The patron saints of the university, as so declared by the first article of the constitutions, were St. Paul the Apostle, and St. Catherine the Martyr. Among the patrons, however, were also mentioned in special manner two other saints--St. John Nepomucen, who died rather than reveal the secrets of the confessional, and St. Aloysius Gonzaga, the special patron of students. It is evident that these two patrons had been chosen with a particular idea that devotion to them would encourage the practice of such virtues and devotion to duty as would be especially useful to the students, clerical and secular, of the university. On all four of the feast days of these patrons the university had a holiday. This would seem to be adding notably to the number of free days in a modern university, but must have meant very little at the University of Mexico, they had so many other free days. The most striking difference between the calendar of the University of Mexico and that of a modern university would be the number of days in the year in which no lectures were given. There were some forty of these altogether. Besides the four patron saint days, the feast day of every Apostle was a holiday. Besides these, all the Fathers and Doctors of the Church gave reasons for holidays. Then there was St. Sebastian's Day, in order that young men might be brave, St. Joseph's Day, the Annunciation, the Expectation, the Assumption and the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, the {318} Invention of the Holy Cross, the Three Rogation Days and the Feast of Our Lady of the Snows. Besides, there were St. Magdalen's, St. Ann's, St. Ignatius' and St. Lawrence's Day. These were not all, but this will give an idea how closely connected with the Church were the lectures at the university, or, rather, the intermission from the lectures. It might be said that this was a serious waste of precious time, and that our universities in the modern time would not think of imitating them, but such a remark could come but from some one who did not realize the real condition that obtained in the old-time universities. At the present time our universities finish their scholastic year about the middle of May and do not begin again until October--nearly twenty weeks. At these old universities their annual intermission between scholastic years lasted only the six weeks from the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, September 8, to St Luke's Day, October 18. They had five weeks at Easter time and two weeks at Christmas time. They spread their year out over a longer period and compensated for shorter vacations by granting holidays during the year. Their year's labor was less intense and spread out over more ground than ours.

The development of the University of Mexico into a real university in the full sense of the old studium generale, in which all forms of human knowledge might be pursued, is very interesting {319} and shows the thoroughgoing determination of the Spanish Americans to make for themselves and their children an institute of learning worthy of themselves and their magnificent new country.

Chartered in 1551, it was not formally opened until 1553. Chairs were established in this year in theology, Sacred Scripture, canon law and decretals, laws, art, rhetoric and grammar. Both Spanish and Latin were taught in the classes of grammar and rhetoric. To these was added very shortly a chair in Mexican Indian languages, in accordance with the special provisions of the imperial charter. The university continued to develop and added further chairs and departments as time went on. It had a chair of jurisprudence at the beginning, but its law department was completed in 1569 by the addition of two other chairs, one in the institutes of law, the other in codes of law. In the meantime the university had begun to make itself felt as a corporate body for general uplift by publications of various kinds. Its professor of rhetoric, Dr. Cervantes Salazer, published in 1555 three interesting Latin dialogues in imitation of Erasmus' dialogues. At the moment Erasmus' "Colloquia" was the most admired academic work in the university world of the time. The first of these dialogues described the University of Mexico, and the other two, taking up Mexico City and its environments, gave an excellent idea of {320} what the Spanish-American capital of Mexico was three centuries and a half ago.

"The early promoters of education and missions did not rely upon the distant European presses for the publication of their manuals. The printing press was introduced into the New World probably as early as 1536, and it seems likely that the first book, an elementary Christian doctrine called 'La Escala Espiritual' (the ladder of the spirit), was issued in 1537. No copy of it, however, is known to exist. Seven different printers plied their craft in New Spain in the sixteenth century. Among the notable issues of these presses, besides the religious works and church service works, were dictionaries and grammars of the Mexican languages, Puga's 'Cedulario' in 1563, a compilation of royal ordinances, Farfan's 'Tractado de Medicina.' In 1605 appeared the first text-book published in America for instruction in Latin, a manual of poetics with illustrative examples from heathen and Christian poets." (Bourne.)

With the light thrown on the early history of printing on this continent by a paragraph like this, how amusing it is to be told that the tradition among the printers and the publishers and even the bibliophiles of the United States is that the first book printed in America was the Massachusetts Bay Psalm Book printed, I believe, in 1637. There were no less than seven printing presses at work in Mexico during the sixteenth {321} century, fully fifty years before the Massachusetts Bay Psalm Book was issued. How interesting it is for those who still like to insist that the Catholic Church is opposed to the distribution of the Scriptures to the people or its printing in the vernacular, to find how many editions of it were printed in Mexico and in South America during the sixteenth century. This story of the printing press in Spanish America in the early days would of itself make a most interesting chapter in a volume on American origins, which could probably be extended into a very valuable little manual of bibliography and bibliophilic information that would arouse new interest in the accumulation of early American books.

The university had been founded just twenty-five years when provision was made for the establishment of the medical department. According to most of the chronicles the first chair in medicine was founded June 21, 1578, although there are some authorities who state that this establishment came only in 1580. I am a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School myself, and I yield to none of her sons in veneration for my Alma Mater, but I cannot pass over this statement of the foundation of the medical school in Mexico without recalling that we have been rather proud at the University of Pennsylvania to be known as the First American Medical School. This is, of course, only due to our fond United States way of assuming {322} ourselves to be all America and utterly neglecting any knowledge of Spanish America. I believe that there are tablets erected at the University of Pennsylvania chronicling our priority. One of them is to the first graduating class, the other to the first faculty of the medical school. I believe that between the erection of the two tablets there had come to be some suspicion of the possibility that South America was ahead of us in this respect and so the second tablet specifically mentions North America. When I talked some time ago before the College of Physicians of Philadelphia on this subject one of my friends, who was a teacher at the university, asked me what they should do with their tablets. I suggested that, by all means, they should be allowed to remain, and that as soon as possible an opportunity should be secured to erect the third tablet containing a statement of the real facts with regard to the place of the University of Pennsylvania as the protagonist in medicine in the United States. The tablets will then serve to show the gradual evolution of our knowledge of the true history of medical education in this country. It is all the more important that this should be the arrangement because the University of Pennsylvania has been a leader in "the discovery" of South America that has been made by us in the last few years.

Between the date of the foundation of the first chair in medicine at the beginning of the {323} last quarter of the sixteenth century and the foundation of the city, Mexico had not been without provision of physicians. In the very first year of the existence of the University of Mexico, though there was no formal faculty of medicine, two doctors received their degrees in medicine from the university. They had been students in Spain and were able to satisfy the faculty of their ability. This shows that the institution was considered to have the power to confer these degrees upon those who brought evidence of having completed the necessary studies, though it was not in a position to provide facilities for these studies. It is evident that this custom continued in subsequent years until the necessity for medical studies at home became evident. The intimate connection between the universities of old Spain and of New Spain is a very interesting subject in the educational history of the time. Even before the foundation of the university, however, definite efforts were made by the authorities to secure proper medical service for the colonists and to prevent their exploitation by quacks and charlatans.

