Education: How Old The New Part 4

"The vulgar notion about Bacon we take to be this, that he invented a new method of arriving at truth, which method is called induction, and that he detected some fallacy in the syllogistic reasoning which had been in vogue before his time. This notion is as well founded as that of the people who, in the Middle Ages, imagined that Virgil was a great conjurer. Many who are far too well informed to talk such extravagant nonsense entertain what we think incorrect notions as to what Bacon really effected in this matter."

Still more apposite is what Professor Huxley has to say. Discoursing on the phenomena of {102} organic nature, after warning his auditors not to suppose that scientific investigation is "some kind of modern black art," he adds: "I say that you might easily gather this impression from the manner in which many persons speak of scientific inquiry, or talk about inductive and deductive philosophy, or the principles of the 'Baconian philosophy.' To hear people talk about the great Chancellor--and a very great man he certainly was--you would think that it was he who had invented science, and that there was no such thing as sound reasoning before the time of Queen Elizabeth.

"There are many men who, though knowing absolutely nothing of the subject with which they may be dealing, wish nevertheless to damage the author of some view with which they think fit to disagree. What they do is not to go and learn something about the subject; . . .

but they abuse the originator of the view they question, in a general manner, and wind up by saying that, 'After all, you know, the principles and method of this author are totally opposed to the canons of the Baconian philosophy.' Then everybody applauds, as a matter of course, and agrees that it must be so."

Lord Bacon himself so little understood true science that he condemned Copernicanism because it failed to solve the problems of the universe, and condemned Dr. Gilbert, the great founder in Magnetism, whose work was the best {103} exemplification of inductive science of that time.

Of course Bacon did not invent science nor its methods. He was only a publicist popularizing them. They had existed in the minds of all logical thinkers from the beginning. His great namesake, Friar Bacon, much better deserves to be thought a pioneer in modern physical science than the chancellor,--and he was a mediaeval university man.

We are p.r.o.ne to think of the old-time universities as cla.s.sical or literary schools with certain limited post-graduate features, more or less distantly smacking of science. The reason for this is easy to understand. It is because out of such cla.s.sical and literary colleges our present universities, with their devotion to science, were developed or transformed during the last generation or two. It is to be utterly ignorant of mediaeval education, however, to think that the cla.s.sical and literary schools are types of university work in the Middle Ages. The original universities of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries paid no attention to language at all except inasmuch as Latin, the universal language, was studied in order that there might be a common ground of understanding. Latin was not studied at all, however, from its literary side; to style as such the professors in the old mediaeval universities and the writers of the books of the time paid no attention. Indeed it was because of this neglect of style in literature and of the niceties of cla.s.sical Latin that the university men of recent centuries before our own, {104} so bitterly condemned the old, mediaeval teachers and were so utterly unsympathetic with their teaching and methods. We, however, have come once more into a time when style means little, indeed, entirely too little, and when the matter is supposed to be everything, and we should have more sympathy with our older forefathers in education who were in the same boat. We have inherited traditions of misunderstanding in this matter, but we should know the reasons for them and then they will disappear.

As a matter of fact, exactly the same thing happened in our modern change of university interests during the latter half of the nineteenth century as happened in the latter half of the fifteenth century in Italy, and in the next century throughout Europe. With the fall of Constantinople the Greeks were sent packing by the Turks and they carried with them into Italy ma.n.u.scripts of the old Greek authors, examples of old Greek art and the cla.s.sic spirit of devotion to literature as such. A new educational movement termed the study of the humanities had been making some way in Italy during the preceding half-century before the fall of Constantinople, but now interest in it came with a rush. The clergymen, the n.o.bility, even the women of the time became interested in the New Learning, as it was called. Private schools of various kinds were opened for the study of it, and everybody considered that it was the one thing that people who {105} wanted to keep up to date, smart people, for they have always been with us, should not fail to be familiar with. The humanities became the fas.h.i.+on, just as science became the fas.h.i.+on in the nineteenth century. Fas.h.i.+on has a wonderfully pervasive power and it runs in cycles in intellectual matters as well as in clothes.

The devotees of the New Learning demanded a place for it in the universities. University faculties perfectly confident, as university faculties always are, that what they had in the curriculum was quite good enough, and conservative enough to think that what had been good enough for their forefathers was surely good enough also for this generation, refused to admit the new studies. For a considerable period, therefore, the humanities had to be pursued in inst.i.tutions apart from the universities. Indeed it was not until the Jesuits showed how valuable cla.s.sical studies might be made for developmental purposes and true education that they were admitted into the universities.

