 
 It was not until four years after Harvey's death 
 that, with the aid of the microscope, Malpighi in 
 1661 observed the capillaries uniting by their net- 
 work arteries and veins. 
 
 id) 
 
 A fourth type pf the Paduan pioneers who created 
 its golden age of Medicine is Galileo Galilei. He 
 was the son of a Florentine noble and was born at 
 
30 A CENTURY OF MEDICINE 
 
 Pisa in 1564, the year in which Vesalius died and 
 Shakespeare was born. He -inherited from his 
 father an aristocratic name, a love of music, art 
 and mathematics, an enquiring mind, and an im- 
 poverished patrimony. His father intended him for 
 commerce, but the boy showed so much scholafly 
 capacity at the convent school that at the age of 17 
 he was sent to the University of his native city to 
 study medicine. Nevertheless, he preferred Euclid 
 and Archimedes to Hippocrates and Galen, and 
 turning to mathematics became at the early age of 
 26 professor of that subject in the University. 
 
 Two episodes of his life at Pisa have come down to 
 us. One day in the Duomo his attention was attracted 
 by the great bronze lamp of the Cathedral, which 
 after lighting the verger had left swinging to and 
 fro on its chain. Galileo timed its oscillations by 
 the only watch he possessed, namely, the beat of 
 his own pulse — ^the rhythm of which he also mea- 
 sured by the pendulum — and observed that the time 
 occupied by the swings was the same though the 
 range became smaller. Thus was suggested the 
 law of thie isochronism of the pendulum, which led 
 to the invention of the astronomical clock. On 
 another occasion he climbed the leaning campanile 
 adjoining the baptistery ,, and before the assembled 
 University he dropped a 100-pound shot and a one 
 pound shot from the top of the tower. Together 
 they fell, together they struck the ground. "The 
 simultaneous clang of those two weights," says Sir 
 Oliver Lodge, "sounded the death knell of the old 
 system of philosophy and heralded the birth of the 
 new . ' ' This contraversion of the Aristotelians con- 
 cerning the law of falling bodies contributed, with 
 
AT PADUA. 31 
 
 other like innovations, to Galileo's unpopularity at 
 Pisa, and in 1592 he accepted the offer of the 
 Senatori of Venice to be Professor of Mathematics 
 at Padua. 
 
 Now began the splendid period of Galileo's life. 
 He was 28, and, like Vesalius and the young 
 Fabricius, he came into his kingdom in the first 
 flush of manhood . His fame drew crowds of students , 
 to whom he lectured in the aula magna, where his 
 "pulpit" or rostrum may still be seen, or, if the 
 accommodation proved inadequate they all turned 
 out into the open air. He taught them the laws of 
 motion and mechanics, the principles of the sun 
 dial , and ' 'the mutability of the celestial globe . " He 
 perfected before them the telescope and invented a 
 proportional compass, and with these instruments 
 he demonstrated to the astonished students the 
 Copernican helio-centric theory of the heavens, 
 the new star of 1604, the mountains of the moon, 
 the Milky Way, sun spots, and the satelites of 
 Jupiter. The Senate, as well as the students, fell 
 under his spell. The six year tenure of the pro- 
 fessorship ran a second lap, and then the twelve 
 years became eighteen. It was a brilliant career, 
 perhaps even in that great time the most dazzling 
 in Europe ; it marked advance in the understanding 
 of the laws of physics and the fundamental proper- 
 ties of matter. For at Paidua Galileo did much else 
 than teach mathematics. He enlarged the field of 
 the mind of man, he taug'ht the balance between 
 induction and deduction as a scientific method, he 
 advanced the far-reaching truth that all physical 
 forces within the human body and outside it are 
 measurable. But alas ! the fate of the prophet over- 
 
32 A CENTURY OF MEDICINE 
 
 took him and in 1610 he left Padua never to return. 
 Two years later he published his belief in the 
 Copernican theory and came under the papal ban-; 
 in 1632 he underwent the persecution of the Inquisi- 
 tion ; and ten years after the blind, bereaved, old 
 man passed beyond the power of his traducers. In 
 spite of his recantation of his scientific faith, his 
 work remained and brought forth a hundred-fold. 
 For it was sown in strength and raised in power. 
 "This is Galileo's main glory," says Sir Oliver 
 Lodge, "that he first laid the foundation of 
 mechanics on a firm and secure basis of experiment, 
 reasoning and observation. He first discovered the 
 true Laws of Motion." 
 
 The forecanners of Galileo had been CQpernicus 
 and ^aracelsu&j, Telesio, Patrizzi and Campanella ; 
 his contemporaries were Kepler and our own 
 William Gilbert, of Colchester, the author of De 
 Magnete, and the first President of the College of 
 Physicians who was pre-eminent as physicist ; and 
 his iminediate successors were Sanctorius of Padua, 
 Descarles, Stensen, Borelli and Malpighi. Yet 
 once more ^e succession passed to an Englishman, 
 Sir IsaaqNewfon. 'He it was whd became Professor 
 of Mathematics at Cambridge when 26 years old, 
 and who took the learning of Descartes and Galileo, 
 reformulated it and applied it to the diflEerential 
 calculus, to the law of gravitation and a complete 
 theory of astronomy, and to the beginnings of 
 spectrum analysis. The Principia was published 
 in 1687. 
 
