was organized about 1770. During the
course of a generation altogether seven chairs in medicine were
founded in Mexico, including a chair of anatomy and surgery, a special
chair of dissection, a chair of therapeutics and one of prognostics.
The medical school of the University of Lima was organized about the
same time.

With our rather complacent modern method of belittling the past and
our disinclination to admit that the Spaniards were doing anything in
science that the English Americans were not to think of for nearly two
centuries, it would be easy to conclude that the teaching at these
medical schools must have been altogether trivial and of no
significance. When it is learned that most of the teaching was founded
on Hippocrates and Galen some of our generation might think it
hopelessly backward, but it would be well for those who think so, to
be reminded that during the century following the sixteenth, Sydenham
in England, and Boerhaave in Holland, the most distinguished medical
men of their time who are deservedly looked up to with great reverence
by most of the distinguished teachers of ours, were both of them
pleading for a return to the broad, sane views and insistence on
clinical observation of Hippocrates and Galen. As a matter of fact the
medical schools of both the University of Mexico and of Lima were
furnishing quite as good a medical training as the average medical
school of Europe at that time. They were modelled closely after the
Spanish universities and were in intimate relations with them, even
exchanging professors and students, and at the middle of the
seventeenth century at least maintaining excellent standards.

From the very beginning, then, the Spanish Americans made a definite
attempt to develop scientific knowledge in America. In medicine, in
botany, in pharmacology, as well as in geography, philology,
ethnology, and anthropology, there are magnificent contributions made
by Spanish scholars. Many a Spanish university student and teacher
spent time in this country investigating the properties of plants,
especially their relations to medicine, and laying precious
foundations in botany. Besides there were university scholars at home
in Spain taking advantage of these field investigations to {496}
compile works of serious character which are well known by those who
are familiar with the history of botany and pharmacology. What the
Spaniards were doing in America the Portuguese were doing in In