haracteristically the naive medical science of the time. The Fountain
of Youth was only like the many wonderful remedies--nearly always they
are announced to have come from long distances--that are supposed to
renew youthful vigor and which are sold so plentifully in our time. To
take such popular notions as an index of the medical science of either
that time or our own is quite absurd. The genuine medical science of
this period is, as I have shown in my volume "The Century of
Columbus," a never-ending source of surprise by its anticipation of
many ideas that are usually supposed to be much later in origin and
not a few of which are fondly supposed to be original discoveries of
our time.

Evidently Spanish interest in science was broad and deep and this is
confirmed by the story of the medical schools in connection with these
Spanish-American universities which is of special significance. My own
medical _alma mater_, the University of Pennsylvania, whose medical
school was the first in the United States, erected a tablet some years
ago in which it was at least hinted that this was the oldest medical
school in America. A few years later, on the erection of a second
tablet to the earliest medical faculty, additional knowledge having
come in the meantime, the inscription on this was worded so as to
refer to the first school of medicine in North America.

[Illustration: HOSPITAL, MEXICO (ANOTHER VIEW) This hospital, as was
noted in the caption to the other view of it (opp. page 272), is the
oldest foundation of this kind in America (1524) and is still in
existence supported by the original endowment. The second oldest
hospital in America was that of Santa Fe (in Mexico) founded in 1531
by a remarkable man who became Bishop of Michoacan, and who supported
it at his own expense, besides forming at Santa Fe a community of
thirty thousand Indians who lived like monks, practising hospitality
and all the works of charity (_A History of Nursing, Nutting and
Dock, New York_).]

{495}

The medical school of the University of Lima, founded before the end
of the sixteenth century, had meanwhile been discovered. Subsequently
the medical school of the University of Mexico came to be known and
the next tablet will have to be worded with due reference to that. The
first chair in medicine was founded at the University of Mexico about
1580, almost two centuries before our first formal academic medical
teaching in the United States