Strict medical regulations were established by the Municipal Council of the City of Mexico in 1527 so as to prevent quacks from Europe, who might think to exploit the ills of the settlers in the new colony, from practising medicine. Licenses to practise were issued only to those who showed the possession of a university degree. {324} This strict regulation of medical practice was extended also to the apothecaries in 1529. Even before this, arrangements had been made for the regular teaching of barber-surgeons, so that injuries and wounds of various kinds might be treated properly, and so that emergencies might be promptly met, even in the absence of a physician, by these barber-surgeons. Dr. Bandelier, in his article on Francisco Bravo in the second volume of the Catholic Encyclopedia, calls attention to some important details with regard to medicine in Mexico in the early part of the sixteenth century, and especially to this distinguished physician who published the first book on medicine in that city in 1570.

Three years before that time Dr. Pedrarius de Benavides had published his "Secretos de Chirurgia" at Valladolid, in Spain, a work which had been written in America and contained an immense amount of knowledge that is invaluable with regard to Indian medicinal practice. Dr. Bravo's work, however, has the distinction of being the first medical treatise printed in America.

The issuance of these books shows the intense interest in medicine in the sixteenth century, but there are other details which serve to show how thorough and practical were the efforts of the authorities in securing the best possible medical practice. In 1524 there was founded in the City of Mexico a hospital, which still stands and which was a model in its way. That way was {325} much better than the mode of the construction of hospitals in the eighteenth century, for instance, when hospitals and care for the ailing reached the lowest ebb in modern times. Other hospitals besides this foundation by Cortez soon arose, and the wards of these hospitals were used for purposes of clinical teaching. Clinical or bedside teaching in medicine is supposed to be a comparatively recent feature of medical education. There are traces of it, however, at all times in history and while at times when theory ruled the practical application of observation waned, it was constantly coming back whenever men took medical education seriously. Its employment in Mexico seems to have been an obvious development of their very practical methods, which began with the teaching of first aid to the injured and developed through special studies of the particular diseases of the country and of the methods of curing them by native drugs.

A chair of botany existed already in connection with the university, and this, with the lectures on medicine, constituted the medical training until 1599, when a second medical lectureship was added. During the course of the next twenty years altogether seven chairs in medicine were founded, so that besides the two lectureships in medicine there was a chair of anatomy and surgery, a special chair of dissection, a chair of therapeutics, the special duty of which was to lecture on Galen "De Methodo Medendi," a {326} chair of mathematics and astrology, for the stars were supposed to influence human constitutions by all the learned men of this time and even Kepler and Galileo and Tycho-Brahe were within this decade making horoscopes for important people in Europe, and, finally, a chair of prognostics. Most of the teaching was founded on Hippocrates and Galen, and lest this should seem sufficient to condemn it as hopelessly backward in the minds of many, it may be recalled that during the century following this time Sydenham, in England, and Boerhaave, in Holland, the most distinguished medical men of their time and looked on with great reverence by the teachers of ours, were both of them pleading for a return to Hippocrates and Galen. As a matter of fact, the medical school of the University of Mexico was furnishing quite as good a medical training as the average medical school in Europe at that time, at least so far as the subjects lectured on are concerned. Indeed, it was modelled closely after the Spanish universities, which were considered well up to the standard of the time.

In the meantime additional chairs in university subjects continued to be founded. Another chair in arts was established in 1586, and further chairs in law and grammar were added at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The Spanish Crown was very much interested in Mexican education, and King Philip II of Spain, who is usually mentioned in English history for quite {327} other qualities than his interest in culture and education, was especially liberal in his provision from the Crown revenues of funds for the university. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, according to Flores in his "History of Medicine in Mexico from the Indian Times Down to the Present," the total amount of income from the Crown allowed the University of Mexico was nearly $10,000. This was about Shakespeare's time, and so we have readily available calculations as to the buying power of money at that time compared to our own. It is usually said that the money of Elizabeth's time had eight to ten times the trading value of ours. This would mean that the University of Mexico had nearly an income of $100,000 apart from fees and other sources of revenue. This would not be considered contemptible even in our own day for a university having less than twenty professorships.

The number of students at the University of Mexico is not absolutely known, but, as we have seen, Professor Bourne calculates that the University of Lima had at the beginning of the eighteenth century more than 2,000 students. The University of Mexico at the same time probably had more than 1,000 students, and both of these universities were larger in number than any institution of learning within the boundaries of the present United States until after the middle of the nineteenth century. After all, we began to have universities in the real sense of {328} that word--that is, educational institutions giving opportunities in undergraduate work and the graduate departments of law, medicine and theology--not until nearly the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Our medical and law schools did not, as a rule, become attached to our universities until the second half of the nineteenth century, and even late in that. This was to the serious detriment of post-graduate work, and especially detrimental to the preliminary training required for it, and consequently to the products of these schools.

Before a student could enter one of the post-graduate departments at the University of Mexico in law or medicine, he was required to have made at least three years of studies in the undergraduate departments. When we contrast this regulation with the custom in the United States, the result is a little startling. Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century students might enter our medical schools straight from the plow or the smithy or the mechanic's bench, and without any preliminary education, after two terms of medical lectures consisting of four months each, be given a degree which was a license to practise medicine. The abuses of such a system are manifest, and actually came into existence. They were not permitted in Mexico even in the seventeenth century.

It might perhaps be thought that these magnificent opportunities in education were provided {329} only for the higher classes, or concerned only book learning and the liberal and professional studies. Far from any such exclusiveness as this, their schools were thoroughly rounded and gave instruction in the arts and crafts and recognized the value of manual training. We have only come to appreciate in the last few decades how much we have lost in education in America by neglecting these features of education for the masses. While Germany has manual training for over fifty per cent. of the children who go to her schools, here in the United States we provide it for something less than one per cent, of our children. They made no such mistake as this in the Spanish-American countries. Indeed, Professor Bourne's paragraph on this subject is perhaps the most interesting feature of what he has to say with regard to education in Spanish America. The objective methods of education, as he depicts them, the thoroughly practical content of education, and the fact that the Church was one of the main factors in bringing about this well-rounded education, is of itself a startling commentary on the curiously perverted notions that have been held in the past with regard to the comparative value of education in Spanish and in English America and the attitude of the Church toward these educational questions:

"Both the Crown and the Church were solicitous for education in the colonies, and provisions were made for its promotion on a far greater {330} scale than was possible or even attempted in the English colonies. The early Franciscan missionaries built a school beside each church, and in their teaching abundant use was made of signs, drawings and paintings. The native languages were reduced to writing, and in a few years Indians were learning to read and write. Pedro de Gante, a Flemish lay brother and a relative of Charles V, founded and conducted in the Indian quarter in Mexico a great school, attended by over a thousand Indian boys, which combined instruction in elementary and higher branches, the mechanical and fine arts. In its workshops the boys were taught to be tailors, carpenters, blacksmiths, shoemakers and painters."