Note the similarity with certain events in our own time in all this.

Two generations ago the universities refused to admit science. They were training men in their undergraduate departments by means of cla.s.sical literature. They argued exactly as did the old mediaeval universities with regard to the new learning, that they had no place for science. Science had to be learned, then, in separate inst.i.tutions for a time. The scientific {106} educational movement made its way, however, until finally it was admitted into the university curricula.

Now we are in the midst of an educational period when the cla.s.sics are losing in favor so rapidly that it seems as though it would not be long before they would be entirely replaced by the sciences, except, in so far as those are concerned who are looking for education in literature and the cla.s.sic languages for special purposes.

It will be interesting, then, to trace the story of the old mediaeval universities as far as the science in their curriculum was concerned, because it represents much more closely than we might have imagined, or than is ordinarily thought, the preceding phase of education to the cla.s.sical period which we have seen go out of fas.h.i.+on to so great an extent in the last two generations. We shall readily find that at least as much time was devoted in the mediaeval universities to the physical sciences as in our own, and that the culture sciences filled up the rest of the curriculum. Philosophy, which occupied so prominent a place in older university life, was not only a culture science, but physical science as well, as indeed the name natural philosophy, which remained almost down to our day, attests.

Physical science was not the sole object of these mediaeval inst.i.tutions of learning, but they were thoroughly scientific. The main object of the universities in the olden time was to secure such {107} discussion of the problems of man's relation to the universe, to his Creator, to his fellow-creatures and to the material world as would enable him to appreciate his rights and duties and to use his powers. Huxley declared that the trivium and quadrivium, the seven liberal arts studied in the mediaeval universities, probably demonstrate a clearer and more generous comprehension of what is meant by culture than the curriculum of any modern university. Language was learned through grammar, the science of language. Reasoning was learned through logic, the science of reasoning; the art of expression through rhetoric, a combination of art and science with applications to practical life. Mathematics was studied with a zeal and a success that only those who know the history of mediaeval mathematics can at all appreciate. Cantor, the German historian of mathematics, in hundreds of pages of a large volume, has told the story of the development of mathematics during the centuries before the Renaissance, that is from the thirteenth to the fifteenth, in a way that makes it very clear that the teaching at the universities in this subject was not dry and sterile, but eminently productive, successful in research, and with constant additions to knowledge such as live universities ought to make.

Then there was astronomy, metaphysics, theology, music and law and medicine. The science of law was developed and, above all, great {108} collections of laws made for purposes of scientific study. Of astronomy every one was expected to know much, of medicine we shall have considerable to say hereafter, but in the meantime it is well to recall that these mediaeval centuries maintained a high standard of medical education and brought some wonderful developments in the sciences allied to medicine and above all in their applications to therapeutics. Surgery never reached so high a plane of achievement down to our own time, as during the period when it was studied so faithfully and developed so marvellously at the mediaeval universities. It was inasmuch as a knowledge of physics was needed for the development of metaphysics that the mediaeval schoolmen devoted themselves to the study of nature. They turned with as much ardor and devotion as did Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth century, to the acc.u.mulation of such information with regard to nature as would enable them to draw conclusions, establish general principles and lay firm foundations for reasonings with regard to the creature and the Creator. It is, above all, this phase of mediaeval teaching work, of the schoolmen's ardent interest that is misunderstood, often ignored and only too frequently misrepresented in the modern time.

For instance, in the discussion of the status of matter in the universe the scholastics and notably Thomas Aquinas had come to the conclusion that matter was absolutely indestructible. He {109} even went so far as to say that man could not destroy it, and G.o.d would not annihilate it. _Nihil omnino in nihilum redigetur_--nothing at all will ever be reduced to nothingness, was his dictum as the conclusion of a course of lectures on this subject. He saw the changes in matter all round him that were supposed to be destructive, the burnings, the vaporizations, the solutions, the putrefactions and all the rest, but he knew that these only brought changes in matter and not destruction of the underlying substance. For him, as for all the scholastic philosophers, matter was composed of two principles, as they were called. One of these was prime matter and the other form. To prime matter, one of these, matter or substance owed all its negative qualities, inertia and the like. To form, the dynamic element or principle, it owed all its individuating qualities. Prime matter was the same in all things. Form was the energy or bundle of energies, the dynamic principle, as we have said, which entering into prime matter, made the different kinds of matter that we speak of.