 It is important in the history of physiology to 
 remember that for eighteen years the influence of 
 Galileo permeated the first medical school of the 
 
AT PADUA. 33 
 
 age and left its ineffaceable mark upon the growing 
 science of all living things. Harvey himself must 
 often have listened to the Professor of Mathematics, 
 for the aula magna and the anatomical theatre ad- 
 joined each other, and Galileo's amazing lectures, 
 were the talk of the University. We know to what 
 physiological purposes Harvey applied the prin- 
 ciples of mechanics. But even before this, and only 
 a year after Galileo had left the University, Sanc- 
 torius, the professor of medicine at Padua, intro- 
 duced physical measurement for the determination 
 of chemical and physiological change. He con- 
 structed a chair suspended to a steel-yard, and by 
 this balance weighed himself before and after regu- 
 lated meals, and thus measured the loss of weight 
 due td, what he termed, insensible transpiration. 
 "If the food and drink in one day amount to eight 
 pounds," he says, "the insensible transpiration 
 will generally amount to about five pounds." 
 Quaint and imperfect as were his methods he was 
 a pioneer of the physical measurement of physio- 
 logical processes. 
 
 Descartes, the philosopher and mathematician, 
 though not associated with Padua, was a follower 
 of Galileo, and added the method of reasoning to 
 that of observation and experiment. It was part 
 of his creed that man was a machine, an automaton 
 {machine de terre) inhabited and governed by a 
 rational soul {dme raisonable), and he was the first 
 to explain physiological and mental functions in a 
 mechanical manner. "Other authors," said 
 Stensen, "describe man; Descartes puts before us 
 merely a machine. "i/From the medical standpoint • 
 two of the greatest disciples of Galileo were Borelli 
 
34 A CENTURY OF MEDICINE 
 
 of Pisa and Malpighi of Bologna. Borelli was born 
 at Naples and was two years old when Galileo left 
 Padua, but in 1656 he followed him in the chair of 
 mathematics at Pisa. He devoted himself to the 
 mechanics of physiology, muscular movement, heart 
 beat, and the resistance and elasticity of the arteries. 
 He also investigated the mechanics of respiration, 
 secretion and excretion. Borelli's friend Malpighi 
 became professor of medicine at Bologna, Padua's 
 great neighbour, and there with the aid of the newly 
 invented microscope he worked as naturalist, em- 
 bryologist and pathologist. He discovered the 
 capillaries and thus threw new light on the nutri- 
 tion of the tissues, and as histologist he demon- 
 strated the relation of structure to function and the 
 response of structure to physical forces. 
 
 These men were the descendants of Galileo, and 
 laid the foundations on which we build in that new 
 world of physics,mathematics and chemistry in their 
 relation to Medicine which marks our own day and 
 generation. But as I have said the succession passed 
 to England, — and to the genius who knew, yet 
 knew how little he knew. When an old man, full 
 of honour and at the height of his fame. Sir Isaac 
 Newton wrote these words : "I know not what the 
 world will think of my labours, but to myself it 
 seems that I have been but as a child playing on the 
 sea shore; now finding some pebble rather more 
 polished, and now some shell rather more agreeably 
 variegated than another, while the immense ocean 
 of truth extended itself unexplored before me." 
 
AT PADUA. 35 
 
 V. 
 
 Such were four of the leaders and teachers of the 
 School of Padua in the century which began on 
 New Year's Day, 1538— an anatomist, a practi- 
 tioner, a professor, and a physicist. Their influ- 
 ence spread through Europe, and Padua, in spite 
 of conservative and reactionary elements, gave 
 many sons to the advancement of learning and the 
 science and art of Medicine. Its contribution was 
 supreme in three respects. 
 
 First and foremost^ Padua galled men's minds 
 back to Nature. Not Galen or othe? authority, rioF 
 ftlC"-t€»tr-of a^book, not consistency with tradition, 
 but the study of the Human Body was the issue 
 that was joined — in the splendid words of Vesalius 
 "the study of that true bible, as we account it, of 
 the human body and of the nature of man. " This 
 was the source of new truth in 1538, and it is the 
 source to-day. "It was in Padua," wrote Sjr 
 Clifford AUbutt, "that Medicine, long degraded'or 
 disguised, was to prove her lineage as the mother, 
 of natural science and the truth of the saying of 
 Hippocrates that to know the nature of man one 
 must know the nature of all things." This return 
 to Nature was not merely an elegant fancy or plulo- 
 sophic idea, it was a way of thought and of lu&r 
 Nature was to be observed, rather than interpreted, 
 as the fans et origo of truth ; but more than that, she 
 was to be interrogated, cross-examined, tested. The 
 Paduan School made Experiments and control ex- 
 periments, ak Aristotle had done before them ; but 
 they did jn4i;;e, fQj>^llowing in the footsteps of 
 Roger JBacon,tfi^ applied the experimental tnetfoorf 
 
