(6) Cooke's Morgagni, Vol. 1, pp. 417-418. I cannot too warmly
commend to young clinicians the reading of Morgagni. English
editions are available--Alexander's three-volume translation of
1769 and Cooke's Abridgement (London, 1822), of which there was
an American edition published in Boston in 1824.

Morgagni's life had as much influence as his work. In close
correspondence with the leading men of the day, with the young and
rising teachers and workers, his methods must have been a great
inspiration; and he came just at the right time. The profession was
literally ravaged by theories, schools and systems--iatromechanics,
iatrochemistry, humoralism, the animism of Stahl, the vitalistic
doctrines of Van Helmont and his followers--and into this metaphysical
confusion Morgagni came like an old Greek with his clear observation,
sensible thinking and ripe scholarship. Sprengel well remarks that "it
is hard to say whether one should admire most his rare dexterity and
quickness in dissection, his unimpeachable love of truth and justice in
his estimation of the work of others, his extensive scholarship and rich
classical style or his downright common sense and manly speech."

Upon this solid foundation the morbid anatomy of modern clinical
medicine was built. Many of Morgagni's contemporaries did not fully
appreciate the change that was in progress, and the value of the new
method of correlating the clinical symptoms and the morbid appearances.
After all, it was only the extension of the Hippocratic method
of careful observation--the study of facts from which reasonable
conclusions could be drawn. In every generation there had been men of
this type--I dare say many more than we realize--men of the Benivieni
character, thoroughly practical, clear-headed physicians. A model of
this sort arose in England in the middle of the seventeenth century,
Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689), who took men back to Hippocrates, just as
Harvey had led them back to Galen. Sydenham broke with authority
and went to nature. It is extraordinary how he could have been so
emancipated from dogmas and theories of all sorts. He laid down the
fundamental proposition, and acted upon it, that "all disease could be
described as natural history." To do him justice we must remember,
as Dr. John Brown says, "in the midst of what a mass of errors and
prejudices, of theories actively mischievous, he was placed, at a time
when the mania of hypot