If there was all this of progress in education in Spanish-American countries in advance of what we had in the United States, people will be prone to ask where, then, are the products of the Spanish-American education? This is only a fair question, and if the products cannot be shown, their education, however pretentious, must have been merely superficial or hollow, and must have meant nothing for the culture of their people. We are sure that most people would consider the question itself quite sufficient for argument, for it would be supposed to be unanswerable.

Such has been the state of mind created by history as it is written for English-speaking people, that we are not at all prepared to think that there {331} can possibly be in existence certain great products of Spanish-American education that show very clearly how much better educational systems were developed in Spanish than in English America. The fact that we do not know them, however, is only another evidence of the one-sidedness of American education in the North, even at the present time. Our whole attitude toward the South American people, our complacent self-sufficiency from which we look down on them, our thoroughgoing condescension for their ignorance and backwardness, is all founded on our lack of real knowledge with regard to them.

The most striking product of South American education was the architectural structures which the Spanish-American people erected as ornaments of their towns, memorials of their culture and evidences of their education. The cathedrals in the Spanish towns of South America and Mexico are structures, as a rule, fairly comparable with the ecclesiastical buildings erected by towns of the same size in Europe. As a rule, they were planned at least in the sixteenth century, and most of them were finished in the seventeenth century. Their cathedrals are handsome architectural structures worthy of their faith and enduring evidence of their taste and love of beauty. The ecclesiastical buildings, the houses of their bishops and archbishops and their monasteries were worthy of their cathedrals and churches. Most of them are beautiful, all of them are dignified, all of them had {332} a permanent character that has made them endure down to our day and has made them an unfailing ornament of the towns in which they are. Their municipal buildings partook of this same type. Some of them are very handsome structures. Of their universities we have already heard that they were imposing buildings from without, handsomely decorated within.

It must not be forgotten that the Spanish Americans practically invented the new style of architecture. How effective that style is, we had abundant opportunity to see when it was employed for the building of the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo. That style is essentially American. It is the only new thing that America has contributed to construction since its settlement. How thoroughly suitable it was for the climate for which it was invented, those who have had experience of it in the new hotels erected in Florida, in the last decade or so, can judge very well. Many of its effects are an adaptation of classical formulae to buildings for the warm, yet uncertain climate of many parts of South America. Some of the old monasteries constructed after this style are beautiful examples of architecture in every sense of the word. If the Spanish-American monks had done nothing else but leave us this handsome new model in architecture they would not have lived in vain, nor would their influence in American life have been without its enduring effects. This is a typical {333} product of the higher culture of the South Spanish-American people.

With regard to the churches, it may be said that the spirit of the Puritans was entirely opposed to anything like the ornamentation of their churches, and that, indeed, these were not churches in the usual sense of the word, but were merely meeting houses. Hence there was not the same impulse to make them beautiful as lifted the Spanish Americans into their magnificent expressions of architectural beauty. On the other hand, there are other buildings in regard to which, if there had been any real culture in the minds of the English Americans, we have a right to expect some beauty as well as usefulness. If we contrast for a moment the hospitals of English and Spanish America the difference is so striking as to show the lack of some important quality in the minds of the builders at the north. Spanish-American hospitals are among the beautiful structures with which they began to adorn their towns early, and some of them remain at the present day as examples of the architectural taste of their builders. They were usually low, often of but one story in height, with a courtyard and with ample porticos for convalescents, and thick walls to defend them from the heat of the climate. In many features they surpass many hospitals that have been built in America until very recent years. They were modelled on the old mediaeval hospitals, some of which are very beautiful {334} examples of how to build places for the care of the ailing.

Contrast for a moment with this the state of affairs that has existed with regard to our church buildings and our public structures of all kinds in North America, down to the latter half of the nineteenth century. We have no buildings dating from before the nineteenth century that have any pretension to architectural beauty. They were built merely for utility. Some of them still have an interest for us because of historical associations, but they are a standing evidence of the lack of taste of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors. The English poet, Yeats, said at a little dinner given to him just before he left this country ten years ago, that no nation can pretend to being cultured until the very utensils in the kitchen are beautiful as well as useful. What is to be said, then, of a nation that erects public buildings that are to be merely useful? As a matter of fact, most of them were barracks. The American people woke up somewhat in the nineteenth century, but the awakening was very slow. A few handsome structures were erected, but it is not until the last decade or two that we have been able to awaken public taste to the necessity for having all our public buildings beautiful as well as useful.

The effect of this taste for structural beauty on the appearance of the streets of their towns was an important element in making them very different from our cramped and narrow pathways. {335} The late Mr. Ernest Crosby once expressed this very emphatically in an after-dinner speech, by detailing his experience with regard to Havana. He had visited the Cuban capital some twenty years ago, and found it very picturesque in its old Spanish ways. It is true the streets were dirty and the death-rate was somewhat high, but the vista that you saw when you came around the corner of a street, was not the same that you had seen around every other corner for twenty miles; it was different. It was largely a city of homes, with some thought of life being made happy, rather than merely being laborious. It was a place to live in and enjoy life while it lasted, and not merely a place to exist in and make money. He came north by land. The first town that he struck on the mainland, he said, reminded him of Hoboken. Every other town that he struck in the North reminded him more and more of Hoboken, until he came to the immortal Hoboken itself. The American end of the Anglo-Saxon idea seemed to him to make all the towns like Hoboken as far as possible. There is only one town in this country that is not like Hoboken, and that is Washington; and whenever we let the politicians work their wills on that--witness the Pension Building--it has a tendency to grow more and more like Hoboken. Perhaps we shall be able to save it. As for Havana, he said he understood that the death-rate had been cut in two, and that yellow fever was no longer {336} epidemic there, but he understood also that the town was growing more and more like Hoboken, so that he scarcely dared go back to see it.

The parable has a lesson that is well worth driving home for our people, for it emphasizes a notable lack of culture among the American people, which did not exist among the Spanish Americans, a lack which we did not realize until the last decade or two, though it is an important index of true culture. The hideous buildings that we have allowed ourselves to live in in America, and, above all, that we have erected as representing the dignity of city, and only too often even of state, together with the awful evidence of graft, whenever an attempt has been made to correct this false taste and erect something worthy of us, the graft usually spoiling to a very great extent our best purposes, proclaim an absence of culture in American life that amounts to a conviction of failure of our education to be liberal in the true sense of the word.

There were other products of Spanish-American education quite as striking as the architectural beauties with which Mexicans and South Americans adorned their towns. Quite as interesting, indeed, as their architecture is their literature. Ordinarily we are apt to assume that because we have heard almost nothing of Spanish-American literature, there must be very little of it, and what little there is must have very little significance. This is only another one of these examples {337} of how ridiculous it is to know something "that ain't so." Spanish-American literature is very rich. It begins very early in the history of the Spanish settlement. It is especially noteworthy for its serious products, and when the world's account of the enduring literature of the past four centuries will be made up much more of what was written in South America will live than what has been produced in North America. This seems quite unpatriotic, but it is only an expression of proper estimation of values, without any of that amusing self-complacency which so commonly characterizes North American estimation of anything that is done by our people.