It is extremely interesting to compare this old scholastic teaching with the modern ideas of the composition of matter and especially the notions which have come to us from researches in physical chemistry in recent years. Our scientists no longer believe that we have some eighty different elements, essentially different kinds of matter, that cannot by any chance or process be changed one {110} into another. We have seen one form of elementary matter changing into another, helium emanations becoming radium, have heard of Professor Ramsay's trans.m.u.tation of various elements, and have about come to the conclusion that in the radio-active substances we have a wonderful trans.m.u.ting power. A prominent American professor of chemistry declared not long since that he would like to treat a large quant.i.ty of lead ore in order to extract from it all the silver which so constantly occurs in connection with it in the natural state, and then having put the lead ore aside for a score of years, would like to examine it again, confident that he would find traces of silver in it once more, which had developed as a consequence of the radio-activity present in the substance and which is constantly changing lead into silver in small quant.i.ties. Newton's declaration, when he saw crystals of gold in connection with copper, that gold had been developed from the copper, seemed very foolish a century ago, but no one would consider it so at the present moment.

We are p.r.o.ne to think that these old mediaeval philosophers accepting to some extent at least the philosopher's stone with its supposed capacity for changing baser metals into precious, and with their acceptance of the trans.m.u.tation of substances, cannot have had any real scientific bent of mind. We are coming to the realization, however, that in many ways by pure reasoning, in {111} conjunction with such observation as they had at hand, they antic.i.p.ated our most recent conclusions in very marvellous ways. We know now that radium, or at least radio-active substances, represent the philosopher's stone of the olden time. We are not surprised at the trans.m.u.tation of metals and of substances, on the contrary, we are looking for it.

I remember once stating the old theory of matter and form to a distinguished professor in chemistry in this country, and he was struck by the similarity of it to what are the present accepted ideas of the composition of matter. He asked why this teaching was not more generally known. I had to tell him that in every Catholic school of philosophy, it was taught as a basic doctrine, and that far from being concealed it was the very touchstone of Catholic philosophic teaching, and had often been the subject of deprecation and contemptuous remarks on the part of those who thought that it represented somewhat foolish old-fas.h.i.+oned teaching handed down to us from the backwardness and abysm of time.

We have demonstrated the indestructibility of matter in modern times by experimental methods. The mediaeval schoolmen reached similar conclusions, however, by strict reasoning from the premises of observation that they had in the olden times. We may be apt to think that they knew very little about nature and the details of physical science, but that will be only because we do not {112} know their great books. Albertus Magnus is a typical example of a renowned teacher of the thirteenth century who was, however, at the same time a highly respected member of his order, holding important official positions in it and thoroughly honored and respected by his ecclesiastical superiors so that he was made a bishop, yet writing volumes of observation with regard to nearly every phase of physical science. A list of his books reads like a section of a catalogue of a library of physical science. I have told the story of his career in the second series of "Catholic Churchmen in Science," but the names of his volumes are sufficient to show what sort of work he was doing. He has volumes on chemistry, botany, on physics, on cosmography, on animal locomotion, on respiration, on generation and corruption, on age and death and life, on phases of psychology, the soul, sense and sensation, memory, sleep, the intellect and many another subject.

Those who think that there was no attention paid to science in the Middle Ages must know nothing at all of Albertus Magnus' work.

Above all, those who talk thus are entirely ignorant of all that Roger Bacon did. Roger Bacon himself was a student of the University of Paris. He was a professor there. He corresponded with the scientists of Europe quite as frequently or at least as significantly as professors of the modern time do with each other. Students submitted their discoveries to him. We {113} have Peregrinus' letter to him with regard to magnetism and electricity and know of others. We have his own books, in which he treats not only the scientific problems, but inventions and applied science of all kinds. At the present time his interest in aeronautics has a special appeal to us. He was sure that men would sometime make a successful airs.h.i.+p. He even thought that he could make one himself, but his experiments proved unsuccessful. His theory of it was very interesting. In his work "De Secretis Artis et Naturae Operibus" he writes that a machine could be constructed in which a man sitting in the centre might move wings by means of a crank and thus, quite after the fas.h.i.+on of birds, fly through the air. It was he who wrote that the time would come when carriages would move along the roads without men or horses to pull them. At the moment he was experimenting with gunpowder. He realized, therefore, that sometime men would harness explosives and use them for motor purposes.

That is, of course, just what we are doing with gasolene.

