The truth is, that medicine, professedly founded on observation, is as sensitive to outside influences, political, religious, philosophical, imaginative, as is the barometer to the changes of atmospheric density.  Theoretically it ought to go on its own straightforward inductive path, without regard to changes of government or to fluctuations of public opinion.  But look a moment while I clash a few facts together, and see if some sparks do not reveal by their light a closer relation between the Medical Sciences and the conditions of Society and the general thought of the time, than would at first be suspected.

Observe the coincidences between certain great political and intellectual periods and the appearance of illustrious medical reformers and teachers.  It was in the age of Pericles, of Socrates, of Plato, of Phidias, that Hippocrates gave to medical knowledge the form which it retained for twenty centuries.  With the world-conquering Alexander, the world-embracing Aristotle, appropriating anatomy and physiology, among his manifold spoils of study, marched abreast of his royal pupil to wider conquests.  Under the same Ptolemies who founded the Alexandrian Library and Museum, and ordered the Septuagint version of the Hebrew Scriptures, the infallible Herophilus ["Contradicere Herophilo in anatomicis, est contradicere evangelium,” was a saying of Fallopius.] made those six hundred dissections of which Tertullian accused him, and the sagacious Erasistratus introduced his mild antiphlogistic treatment in opposition to the polypharmacy and antidotal practice of his time.  It is significant that the large-minded Galen should have been the physician and friend of the imperial philosopher Marcus Aurelius.  The Arabs gave laws in various branches of knowledge to those whom their arms had invaded, or the terror of their spreading dominion had reached, and the point from which they started was, as Humboldt acknowledges, “the study of medicine, by which they long ruled the Christian Schools,” and to which they added the department of chemical pharmacy.

Look at Vesalius, the contemporary of Luther.  Who can fail to see one common spirit in the radical ecclesiastic and the reforming court-physician?  Both still to some extent under the dominion of the letter:  Luther holding to the real presence; Vesalius actually causing to be drawn and engraved two muscles which he knew were not found in the human subject, because they had been described by Galen, from dissections of the lower animals.  Both breaking through old traditions in the search of truth; one, knife in hand, at the risk of life and reputation, the other at the risk of fire and fagot, with that mightier weapon which all the devils could not silence, though they had been thicker than the tiles on the house-tops.  How much the physician of the Catholic Charles V. had in common with the great religious destructive, may be guessed by the relish with which he tells the story