South American literature, in the best sense of that much abused term, begins shortly after the middle of the sixteenth century, with the writing of the Spanish poet, Ercilla's, epic, "Araucana," which was composed in South America during the decade from 1550 to 1560. This is a literary work of genuine merit, that has attracted the attention of critics and scholars of all kinds and has given its author a significant place even in the limited field of epic poetry among the few great names that the world cares to recall in this literary mode. Voltaire considered this epic poem a great contribution to literature, and in the prefatorial essay to his own epic, the "Henriade," he praises it very highly. The poem takes its name from the Araucanos Indians, who had risen in revolt against the Spaniards in Chile, and {338} against whom the poet served for nearly ten years. He did not learn to despise them, and while the literature which does justice to the lofty sentiments which sometimes flowed from mouths of great Indian chiefs, is supposed to be much more recent, Ercilla's most enthusiastically extolled passage is the noble speech which he has given to the aged chief, Colocolo, in the "Araucana."

The expedition against the Araucanos inspired two other fine poems--that of Pedro de Ona, "Arauco Domado," written near the end of the century, and "Araucana," written by Diego de Santisteban, whose poem also saw the light before the seventeenth century opened. A fourth poet, Juan de Castellanos, better than either of these, wrote "Elegias de Varones Ilustres de Indias." He was a priest who had served in America, and who remembered some of the magnificent traits of the Indians that he had observed during his life among them, and made them the subject of his poetry. This was only the beginning of a serious Spanish-American literature, that has continued ever since. Father Charles Warren Currier, in a series of lectures at the Catholic Summer School three years ago, did not hesitate to say that the body of Spanish-American literature was much larger and much more important, and much more of it was destined to endure than of our English-American literature. In the light of what these Spaniards had done for education in their universities, and for the beauty of life in {339} their cities by their architecture, this is not so surprising a saying as it might otherwise be. All of these things stand together and are confirmations one of the other.

The most interesting product of Spanish-American education, however,--the one which shows that it really stood for a higher civilization than ours,--remains to be spoken of. It consists of their treatment of the Indians. From the very beginning, as we have just shown, their literature in Spanish America did justice to the Indians. They saw his better traits. It is true they had a better class of Indians, as a rule, to deal with, but there is no doubt also that they did much to keep him on a higher level, while everything in North America that was done by the settlers was prone to reduce the native in the scale of civilization. He was taught the vices and not the virtues of civilization, and little was attempted to uplift him. Just as the literary men were interested in the better side of his character, so the Spanish-American scientists were interested in his folklore, in his medicine, in his arts and crafts, in his ethnology and anthropology--in a word, in all that North Americans have only come to be interested in during the nineteenth century. Books on all these subjects were published, and now constitute a precious fund of knowledge with regard to the aborigines that would have been lost only for the devotion of Spanish-American scholars.

It is not surprising, then, that the Indian {340} himself, with all this interest in him, did not disappear, as in North America, but has remained to constitute the basis of South American peoples. If the South American peoples are behind our own in anything, it is because large elements in them have been raised from a state of semi-barbarism into civilization, while our people have all come from nations that were long civilized and we have none at all of the natives left. Wherever the English went always the aborigines disappeared before them. The story is the same in New Zealand and Australia as it is in North America, and it would be the same in India, only for the teeming millions that live in that peninsula, for whom Anglo-Saxon civilization has never meant an uplift in any sense of the word, but rather the contrary. The white man's burden has been to carry the Indian, instilling into him all the vices, until no longer he could cling to his shifty master and was shaken off to destruction.

This story of the contrast of the treatment of the Indian at the North and the South is probably the best evidence for the real depth of culture that the magnificent education of the Spaniards, so early and so thoroughly organized in their colonies, accomplished for this continent. Alone it would stand as the highest possible evidence of the interest of the Spanish Government and the Spanish Church in the organization not only of education, but of government in such a way as to bring happiness and uplift for {341} both natives and colonists in the Spanish-American countries. Abuses there were, as there always will be where men are concerned and where a superior race comes in contact with an inferior. These abuses, however, were exceptions and not the rule. The policy instituted by the Spaniards and maintained in spite of the tendencies of men to degenerate into tyranny and misuse of the natives is well worthy of admiration. English-speaking history has known very little of it until comparatively recent years. Mr. Sidney Lee, the editor of the English Biographical Dictionary and the author of a series of works on Shakespeare which has gained for him recognition as probably the best living authority on the history of the Elizabethan times, wrote a series of articles which appeared in Scribner's last year on "The Call of the West." This was meant to undo much of the prejudice which exists in regard to Spanish colonization in this country and to mitigate the undue reverence in which the English explorers and colonists have been held by comparison. There seems every reason to think, then, that this newer, truer view of history is gradually going to find its way into circulation. In the meantime it is amusing to look back and realize how much prejudice has been allowed to warp English history in this matter, and how, as a consequence of the determined, deliberate efforts to blacken the Spanish name, we have had to accept as history exactly the opposite view to the {342} reality in this matter. Lest we should be thought to be exaggerating, we venture to quote one of the opening paragraphs of Mr. Sidney Lee's article as it appeared in Scribner's for May, 1907: "Especially has theological bias justified neglect or facilitated misconception of Spain's role in the sixteenth century drama of American history. Spain's initial adventures in the New World are often consciously or unconsciously overlooked or underrated in order that she may figure on the stage of history as the benighted champion of a false and obsolete faith, which was vanquished under divine protecting Providence by English defenders of the true religion. Many are the hostile critics who have painted sixteenth century Spain as the avaricious accumulator of American gold and silver, to which she had no right, as the monopolist of American trade, of which she robbed others, and as the oppressor and exterminator of the weak and innocent aborigines of the new continent who deplored her presence among them. Cruelty in all its hideous forms is, indeed, commonly set forth as Spain's only instrument of rule in her sixteenth century empire. On the other hand, the English adventurer has been credited by the same pens with a touching humanity, with the purest religious aspirations, with a romantic courage which was always at the disposal of the oppressed native.

"No such picture is recognized when we apply the touchstone of the oral traditions, printed {343} books, maps and manuscripts concerning America which circulated in Shakespeare's England. There a predilection for romantic adventure is found to sway the Spaniards in even greater degree than it swayed the Elizabethan. Religious zeal is seen to inspirit the Spaniards more constantly and conspicuously than it stimulated his English contemporary. The motives of each nation are barely distinguishable one from another. Neither deserves to be credited with any monopoly of virtue or vice. Above all, the study of contemporary authorities brings into a dazzling light which illumes every corner of the picture the commanding facts of the Spaniard's priority as explorer, as scientific navigator, as conqueror, as settler."