He suggested that boats would run over the water without oars and without sails. He was antic.i.p.ating our motor boat. He taught that light moves with a definite rate of velocity, though that fact was not demonstrated for several centuries after his time. He worked out most of the theory of lenses as we have it at the present time. He was sure that experiment and {114} observation const.i.tuted the only way by which knowledge of nature could be obtained. In this he was but following his great teacher Albertus Magnus, who insisted that in natural philosophy experiment alone brought sure knowledge; _"Experimentum solum certificat in talibus."_ are his own words. Roger Bacon's devotion to mathematics shows how thoroughly scientific was the trend of his mind. Without mathematics he was sure that one could not reach scientific knowledge, or that what one did get was without certainty. Some of his expressions in this matter are strikingly modern. It is no wonder that his writings and teachings were so great a surprise to his generation that the Pope ordered him to write out his knowledge in books. Without this order we would not have had Roger Bacon's great works, for his vow of poverty voluntarily taken forbade him to be possessed of sufficient money to enable him to purchase writing materials, which were then very expensive.

Indeed the mathematics of the mediaeval universities is the best proof of the seriousness of their devotion to science and, may it also be said, of their success. Cantor, in his "History of Mathematics," and he is the great authority in the matter, devotes nearly 100 pages of his second volume to the mathematicians of the thirteenth century alone, two of whom, Leonard of Pisa and Jorda.n.u.s Nemorarius, did so much in arithmetic, in the theory of numbers, and in geometry, {115} as to work a revolution in mathematics. They had great disciples like John of Holywood (probably a town near Dublin), Johannes Campa.n.u.s and others. No wonder that at the end of the century Roger Bacon said, "For without mathematics nothing worth knowing in philosophy can be obtained," and again, "for he who knows not mathematics cannot know any other science; what is more, he cannot discover his own ignorance or find its proper remedy." The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw even more important work done. Cantor has half a dozen men in the fifteenth century to whom he devotes more than twenty-five pages each.

How the place of this in mediaeval teaching can have escaped the notice of those who insist so much on the neglect of science during the Middle Ages, is hard to understand. This alone would convict them of ignorance of what they are talking about.

The educational genius of the great university century, the thirteenth, the man who influenced his contemporaries and succeeding generations more than any other, was Thomas Aquinas, to whom the Church, for his knowledge and goodness, gave the t.i.tle of saint. If any further proof that these centuries were interested in science were needed, or that the universities in which he was the leading light as scholar and professor in the thirteenth century, and as the great master to whom all looked reverentially after, were developing scientific studies, it would be found in {116} his works. Philosophy is developed scientifically in his "Contra Gentes" and theology, scientifically in his great "Summa." It is the very austerity of the scientific qualities of these books that have made them forbidding for many modern readers, who, therefore, have failed to understand the scientific spirit of the time. St. Thomas Aquinas, however, was, as I suggested at the beginning of this, deeply interested in every form of information with regard to what we now call physical science. He evidently drank in with avidity all that had been observed with regard to living creatures and, when we come to a.n.a.lyze his works with care and read his books with the devotion of his own students, we find many antic.i.p.ations of what is most modern in our science.

The indestructibility of matter, matter and form, that is the doctrine of the unity of the basis of matter, the conservation of energy in the sense that the forms of matter change but do not disappear, all these were commonplaces in his thought and teaching. I have recently had occasion to point out how close he came to that thought in modern biology which is probably considered to be one of our most modern contributions to the theory of evolution. It is expressed by the formula of Herbert Spencer, "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny."

According to this the completed human being repeats in the course of its development the history of the race, that is to say, the varying phases of foetal development {117} in the human embryo, from the single cell in which it originates up to the perfect being as it is born into the world, retrace the history by which from the single-cell being man has gradually developed. The whole theory of evolution is supposed by many people to be modern, but of course it is not. This particular phase of it, however, is thought surely to be modern. It is sometimes spoken of as the fundamental law of biogeny. In recent years serious doubts have been thrown on it, but with that we have nothing to do here.

It is very curious to find, however, that St. Thomas, in his teaching with regard to the origin and development of the human being, says, almost exactly, what the most ardent supporters of this so-called fundamental biogenetic law proclaimed in recent years. He says that "the higher a form is in the scale of being and the farther it is removed from mere material form, the more intermediate forms must be pa.s.sed through before the finally perfect form is reached. Therefore, in the generation of animal and man--these having the most perfect forms--there occur many intermediate forms in generations and consequently destruction, because the generation of one being is the destruction of another." St. Thomas does not hesitate to draw his conclusions from this doctrine without hesitation. He proclaims that the human material is first animated by a vegetative soul or principle of life, and then by an animal soul and only ultimately, when the matter has {118} been properly prepared for it, by a rational soul. He said:

"The vegetative soul, therefore, which is first in the embryo, while it lives the life of a plant, is destroyed, and there succeeds a more perfect soul, which is at once nutrient and sentient, and for that time the embryo lives the life of an animal: upon the destruction of this there succeeds the rational soul, infused from without."