36 A CENTURY OF MEDICINE 
 
 to all things. It has been wisely said that "by the 
 ordering of experiment after a definite plan dis- 
 covery is to be guided, doctrine tested, error disi- 
 pated, and the succession of natural phenomena 
 ascertained." This was what Galileo and Harvey 
 did. By design they verified the fundamental pre- 
 mises. They taught the world mighty truths, but 
 better than that, the truths were natural and the 
 offspring of their own experience. Their teaching 
 was founded, as all consummate teaching must be, 
 on their own research, their own first-hand know- 
 ledge of truth at the source. It is the supreme 
 order, be the endeavour what it ma5^ 
 
 Then in the second place, though to construct a 
 true method is a larger gift to mankind than to dis- 
 cover items of knowledge, the Paduan School 
 rendered inestimable service in extending the boun- 
 daries of learning. Vesalius revealed morphology 
 as the bed-rock of systematic medicine ; Fracastojius 
 was the first of the moderns in the realm of mfection 
 and epidemiology ; Fabricius was one of the greatest 
 of the early exponents of the elements of physiology 
 and embryology; and Galileo opened the august 
 I chapter of the laws of mechanics and physics. In 
 the main, therefore, Padua is associated with the 
 basic elements of physics, anatomy and physiology 
 — in a word, with the essentials of the mechanics, 
 structure and function of the body. The super- 
 structure was to be built by other men. What is 
 significant, though not surprising, is that these 
 Paduan pioneers inspired, as we have seen, a long 
 succession of descendants and disciples whose in- 
 tellectual germ plasm has continued to reproduce 
 its kind in many nations down to our own day. 
 
AT PADUA. 37 
 
 Their work was of the nature of fruit ; it grew from 
 seed and it had within it the seed of more fruit. 
 That is their enduring fame. We may be proud, 
 and should be profoundly encouraged, that chief of 
 them all was an Englishman, the immortal William 
 Harvey, whose demonstration of the circulation of 
 --theistebd and whose method of proof opened a new 
 chapter not for Medicine only but for mankind. 
 "I profess both to learn and to teach anatomy," he 
 wrote, "not from books but from dissections j not 
 from the position of the philosophers but from the 
 fabric of nature. I avow myself the partisan of 
 truth alone." 
 
 Lastly, there is a third characteristic of the pro- 
 gress of Medicine at Padua in its wonderful century, 
 and it is this, there was co-operation and integration 
 of the one into the many and the many into the one. 
 The forerunners handed the glowing torch to these 
 men of Padua — Vesalius, Fracastor, Galileo and 
 Harvey — who carried it forward with enthusiasm, 
 devotiira and courage, and handed it on aflame to 
 their followers — that was co-operation. But they 
 did more. Biology was made by them to subserve 
 anatomy, the anatomy was laid as the foundation 
 of physiology, the physiology was illuminated and 
 explained by physics, and the whole was applied to 
 the healing art — ^that was integration. There was 
 correlation and interdependence and integration; 
 there was a fresh and large understanding of the 
 unity of nature. These men lit a candle in Europe, 
 the lamp of truth, and they used it to push out 
 further into the darkness which surrounded them, 
 seeking the many in the one. They kept their 
 lamp well trimmed and burning, but always, 
 
38 A CENTURY OF MEDICINE 
 
 though sometimes unconsciously, for the single- 
 minded Search. Coming out of a great time they 
 sang again the song of man's inheritance, of his 
 unconquerable mind, of his partnership with the 
 eternal wisdom. And in seeing this vision and 
 singing this song, they made their day the Dawn. 
 Was Browning thinking of such men in the last 
 words of Paracelsus, in the hospital of St. Sebastian 
 in 1541 ? 
 
 "If I stoop 
 Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud, 
 It is but for a time; I press God's lamp 
 Close to my breast — its splendour, soon or late, 
 Will pierce the gloom : I shall emerge one day." 
 
 Some of these were my musings that spring 
 morning in Padua. But the evening came, and its 
 long shadows fell across the plains of Lombardy 
 and enshrouded the Euganean Hills ; the workers 
 came in from the fields and vineyards, the city 
 toilers rested from their labours, the great bell of 
 the Cathedral sounded the Ave Maria at sunset; 
 and walking away in the twilight through those 
 quiet and forsaken streets of the Middle Ages, 
 familiar three centuries ago to Fabricius and Galileo 
 and Harvey, I listened to "the deep sad murmur 
 of voices long dead." 
 
Printed by the Orphans' 
 Printing Press, Ltd,, 
 Broad St, Leominster. 
 

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