Here is magnificent praise from one who cannot be suspected of national or creed affinities to bias his judgment. He has studied the facts and not the prejudiced statements of his countrymen. The more carefully the work of the Spaniards in America during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is studied, the more praise is bestowed upon them. The more a writer knows of actual conditions the more does he feel poignantly the injustice that has been done by the Protestant tradition which abused the good that was accomplished by the Catholic Spanish and which neglected, distorted and calumniated his deeds and motives. This bit of Protestant tradition is, after all, only suffering the fate that every other {344} Protestant position has undergone during the course of the development of scientific historical criticism. Every step toward the newer, truer history has added striking details to the picture of the beneficent influences of the Church upon her people in every way. It has shown up pitilessly the subterfuges, the misstatements and the positive ignorance which have enabled Protestantism to maintain the opposite impression in people's minds in order to show how impossible was agreement with the Catholic Church, since it stood for backwardness and ignorance and utter lack of sympathy with intellectual development. Now we find everywhere that just the opposite was true. Whenever the Reformation had the opportunity to exert itself to the full, education and culture suffered. Erasmus said in his time, "Wherever Lutheranism reigns there is an end of literature." Churches and cathedrals that used to be marvellous expressions of the artistic and poetic feeling of the people became the ugliest kind of mere meeting houses. Rev. Augustus Jessop, himself an Anglican clergyman, tells how "art died out in rural England" after the Reformation, which he calls The Great Pillage, and "King Whitewash and Queen Ugliness ruled supreme for centuries." The same thing happened in Germany, and education was affected quite as much as art. German national development was delayed, and she has come to take her place in world influence only in the nineteenth {345} century, after most of the influence of the religious revolt led by Luther in the sixteenth century has passed away. These are but a few of the striking differences in recent history that are so well typified by the contrast between what was accomplished for art and culture and architecture and education by the Catholic Spaniard and the English Protestant here in America during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Truth is coming to her own at last, and it is in the history of education particularly that advances are being made which change the whole aspect of the significance of history during the past 350 years.

THE MEDICAL PROFESSION FOR SIX THOUSAND YEARS

"Tu recte vivis si curas esse quod audis;
Neve putes alium sapiente bonoque beatum."
--Horace, Ep., 1, 16.

[You are living right if you take care to be what people say you are. Do not imagine that any one who is really happy is other than wise and good.]


"Quod ipse sis, non quod habearis, interest."
--Publius Syrus.

[The question is what you are, not what you are thought to be.]


"May you so raise your character, that you may help to make the next age a better thing, and leave posterity in your debt for the advantage it shall receive by your example."
--Lord Halifax.

THE MEDICAL PROFESSION FOR SIX THOUSAND YEARS [Footnote 20]

[Footnote 20: This was the address to the graduates at the First Commencement of the Fordham University School of Medicine, June 9, 1909.]

I have felt that the first graduation of the youngest of the medical schools might very well be occupied with the consideration of the place of the medical profession in history. We are rather apt in the modern time to neglect the lessons of history and, above all, of the history of science, first because it is not always easy to get definite information with regard to it, and secondly and mainly because we are likely to imagine that scientific and medical history can mean very little for us. In America particularly we have neglected the history of medicine and it has been one of the definite efforts at Fordham University School of Medicine to renew interest in this subject. It is entirely too important to be neglected and it has valuable lessons for all generations, but especially for a generation so occupied with itself, that it does not properly consider the claims of the past to recognition for fine work accomplished, and for the exhibition of some of the best qualities of the human intellect in the pursuit of scientific and practical medical knowledge in previous generations.

At the earliest dawn of history we find institutions called temples in which men were being treated for their ailments. Those who treated them we have been accustomed to speak of as priests. And such they were, since their functions included the direction of religious services. These religious services, however, were not the exercises of religion as we know them now, but were special services meant to propitiate certain gods who were supposed to rule over health and disease. There were other kinds of temples besides these. We still talk of temples of justice meaning our law courts, and our phrase comes from an older time when people went to have their differences of opinion adjudicated by men who conducted the services of praise and prayer for particular deities who were supposed to mete out justice to men, but the temple attendants were at the same time expert in deciding causes, knowing right and wrong, wise in declaring how justice should be done. These early temples, then, in which the ailing were treated and over which experts in disease and its treatment presided, were not temples in our modern sense, but were much like hospitals as we know them now. They would remind us of the hospitals conducted by religious orders, trained to care for the illnesses of mankind and yet deeply interested in the worship of God.

Human institutions are never so different from one another, even in spite of long distance of time {351} or place, as they are usually presumed to be. Men and women have not changed in all the period of human history that we know, and their modes and ways of life often have a startling similarity if we but find the key for the significance of customs that seem to be very different. These temples of the gods of health and of disease, then, were places where patients congregated and men studied diseases for generations, and passed on their knowledge from one to another, and accumulated information, and elaborated theories, and came to conclusions, often on insufficient premises, and did many other things that we are doing at the present time. The medical profession is directly descended from these institutions. They are among the oldest that we know of in human history. These special temples are only a little less ancient than other forms of temples if, indeed, they were not the first to be founded, for man's first most clamorous reason for appeal to the gods has ever been himself and his own health.

With the reception of your diplomas this evening you now belong to what is therefore probably the oldest profession in the world. In welcoming you into it let me call your attention particularly to the fact that the history of our profession can be traced back to the very beginning of the course of time, for as long as we have any account of men's actions in an organized social order.

We are very prone in the modern time to think that what we are doing in each successive generation is of so much greater significance than what was accomplished before our time that it is really scarcely worth while to give much attention to the past. This self-sufficient complacency with regard to the present would be quite unbearable only that each successive generation in its turn has had the same tendency and has expiated its fault by being thought little of by subsequent generations. We shall have our turn with those we affect to despise.

It is supposed to be particularly true in every department of science and, above all, in medicine that there is such a wide chasm between what we are doing now and what was accomplished by our forebears, no matter how intelligent they were in the long ago, that to occupy ourselves seriously with the history of medicine may be a pleasant occupation for an elderly physician who has nothing better to do, but can mean very little for the young man entering upon practice or for the physician busy with his patients. Medical history may be good enough for some book-worm interested in dry-as-dust details for their own sake and perhaps because he rejoices in the fact that other people do not know them, but can have very little significance for the up-to-date physician. This is an impression that is dying hard just now, but it is dying. We are learning that there is very little that we are {353} doing even now that has not been done before us and that, above all, the great physicians, no matter how long ago they wrote, always have precious lessons for us that we cannot afford to neglect, even though they be 300 or 600 or 1,800 or even 2,500 years ago. At all of these dates in the past there were physicians whose works will never die.

