the fifteenth was a true dawn that brightened
more and more unto the perfect day. Always a reflex of its period,
medicine joined heartily though slowly in the revolt against
mediaevalism. How slowly I did not appreciate until recently. Studying
the earliest printed medical works to catch the point of view of the men
who were in the thick of the movement up to 1480--which may be taken to
include the first quarter of a century of printing--one gets a startling
record. The mediaeval mind still dominates: of the sixty-seven
authors of one hundred and eighty-two editions of early medical books,
twenty-three were men of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, thirty
men of the fifteenth century, eight wrote in Arabic, several were of
the School of Salernum, and only six were of classical antiquity, viz.,
Pliny (first 1469), Hippocrates (1473) (Hain (*)7247), Galen (1475)
(Hain 7237), Aristotle (1476), Celsus (1478), and Dioscorides
(1478).(**)

(*) This asterisk is used by Hain to indicate that he had seen a
copy.--Ed.

(**) Data added to a manuscript taken from the author's summary
on "Printed Medical Books to 1480" in Transactions of the
Bibliographical Society, London, 1916, XIII, 5-8, revised from
its "News-Sheet" (February, 1914). "Of neither Hippocrates nor
Galen is there an early edition; but in 1473 at Pavia appeared an
exposition of the Aphorisms of Hippoerates, and in 1475 at Padua
an edition of the Tegni or Notes of Galen." Ibid., p. 6.
Osler's unfinished Illustrated Monograph on this subject is now
being printed for the Society of which he was President.--Ed.

The medical profession gradually caught the new spirit. It has been well
said that Greece arose from the dead with the New Testament in the one
hand and Aristotle in the other. There was awakened a perfect passion
for the old Greek writers, and with it a study of the original
sources, which had now become available in many manuscripts. Gradually
Hippocrates and Galen came to their own again. Almost every professor
of medicine became a student of the MSS. of Aristotle and of the Greek
physicians, and before 1530 the presses had poured out a stream of
editions. A wave of enthusiasm swept over the profession, and the best
energies of its best minds were devoted to a study of the Fathers. Galen
became the idol of the schools. A strong revulsion of feeling arose
against the Arabians, and Avicenna, the P