The romance of medicine / by Ronald Campbell Macfie.

  • Ronald Campbell Macfie
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The romance of medicine / by Ronald Campbell Macfie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tainlv, even after the best business education, the world would be flat to him, and the stars little more than ioo candle-power lights. As recently as the seventeenth century the Muggletonians believed that God was only six feet high, and the sun only four miles off. And even in these davs of education the most grotesque ideas of the universe and of the body may be found. No ; we are not scientists, and to a few great scientific minds we owe all the real science of the world. The history of science is the history of a few great men fighting single-handed to estab¬ lish truth and to abolish error. Save for Galen, Vesalius, Galileo, Harvey, Newton, what sort of a world should we be in to-day ? When we examine the records of history, we find that medicine in its early days must have presented the characters we have suggested. Surgery apart, we find it, even in historic times, a magic art dealing in charms and amulets and incantations—the natural and inevitable fruit of a fanciful cosmogony. The oldest medical treatises known are the medical papyrus discovered by Professor Flinders Eoyptian Petrie nCar E1 Lahun> dated about medicine. ldo° B,c- (before the time of Moses), the so-called Papyrus Ebers (found between the legs of a mummy), dated about 1500 b.c., the Beilin Medical Papyrus, dated about 1400 b.c., and the British Museum Papyrus, dated