e are many gems to be dug out. The counterblast
against bleeding was a useful protest, and to deny in toto its utility
in fever required courage--a quality never lacking in the Father of
Modern Chemistry, as he has been called.

A man of a very different type, a learned academic, a professor
of European renown, was Daniel Sennert of Wittenberg, the first to
introduce the systematic teaching of chemistry into the curriculum,
and who tried to harmonize the Galenists and Paracelsians. Franciscus
Sylvius, a disciple of Van Helmont, established the first chemical
laboratory in Europe at Leyden, and to him is due the introduction of
modern clinical teaching. In 1664 he writes: "I have led my pupils
by the hand to medical practice, using a method unknown at Leyden, or
perhaps elsewhere, i.e., taking them daily to visit the sick at the
public hospital. There I have put the symptoms of disease before their
eyes; have let them hear the complaints of the patients, and have asked
them their opinions as to the causes and rational treatment of each
case, and the reasons for those opinions. Then I have given my own
judgment on every point. Together with me they have seen the happy
results of treatment when God has granted to our cares a restoration of
health; or they have assisted in examining the body when the patient has
paid the inevitable tribute to death."(39)

(39) Withington: Medical History from the Earliest Times,
London, 1894, pp. 312-313.

Glauber, Willis, Mayow, Lemery, Agricola and Stahl led up to Robert
Boyle, with whom modern chemistry may be said to begin. Even as late as
1716, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Vienna found that all had transferred
their superstitions from religion to chemistry; "scarcely a man of
opulence or fashion that has not an alchemist in his service." To one
scientific man of the period I must refer as the author of the first
scientific book published in England. Dryden sings:

Gilbert shall live till load-stones cease to draw
Or British fleets the boundless ocean awe.

And the verse is true, for by the publication in 1600 of the "De
Magnete" the science of electricity was founded. William Gilbert was a
fine type of the sixteenth-century physician, a Colchester man, educated
at St. John's College, Cambridge. Silvanus Thompson says: "He is beyond
question rightfully regarded as the Father of Electric Science. He
founded the entire subject of Terrestrial Magnetism. He also ma