In every department of human history the impression that we are the only ones whose work is significant has been receiving a sad jolt in recent years, and perhaps in no branch of science is this so true as in medicine. We are coming to realize how much the physicians and surgeons of long distant times accomplished, and, above all, we are learning to appreciate that they approached problems in medicine at many periods of medical history in the best scientific temper of the modern time. Of course there were abuses, but, then, the Lord knows, there are abuses now. Of course their therapeutics had many absurdities in it, but, then, let us not forget that Professor Charles Richet, the director of the department of physiology at the University of Paris, declared not long ago in an article in the best known of French magazines, the Revue des Deux Mondes, that the therapeutics of any generation of the world's history always contained many absurdities--for the second succeeding generation. The curious thing about it is that some of these supposed absurdities afterward come {354} back into vogue and prove to be precious germs of discovery, or remedies of value that occasionally even develop into excellent systems of treatment.

Of course there were superstitions in the old days, but, then, there have been superstitions in medicine at all times. Any one who thinks that we are without superstitions in medicine at the present time, superstitions that are confidently accepted by many regular practising physicians, must, indeed, be innocent. A superstition is in its etymology a survival. It comes from the Latin superstes, a survivor. It is the acceptance of some doctrine the reasons for which have disappeared in the progress of knowledge or the development of science, though the doctrine itself still maintains a hold on the minds of man. Superstition has nothing necessarily to do with religion, though it is with regard to religion that doctrines are particularly apt to be accepted after the reasons for them have disappeared. In medicine, however, superstitions are almost as common as in religion. I shall never forget a discussion with two of the most prominent physicians of this country on this subject.

One of them was our greatest pathologist, the other a great teacher of clinical medicine, who came into medicine through chemistry and therefore had a right to opinions with regard to the chemical side of medicine. We had been discussing the question of how much serious medical {355} education there was in the Middle Ages and how, in spite of the magnificent work done, so many superstitions in medicine continued to maintain themselves. I remarked that it seemed impossible to teach truths to large bodies of men without having them accept certain doctrines which they thought truths but which were only theories and which they insisted on holding after the reasons for them had passed away. I even ventured to say that I thought that there were as many superstitions now, and such as there were, were of as great significance as those that maintained themselves in the Middle Ages. My chemical clinician brother on the right side said, "Let us not forget in this regard the hold the uric acid diathesis has on the English-speaking medical profession." And the brother pathologist on the left side: "Well, and what shall we say of intestinal auto-intoxication?"

Perhaps you will not realize all the force of these expressions at the present time, but after you have been five years in the practice of medicine and have been flooded by the literature of the advertising manufacturing pharmacist and by the samples of the detail man and his advice and suggestion of principles of practice, if you will listen to them, perhaps you will appreciate how much such frank expressions mean as portraying the medical superstitions of our time.

Surely we who have for years been much occupied with the superstition, for such it now {356} turns out to be, of heredity in medicine, will not be supercilious toward older generations and their superstitions. Until a few years ago we were perfectly sure that a number of diseases were inherited directly. Tuberculosis, rheumatism, gout, various nutritional disturbances all were supposed to pass from father to son and from mother to daughter, or sometimes to cross the sex line. For a time cancer was deemed to be surely hereditary to some degree at least. Now most of us know that probably no disease is directly inherited, that acquired characters are almost surely not transmitted, and that while defects may be the subject of heredity, disease never is. Not only this, biological investigations have served to show that what is the subject of inheritance is just the opposite,--resistance to disease. A person whose father and mother had suffered from tuberculosis used to think it almost inevitable that he too should suffer from it. If they had died that he too would die. Our experts in tuberculosis declare now, that if tuberculosis has existed in the preceding generation there is a much better chance of the patient recovering from it, or at least resisting it for a long time, than if there had been no tuberculosis in the family. We had been harboring the superstition of heredity, the surviver opinion from a preceding generation, until we learned better by observation.

Let us turn from such discussion to the {357} beginnings of the story of our medical profession as it has been revealed to us in recent years.

The first picture that we have of a physician in history is, indeed, one to make us proud of our profession. The first physician was I-em-Hetep, whose name means "the bringer of peace." He had two other titles according to tradition, one of which was "the master of secrets," evidently in reference to the fact that more or less necessarily many secrets must be entrusted to the physician, but also, doubtless, in connection with the knowledge of the secrets of therapeutics which he was supposed to possess. Another of his titles was that of "the scribe of numbers," by which, perhaps, reference is made to his prescriptions, which may have been lengthy, for there are many "calendar" prescriptions in the early days, but may only refer to the necessity of his knowing weights and measures and numbers very exactly for professional purposes. I-em-Hetep lived in the reign of King Tchser, a monarch of the third dynasty in Egypt, the date of which is somewhat uncertain, but is about 4500 B.C. How distinguished this first physician was in his time may be gathered from the fact that the well-known step pyramid at Sakkara, the old cemetery near Memphis, is attributed to him. So great was the honor paid to him that, after his death he was worshipped as a god, and so we have statues of him as a placid-looking man with a certain divine expression, seated with a {358} scroll on his knees and an air of benignant knowledge well suited to his profession.

I called attention in 1907 [Footnote 21] to the fact that the earliest pictures of surgical operations extant had recently been uncovered in the cemetery of Sakkara near Memphis in Egypt. These pictures show that surgery was probably an organized branch of medicine thus early, and the fact that they are found in a very important tomb shows how prominent a place in the community the surgeon held at that time. The oldest document after that which we have with regard to medicine is the "Ebers Papyrus," the writing of which was done probably about 1600 B.C. This, however, is only a copy of an older manuscript or series of manuscripts, and there seems to be no doubt that the text, which contains idioms of a much older period, or, indeed, several periods, probably represents accumulations of information made during 2,000 or even 3,000 years before the date of our manuscript. Indeed, it is not improbable that the oldest portions of the "Ebers Papyrus" owe their origin to men of the first Egyptian dynasties, nearly 5,000 years B.C. To be members of a profession that can thus trace its earliest written documents to a time nearly some 7,000 years ago, is an honor that may be readily appreciated and that may allow of some complacency.

[Footnote 21: Journal of the American Medical Association, November 8, 1907.]

There is a well-grounded tradition which shows {359} us that an Egyptian monarch with whose name even we are familiar, though we may not be able to pronounce it very well--he was Athothis, the son of Menes--wrote a work on anatomy. The exact date of this monarch's death is sometimes said to be 4157 b.c. We have traces of hospitals in existence at this time and something of the nature of a medical school. Indeed, one may fairly infer that medical education, which had been developing for some time, probably for some centuries, took a definite form at this time in connection with the temples of Saturn. Priests and physicians were the same, or at least physicians formed one of the orders of the clergy and the teachers of medicine particularly were clergymen. This tradition of close affiliation between religion and medicine continued down to the fifteenth century. How few of us there are who realize that until the fourteenth century the professors of medicine at the great universities were not married men, because members of the faculty, as is true at the present time of many members of the faculty in the English universities, were not allowed to marry. The old clerical tradition was still maintaining itself even with regard to the medical teachers.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this early history of medicine in Egypt is that, with the very earliest dawn of medical history, we have traces of highly developed specialism in medicine. There were thirty-six departments of medicine, or {360} at least there were thirty-six medical divinities who presided over the particular parts of the human body. In the larger temples, at least, there was a special corps of priest physicians for each one of these departments. Herodotus, the Father of History, is particularly full in his details of Egyptian history, and though he wrote about 400 B.C., nearly 2,300 years ago, his attention was attracted by this highly developed specialism among the Egyptians. He tells us in quaint fashion, "Physicke is so studied and practised with the Egyptians that every disease hath his several physician, who striveth to excell in healing that one disease and not to be expert in curing many. Whereof it cometh that every corner of that country is full of physicians. Some for the eyes, others for the head, many for the teeth, not a few for the stomach and the inwards."