His discussion of the position of the Church and of faith to science is extremely interesting, because here once more he faces a modern problem. Aquinas was very sensitive with regard to the imposition upon Christians of things which supposedly they had to believe on the score of faith, though they were really not of faith at all. Some of his expressions in this matter are very strong and he was especially fond of quoting St. Augustine, who was very emphatic on this point. One of these typical pa.s.sages deserves to find a place here because, while the word philosophy is used, it is evidently science in our modern sense of the word that is intended. Augustine talks of what the philosophers have said of the heavens or the stars and the motion of the sun and moon, meaning of course the astronomers, who were in the old days cla.s.sed as natural philosophers. This pa.s.sage, then, which contains the opinions of the two greatest teachers of the Church in the West may well serve as a guide for those who are interested in science, and a warning for those who would {119} obtrude faith too far into scientific questions, and thus limit investigation and hamper that freedom of intellect which is so important for the development of science. St. Thomas said in his introduction to the reply to Master John of Vercelli:

"I have endeavored to reply but with this protest at the outset, that many of these articles do not pertain to the teachings of faith, but rather to the dogmas of the philosophers. But it works a great injury either to a.s.sert or deny as belonging to sacred doctrine such things as do not bear upon the doctrine of piety. For Augustine says, 'When I hear certain Christians ignorant of those things (namely, what philosophers have said of the heavens, or the stars, or the motion of the sun and moon) or misunderstanding them, I look with patience upon such men: nor do I see any reason to hinder them, when of thee, Lord Creator of all things, they do not believe unworthy things, if perhaps they be ignorant of the structure, and condition of corporal creatures. But they are a hindrance if they think these things belong to the very doctrine of piety; and more, pertinaciously, dare to affirm that of which they are ignorant.' But that they may be the cause of injury Augustine shows. 'It is very disgraceful,' he says, 'and pernicious and especially to be avoided, that a Christian speaking of these things as though according to Christian teaching should so rave that any infidel may hear; so that, as it is said, seeing him altogether in the wrong, he may {120} scarcely contain his mirth. And it is not so hurtful that one man should be seen to err, as that our writers are believed by those who are without [the Church] to have such opinions, and to the ruin of those whose salvation is our care they are scorned and contemned as unlearned.' Whence it seems safer to me that those things which philosophers have commonly held, and are not repugnant to our faith, should neither be a.s.serted as dogmas of faith, although at times they may be introduced under the names of the philosophers, nor so denied as contrary to the faith, as to give occasion to the wise of this world of contemning the teaching of the faith."

Is it any wonder that Professor Saintsbury of the University of Edinburgh, whose training in the old Scotch universities has given him a breadth of sympathy not common in our time, and whose wide knowledge of the literature of that period as well as its philosophy and education, and whose training in the discussion of the criticism of all time in his "History of Criticism" has made his opinion of special value, should have sympathetically turned to these old teachers and deprecated a little bitterly the modern att.i.tude towards them? He said:

"Yet there has always in generous souls who have some tincture of philosophy, subsisted a curious kind of sympathy and yearning over the work of these generations of mainly disinterested scholars, who, whatever they were, were {121} thorough, and whatever they could not do, could think. And there have even, in these latter days, been some graceless ones who have asked whether the science of the nineteenth century, after an equal interval, will be of any more positive value--whether it will not have even less comparative interest than that which appertains to the scholasticism of the thirteenth."

I have always considered, however, that the easiest way to show the modern student of science how supremely scientific in his temper was St. Thomas, is to quote for him the pa.s.sage from that great teacher with regard to the Resurrection. In every way, that is typically modern. St. Thomas faces the question that after death men's bodies decay, the material of them is taken up and used in many other living beings, so that how can we dare to believe that we shall rise again on the last day with the same bodies that we now have? St. Thomas discusses this knotty problem straightforwardly and solves it more satisfactorily, even for all the knowledge that we have of it now, than has ever been done.

"What does not bar numerical unity in a man while he lives on uninterruptedly clearly can be no bar to the ident.i.ty of the arisen man with the man that was. In a man's body while he lives there are not only the same parts in respect of matter, but also in respect of species. In respect of matter there is a flux and reflux of parts.

