Everywhere throughout the Middle Ages learning was the handmaid of theology.  Even Roger Bacon with his strong appeal for a new method accepted the dominant mediaeval conviction—­that all the sciences did but minister to their queen, Theology.  A new spirit entered man’s heart as he came to look upon learning as a guide to the conduct of life.  A revolution was slowly effected in the intellectual world.  It is a mistake to think of the Renaissance as a brief period of sudden fruitfulness in the North Italian cities.  So far as science is concerned, the thirteenth century was an aurora followed by a long period of darkness, but the fifteenth was a true dawn that brightened more and more unto the perfect day.  Always a reflex of its period, medicine joined heartily though slowly in the revolt against mediaevalism.  How slowly I did not appreciate until recently.  Studying the earliest printed medical works to catch the point of view of the men who were in the thick of the movement up to 1480—­which may be taken to include the first quarter of a century of printing—­one gets a startling record.  The mediaeval mind still dominates:  of the sixty-seven authors of one hundred and eighty-two editions of early medical books, twenty-three were men of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, thirty men of the fifteenth century, eight wrote in Arabic, several were of the School of Salernum, and only six were of classical antiquity, viz., Pliny (first 1469), Hippocrates (1473) (Hain (*)7247), Galen (1475) (Hain 7237), Aristotle (1476), Celsus (1478), and Dioscorides (1478).(**)

     (*) This asterisk is used by Hain to indicate that he had seen a
     copy.—­Ed.

(**) Data added to a manuscript taken from the author’s summary on “Printed Medical Books to 1480” in Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, London, 1916, XIII, 5-8, revised from its “News-Sheet” (February, 1914).  “Of neither Hippocrates nor Galen is there an early edition; but in 1473 at Pavia appeared an exposition of the Aphorisms of Hippoerates, and in 1475 at Padua an edition of the Tegni or Notes of Galen.”  Ibid., p. 6.  Osler’s unfinished Illustrated Monograph on this subject is now being printed for the Society of which he was President.—­Ed.

The medical profession gradually caught the new spirit.  It has been well said that Greece arose from the dead with the New Testament in the one hand and Aristotle in the other.  There was awakened a perfect passion for the old Greek writers, and with it a study of the original sources, which had now become available in many manuscripts.  Gradually Hippocrates and Galen came to their own again.  Almost every professor of medicine became a student of the MSS. of Aristotle and of the Greek physicians, and before 1530 the presses had poured out a stream of editions.  A wave of enthusiasm swept over the profession, and the best energies of its best minds were devoted to a study of the Fathers.  Galen became the idol of the