It is interesting to realize that the same state of affairs upon which you young graduates will come now that you are going out to find an opportunity to practise for yourselves at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, is not very different from that which the great Father of History chronicles as the state of affairs among the Egyptians between 600 and 1,000 before Christ,--let us say about 3,000 years ago. You, too, will find that every corner is full of physicians, some for the eyes, others for the head, many for the teeth, not a few for the stomach and everything else under the sun quite as in {361} ancient Egypt. After a time you will probably find that some little corner has been left for you, and you will work hard enough to get into it first, and then to fill it afterward. The story of how young physicians have got on in their first few years has probably been interesting at all times in the world's history. I think that I know about it at five different periods, and in every one of these there seemed to be no possible room, and yet somehow room was eventually found, though only after there had been a struggle, in the midst of which a certain number of the young physicians found another sphere of activity besides medicine.

Of course it is easy to think that these specialties did not amount to much, but any such thought is the merest assumption. A single instance will show you how completely at fault this assumption is. Dentistry is presumed to be a very modern profession. As a matter of fact mummies were found in the cemetery of Thebes whose bodies probably come from before 3000 B.C., who have in their teeth the remains of gold fillings that were well put in, and show good workmanship, nearly 5,000 years ago. [Footnote 22] After dentistry, the specialty that we would be sure could not have had any significant existence so long ago would be that of ophthalmology. As a matter of fact, it is with regard to the knowledge of eye diseases displayed by these early teachers of {362} medicine that the "Ebers Papyrus" is most startling. It is especially full in diagnosis and contained many valuable hints for treatment. As for laryngology and rhinology, one of the earliest medical records that we have, is the rewarding by one of the kings of Egypt of an early dynasty (nearly 4000 B.C.), of a physician who had cured him of a trouble of the nose of long standing, that seems to have interfered with his breathing.

[Footnote 22: Burdett: "History of Hospitals."]

It is easy to think in spite of all this, that the Egyptians did not know much medicine; but only one who knows nothing about it thinks so. According to Dr. Carl von Klein, who discussed the "Medical Features of the Ebers Papyrus" in the Journal of the American Medical Association about five years ago, over 700 different substances are mentioned as of remedial value in this old-time medical work. There is scarcely a disease of any important organ with which we are familiar in the modern time that is not mentioned here. While the significance of diseases of such organs as the spleen, the ductless glands, and the appendix was, of course, missed, nearly every other pathological condition was either expressly named or at least hinted at. The papyrus insists very much on the value of history-taking in medicine, and hints that the reason why physicians fail to cure is often because they have not studied their cases sufficiently. While the treatment was mainly symptomatic, it was not more so than is a great deal of therapeutics {363} at the present time, even in the regular school of medicine. The number and variety of their remedies and of their modes of administering them is so marvellous, that I prefer to quote Dr. von Klein's enumeration of them for you:

"In this papyrus are mentioned over 700 different substances from the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms which act as stimulants, sedatives, motor excitants, motor depressants, narcotics, hypnotics, analgesics, anodynes, antispasmodics, mydriatics, myotics, expectorants, tonics, dentifrices, sialogogues, antisialics, refrigerants, emetics, antiemetics, carminatives, cathartics, purgatives, astringents, cholagogues, anthelmintics, restoratives, haematics, alteratives, antipyretics, antiphlogistics, antiperiodics, diuretics, diluents, diaphoretics, sudorifics, anhydrotics, emmenagogues, oxytocics, caustics, ecbolics, galactagogues, irritants, escharotics, caustics, styptics, haemostatics, emollients, demulcents, protectives, antizymotics, disinfectants, deodorants, parasiticides, antidotes and antagonists."

Scarcely less interesting than the variety of remedies were their methods of administration:

"Medicines are directed to be administered internally in the form of decoctions, infusions, injections, pills, tablets, troches, capsules, powders, potions and inhalations; and externally, as lotions, ointments, plasters, etc. They are to be eaten, drunk, masticated or swallowed, to be taken often once only--often for many days--and the time {364} is occasionally designated--to be taken mornings, evenings or at bedtime. Formulas to disguise bad tasting medicaments are also given." We have no advantage over the early Egyptians even in elegant prescribing.

With all this activity in Egypt, it is easy to understand that the other great nations of antiquity also have important chapters in the history of medicine. The earliest accounts would seem to indicate that the Chaldeans, the Assyrians and the Babylonians all made significant advances in medicine. It seems clear that a work on anatomy was written in China about the year 2000 B.C. Some of the other Eastern nations made great progress. The Hindoos in particular have in recent years been shown to have accomplished very good work in medicine itself. Charaka, a Hindu surgeon, who lived not later than 300 B.C., made some fine contributions to the medical literature in Hindostani. There were hospitals in all these countries, and these provided opportunities for the practice of surgery. Laparotomy was very commonly done by Hindu surgeons, and one of the rules enjoined by Hindu students was the constant habit of visiting the sick and seeing them treated by experienced physicians. Clinical teaching is often spoken of as a modern invention, but it is as old as hospital systems, and they go back to the dawn of history.

It is among the Greeks, however, that the most {365} important advances in medicine, so far as we are concerned, were made. This is, however, not so much because of what they did as from the fact that they were more given to writing, and then their writings have been better preserved for us than those of other nations. The first great physician among the Greeks was AEsculapius, of whom, however, we have only traditions. He is fabled to have been the son of Apollo, the god of music and the arts, and therefore to have been a near relative of the Muses. The connection is rather interesting, because sometimes people try to remove medicine from among the arts that minister to the happiness of man, and place it among the sciences whose application is for his profit. Medicine still remains an art, however. The temples of AEsculapius were the first hospitals, though the priests were not the only ones who practised medicine, for there were laymen who, after having served for some time in the hospitals, wandered through the country under the name of Asclepiads, treating people who were not able to go to the hospitals or shrines. These evidently, then, were the first medical schools in Greece as well as the first hospitals.