Still that fact does not bar the man's numerical unity {122} from the beginning to the end of his life. The form and species of the several parts continue throughout life, but the matter of the parts is dissolved by the natural heat, and new matter accrues through nourishment. Yet the man is not numerically different by the difference of his component parts at different ages, although it is true that the material composition of the man at one stage of his life is not his material composition at another. Addition is made from without to the stature of a boy without prejudice to his ident.i.ty, for the boy and the adult are numerically the same man."

The most important feature of the scientific teachings of the mediaeval universities has been left till the last because it is the clinching confirmation of a claim that these were essentially scientific universities. It is to be found in the position of the medical schools and the state of medical teaching during the Middle Ages. So curiously has the history of education been written, and, above all, of medical education, that to most people this would seem to be surely the department of education which would prove just the opposite. We have heard so much about Church opposition to anatomy and Church opposition to surgery, of its repression of the development of medical science and even medical art, because the Church wanted to make people believe in the value of ma.s.ses, relics and prayers--and pay for them--that most people are quite sure that there {123} was no medical education of any significance in the Middle Ages. Nothing shows more clearly how viciously the history of education has been written than the existence of such false impressions. Not only are they utterly unfounded, but they are based on supreme ignorance of one of the greatest periods in the history of medicine that we have in all the world's history. Not only were the schools excellent and the teaching progressive, but there was a fine development of medical science and, above all, of surgery. Surgery is supposed to be particularly the department of medicine that did not develop. We have learned better in recent years, and now we know that there was no greater period in the history of surgery than that from 1200 to 1400 when, alas! following so-called history, we used to think there was no surgery.

The first question that any one who knows anything about the subject asks with regard to the progress in medicine of a particular time or country is, what was the standard of its medical education? What was the standard of admission to the medical schools, how many years of medical studies were required? To this question the Middle Ages have a wonderful answer that has not been realized until recent years. We now have Frederick II's famous law for the regulation of the practice of medicine and the maintaining of standards in medical schools. This law was promulgated in the Two Sicilies, the southern part of {124} Italy and Sicily proper. According to it no one was allowed to practise medicine who had not studied for four years in a recognized university and then practised for one year with a physician before receiving his license to practise by himself. If he wanted to practise surgery he had to spend an additional special year in the study of anatomy. The university medical schools were graduate schools and did not admit a student unless he had completed the undergraduate course.

Of course it may be thought that this was due entirely to the great Emperor Frederick, who was far ahead of his time and who, therefore, antic.i.p.ated the progress of medical teaching by many centuries. We have, however, many other doc.u.ments which ill.u.s.trate the state of medical education at this time. The charters of the medical schools were granted by the Popes and were very explicit in what they required of the new faculties in order that standards might be maintained. Pope John XXII, for instance, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, issued charters for medical schools at Perugia and Cahors. He required that there should be four years of medical study and three years of preliminary work. He went into details to secure the maintenance of standards. The original faculties of these schools would all have to be doctors in medicine from either Paris or Bologna, and it must be their duty to establish in the new schools the standards of their {125} Almae Matres. Examinations were to be conducted under oath, men were not to be granted degrees unless they deserved them, the votes of professors rejecting candidates or graduating them were to be under oath-bound secrecy, so as to have them absolutely free from personal influence, and every precaution was taken to secure the highest possible standards.

It was as a consequence of their direct attachment to these old mediaeval medical schools that the medical schools founded here in America in the sixteenth century at once began with high standards.

Three years of preliminary work was required and four years of medicine. In the United States no preliminary requirements were demanded; and for a full century only two years of medical study, which really consisted of but two terms of four months each, was the requirement. The old mediaeval medical schools were originally attached to the universities, and it is a well-known rule in the history of education that whenever the medical schools are independent then standards are sure to be low. Whenever the university controls the medical school and it is a real graduate department, then standards of admission and of graduation are properly maintained. It is surprising to think that the old mediaeval universities should be able to give us lessons in this matter and should put us to shame for our slip-shod nineteenth-century medical education in the United States, but this is a simple fact. Contrast {126} the South American countries where the mediaeval traditions with which they were founded constrained them to give four, five and even six years to medicine before granting a degree. Go a step further and see how devoted to science were the Universities of Lima (Peru) and Mexico, centuries before we did any serious scientific work in the United States, and all because they were direct descendants of the old mediaeval universities.

The feeling of certain modern educators would be that it did not matter how much time these mediaeval universities gave to medicine since, after all, they had nothing of any value to teach in medicine.

