sms but many Graecisms. They
obtained their inspiration from the old Greeks and carried on the
torch of learning in their own department magnificently as recent
studies of the School of Salerno have shown. They corrected the
polypharmacy of the Arabs and restored natural modes of cure to their
proper place.

{509}

For Professor Draper, until after the Reformation there was
practically no development of medicine. "It had always been the policy
of the Church to discourage the physician and his arts; he interfered
too much with the gifts and profits of the shrines." Professor Draper
either knew nothing of the great series of Papal physicians and
surgeons or else he ignored what they had done deliberately. It seems
reasonably certain that he knew nothing about them, for if he had done
so he would surely have mentioned them in order to minimize the
significance of their work--for that is his way. He is emphatic in his
declaration of the medieval neglect of sanitation and care for the
ailing, and sets it down to the deliberate purpose to secure more
money for prayers. "From cities wreaking with putrefying filth it was
thought that the plague might be staid by the prayers of the priests."
He knows nothing apparently of the well-directed attempts to organize
sanitary control, of the appointment of archiaters or medical
directors in Italian cities, of the recognition of the contagiousness
of tuberculosis, and the effort to control it, and seems even to have
missed the significance of the successful obliteration of leprosy by
segregation methods, for that was one of the greatest triumphs of
preventive medicine ever attained. Leprosy was probably as common in
the thirteenth century in Europe as consumption is now with us or very
nearly so, and yet in two centuries it had been practically
eradicated. Well for us if we shall accomplish as much for our folk
scourge of disease--the White Plague.

Above all, Professor Draper seems to know nothing of the magnificent
hospitals of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries,
beautiful architecturally, well planned for ventilation and the
disposal of waste material, with abundant water supply, with large
open wards, windows high in the wall, tiled floors that could be
thoroughly cleansed and which, alas! were to be replaced hundreds of
years later by the awful hospitals of the first half of the nineteenth
century, which with their small windows, narrow corridors, cell-like
ap