Six hundred years after AEsculapius came Hippocrates, of Cos, the Father of Medicine. He undoubtedly had the advantage of many Egyptian medical traditions and other Oriental medical sources, as well as the observations made in the hospitals and shrines of AEsculapius. He {366} wrote some great works in medicine that have never grown old, Young men do not read them, old men who are over-persuaded of how much progress is being made by their own generation in medicine neglect them. The busy practitioner has no time for them. The great teachers of medicine whom all the professors look up to and who think for us in each generation turn fondly back to Hippocrates, and marvel at his acumen of observation and his wonderful knowledge of men and disease. Sydenham thought that no one had ever written like him, and in our turn we honor Sydenham by calling him the English Hippocrates. Boerhaave, Van Swieten, Liancisi, the great fathers of modern clinical medicine, turned with as much reverence to Hippocrates as does Osler, the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, in our twentieth century. Hippocrates wrote 2,500 years ago, but his writing is eternal in interest and value.

The famous oath of Hippocrates, which used to be read to all the graduates of medicine, well deserved that honor, for it represents the highest expression of professional dignity and obligation. There is a lofty sense of professional honor expressed in it that cannot be excelled at any period in the world's history. Among other things that Hippocrates required his adepts in medicine, his medical students when they graduated into physicians, to swear to was the following: "I will follow the system of regimen which {367} according to my ability and judgment I consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous. I will give no deadly medicine to man, woman, or child born or unborn. With purity and with holiness I will pass my life and practise my art, Whatever in connection with my professional practice, or not in connection with it, I see or hear in the life of men which ought not to be spoken of abroad, I shall not divulge, as reckoning that all such should be kept secret. While I continue to keep this oath inviolate may it be granted to me to enjoy life and the practice of my art respected by all men in all times; but should I trespass and violate this oath may the reverse be my lot."

It is sometimes thought that after the Roman medicine, which was an imitation of the Greek (though Galen well deserves a place by himself, and Galen is usually thought of as a Roman though he wrote in Greek and had obtained his education at Pergamos in Asia Minor), there was an interregnum in medicine until our own time. This is, however, quite as much of an assumption as to suppose that the Egyptians had no medicine--as we used to until we knew more about them--or that old-time medicine is quite negligible because we were ignorant of its value, The Middle Ages had much more of medicine than we are likely to think, and just as soon as the great universities arose at the end of the {368} twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth centuries, medicine gained a new impetus and flourished marvellously. These university medical schools of the later Middle Ages are models in their way, and put us to shame in many things. According to a law of the Emperor Frederick II issued for the Two Sicilies in 1241, [Footnote 23] three years of preliminary study were required at the university before a student might take up the medical course, and then he had to spend four years at medicine, and practise for a year under the supervision of a physician of experience before he was allowed to practise for himself. The story of the medicine of this time is all the more wonderful because subsequent generations forgot about it until recent years, and supposed that all of this period was shrouded in darkness. It was probably one of the most brilliant periods in medical history. Some of the men who worked and taught in medicine at this time will never be forgotten.

[Footnote 23: For the complete text of this law, the first regulating the practice of medicine in modern times, also the first pure drug law, see Walsh's The Popes and Science, New York, Fordham University Press, 1908.]

Probably the greatest of them was Guy de Chauliac, a Papal chamberlain, whom succeeding generations have honored with the title of Father of Surgery. His great text-book, the "Chirurgia Magna," was in common use for several centuries after his death, and is full of surgical teaching that we are prone to think much {369} more modern. He trephined the skull, opened the thorax, operated within the abdomen, declared that patients suffering from wounds of the intestines would die unless these were sewed up, operated often for hernia in an exaggerated Trendelenberg position, with the patient's head down on a board, but said that many more patients were operated upon for hernia "for the benefit of the surgeon's purse than for the good of the patient." His directions for the treatment of fractures and for taxis in hernia were followed for full four centuries after his time. No wonder that Pagel, the great German historian, declared that "Chauliac laid the foundation of that primacy in surgery which the French maintained down to the nineteenth century." Portal, in his "History of Surgery," declares that "Guy de Chauliac said nearly everything which modern surgeons say, and his work is of infinite price, but unfortunately too little read, too little pondered." Malgaigne declared "the 'Chirurgia Magna' a masterpiece of learned and luminous writing."

Chauliac's [Footnote 24] personal character, however, is even more admirable than his surgical knowledge. He was at Avignon when the black death occurred and carried away one-half the population. He was one of the few physicians who had the {370} courage to stay. He tells us very simply that he did stay not because he had no fear, for he was dreadfully afraid, but he thought it his duty to stay. Toward the end of the epidemic, he caught the fever but survived it and has written a fine description of it. He was looked upon as the leader of surgery in his time, and this is his advice as to what the surgeon should be as given in the introductory chapter of his "Chirurgia Magna": "The surgeon should be learned, skilled, ingenious and of good morals; be bold in things that are sure, cautious in dangers; avoid evil cures and practices; be gracious to the sick, obliging to his colleagues, wise in his predictions; be chaste, sober, pitiful and merciful; not covetous nor extortionate of money; but let the recompense be moderate, according to the work, the means of the sick, the character of the issue or event and its dignity." No wonder that Malgaigne says of him: "Never since Hippocrates has medicine heard such language filled with so much nobility and so full of matter in so few words."

[Footnote 24: For sketch of Chauliac see Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin, 1909, or Catholic Churchmen in Science, second series. Dolphin Press, Philadelphia, 1909.]

The old-time medical traditions of education which in the mediaeval universities produced such men as William of Salicet and Lanfranc and Mondeville and Guy de Chauliac, persisted during the next two centuries in the southern countries of Europe, and then were transferred to America through Spain. The first American medical school was not, as has so often been said, at my own Alma Mater, the University of {371} Pennsylvania, which had its first lectures in 1767, while the Physicians and Surgeons of New York did not come for some ten years later and Harvard only in the following decade, but in the medical school of the University of Mexico, where the first lectures were held in 1578, and where a full medical school was organized before the end of the sixteenth century. In this medical school, which during the seventeenth century came to have several hundred students, the university tradition of the olden time was well preserved. Three years of preliminary study at the university were required before a student could take up the course in medicine, and four years of medical study were required before graduation. We have some of the text-books, and know much about the curriculum of this old medical school, and in every way it is worthy of the old university traditions.

Unfortunately our universities in what is now the United States developed very slowly. King's College (Columbia) did not become a university in the sense of having law and medical schools as well as an undergraduate department until the nineteenth century had almost begun. Harvard did not have a law school affiliated with it until the first quarter of the nineteenth century had almost run its course. The affiliations between the medical schools and the universities in these cases was only very slight, and the medical schools were entirely in the hands of the {372} medical faculty, whose main purpose during a great part of the nineteenth century was to make medical studies as short as possible and as inexpensive as they could possibly be made for the faculty, because that left so much more of the fees to be absorbed by the historic septennate of professors who ruled and managed the university. The consequence was that during most of the nineteenth century two terms of four months each were all that was required for the diploma in medicine in most American medical schools. Three schools maintained a very high standard by requiring twenty weeks in each of two calendar years. The medical school that was considered one of the best in the country, and whose graduates obtained the highest marks in the army and navy examinations, that of the University of Virginia, required but two terms of four and one-half months each which might be taken in the same calendar year, and then gave the doctor's degree.