Even educated people have been led to believe that there was nothing in medicine and, above all, in the surgery of those times to be of any value. Probably no opinion is more foolishly ignorant or more ridiculously absurd than this, though it is a commonplace among people who are sure they know something about history, and, above all, among those who consider themselves authorities in the history of education, and of the development of science. In surgery a magnificent development was made at this time of which I shall have something to say later. In medicine there was much less antic.i.p.ation of our modern progress, but even here there was much that demands our respect. One of the university men, Simon of Genoa, worked out the dosage of opium and indicated its uses. Anodyne drugs were {127} employed much more generally and successfully than we are apt to think; various methods of anaesthesia, one of them by inhalation, of which I shall say more when talking of surgery, were invented and a large number of drugs and simples were experimented with. Down at Montpellier Bernard Gordon suggested red light for smallpox.

This is not much of a record, perhaps, but we must not forget what Professor Richet, the Director of the Physiological Laboratory of the University of Paris, said not long since in an article on "Physicians and Medicine" in _La Revue de Deux Mondes._ It is startling but chasteningly true. "The therapeutics of any generation has always been quite absurd to the second succeeding generation." Indeed it is one of the almost disheartening things in the history of medicine to see how treatments come in, are widely accepted and hailed as great advances in therapeutics and then gradually disappear. They bled a great deal and they purged not a little, in accordance with the teaching in the medical schools of the universities of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but then they bled a great deal and purged a great deal more, according to the teaching of the medical schools of the beginning of the nineteenth century. There have been many periods in the interval when purging and bleeding were, and very properly, not nearly so popular.

It was in preventive medicine particularly that {128} these progressive medical men of the early university days secured their triumphs. They made separate hospitals for the lepers all over Europe, and by segregation succeeded in wiping out that disease, though it was as widely spread as tuberculosis in our day and presented just as serious a problem. Indeed the most encouraging incentive for our present tuberculosis campaign is drawn by many authorities from the experience with leprosy, which was eventually obliterated as an endemic popular disease, by strict segregation methods. These same generations created special hospitals for erysipelas and thus prevented the spread of this disease in the ordinary hospitals, where it used to be so serious a factor for morbidity if not for mortality.

Men forgot this later and the disease became a serious problem once more in all the hospitals of even a generation ago. The hospital organization worked out by these university men is the finest jewel in the crown of their accomplishment as applied scientists. Pope Innocent III, himself a University of Paris man, founded the Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome, summoning for that purpose the best authority on hospitals in Europe, Guy of Montpellier, and then required the bishops of the world to erect similar hospitals in their dioceses. This was done, and it is Virchow, whose sympathies were anything but favorable to the Popes, who has been most loud in his praise of the wonderful hospital organization of these centuries. Every town in {129} Europe of 5,000 inhabitants or more had a hospital, and there were hospitals in many of the smaller towns.

It would be easy to think that these hospitals were rudely built, were badly ventilated, were ill-arranged and, above all, were likely to be houses for the perpetuation of disease rather than for the regaining of health. We are p.r.o.ne to think that we are the first generation to solve the problem of hospital construction. We know what poorly-constructed, badly-planned inst.i.tutions were the hospitals of three generations ago. What, then, must have been the hospital buildings of centuries ago? This argument has no place in history; the worst hospitals in the world and in history were erected at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Some of the best hospitals ever constructed date from the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This was a time when great architects were successfully solving the construction problems for cathedrals, munic.i.p.al buildings, colleges and the like, and they solved them quite as successfully for hospitals. Some of these hospitals were models in their way. One of them, built toward the end of the thirteenth century, by the sister of St. Louis, Marguerite of Bourgogne, with its large windows high in the walls, in single-story buildings, with arrangements for the segregation of patients, with the kitchens in a separate building, with beautiful {130} frescoes on the walls so that patients' minds might be occupied and not left to their own often disturbing devices as with our bare wall, with a stream of running water divided so as to pa.s.s on both sides of the hospital, is a model of construction for all time.

It was in surgery rather than medicine, however, that these great mediaeval university medical schools left their impress upon the history of medicine. During the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries we have a series of wonderful teachers of surgery, whose achievements we know not by tradition nor by fragments of their writings, but by the text-books which they wrote and which const.i.tuted the teaching for generations and sometimes for centuries after their time. Gurlt, the great German historian of surgery, devotes some 300 pages of the first volume of his "History of Surgery" to the surgical accomplishments of the Middle Ages. He even protests that s.p.a.ce compels him to abbreviate the story of what these old-time masters of surgery did to lay the foundation of modern surgical practices. It is a commonplace in the American writing of history that there was no surgery at this time. President White says that, "for over a thousand years surgery was considered dishonorable until the German Emperor Wenceslas, in 1403, ordered that it should be held in honor again."

The two centuries immediately preceding this date represent the {131} greatest period in the history of surgery down to our own time, and because of its originality probably greater in real achievement than even our vaunted age.

It is sometimes the custom to say that this surgery was derived from the Arabs. This is supposed to rob the mediaeval universities of any prestige that may come to them for this marvellous progress. Gurlt, however, in his "History of Surgery," in his sketch of Roger (Ruggiero), who was the first of the great surgeons of the thirteenth century, who taught at the Italian universities, says: "Though Arabian writings on surgery had been brought over to Italy by Constantine Africa.n.u.s 100 years before Roger's time, these exercised no influence over Italian surgery in the next century, and there is not a trace of the influence of the Arabs to be found in Roger's work." When Gurlt says this it is because he has deliberately studied the question, and we can be absolutely sure, therefore, that whatever we find in surgery at this time comes to us from these great mediaeval universities themselves, and is not imported from abroad.

After Roger, who was at Bologna for a time after having been in Paris, and who then became a Papal physician, there are a series of great names that deserve to be mentioned. Four names are connected together by a.s.sociation as master and pupil for what may be termed four generations of surgical progress. From the birth {132} of the first to the death of the last represents about 100 years. That 100 years is a gloriously fruitful century in the history of surgery. The first of the group is William of Salicet, of whom Professor Clifford Allb.u.t.t, the Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge, in his address on the "Historical Relations of Medicine and Surgery to the End of the Sixteenth Century," delivered by special invitation at the Congress of Arts and Sciences at the World's Fair in St. Louis in 1904, has the highest praise. Allb.u.t.t says: "Like Lanfranc and the other great surgeons of the Italian tradition, and unlike Franco and Pare, William had the advantage of the liberal university education of Italy; but like Pare and Wurtz, he had a large practical experience in hospitals and on the battlefield and fully recognized that surgery cannot be learned from books only." Allb.u.t.t praises him and rightly for his careful notes of cases and then tells us something of his accomplishments in surgery. He says: "William discovered that dropsy may be due to a _durities renum_ six centuries before Bright; he subst.i.tuted the knife for the Arabist abuse of the cautery; _he investigated the causes of the failure of healing by first intention_ (Italics ours), he described the danger of wounds of the neck; he sutured divided nerves; he forwarded the diagnosis of suppurative diseases of the hip; and he referred chancre and phagedaena to their proper causes."

{133}

His pupil Lanfranc equalled his master in devotion to practical surgery and surpa.s.sed him in his development of the great science of medicine. Pagel, the well-known German historian of medicine, says that, in his text-book Lanfranc has excellent chapters on the affections of the eyes, the ears and mouth, the nose, even the teeth, and treats of hernia in a very practical common-sense way. He warns against the radical operation and says, in words that come home to us with strange familiarity at the present time, that many surgeons decide on operations too easily, not for the sake of the patient but for the sake of the money that is in them. Lanfranc's discussion of cystotomy, Pagel characterizes as prudent but rational, for he considers that the operations should not be feared too much but not delayed too long. In patients suffering from the inconvenience which comes from large quant.i.ties of fluid in the abdomen he advises _paracentesis abdominis_, but warns against putting the patient in danger from such an operation without due consideration. Pagel says that Lanfranc must be considered as one of the greatest surgeons of the Middle Ages and the real establisher of the prestige of the French school of surgery which maintained its prominence down to the nineteenth century.

Lanfranc had been invited to Paris to take the chair of surgery, because the authorities of the university wanted to add prestige to the medical school, which was not as well known as the school {134} of philosophy. The fame of William of Salicet had spread throughout academic Europe, and so Lanfranc was offered the chair at the University of Paris in order to carry his master's message there. The next in the succession of great teachers at Paris was Mondeville, who found less to do in an original way than his master Lanfranc and his protomaster William, but who accomplished much for surgery. All that he did was thrown into the shade by what was accomplished for succeeding generations by the next in the series, Guy de Chauliac, who studied for a time in Paris under Mondeville, though his early medical education was obtained at Montpellier, but had also had the advantage of spending a year in Italy at the various medical schools which were famous at that time. These two incidents, Lanfranc's invitation to Paris to be a teacher there from Italy more than a thousand miles away, and Guy de Chauliac's studies in all the important universities of Europe of the time before he took up his own work, ill.u.s.trate better than any words of ours can the ardent enthusiasm for study, the thoroughgoing antic.i.p.ation of our most modern methods in education.

Mondeville, like Chauliac, had made very nearly the same round of the universities. It is a custom, not a chance incident, that we have to deal with here.