Andrew Borde and his medical works / by Hector A. Colwell.

  • Colwell, Hector A. (Hector Alfred), 1875-
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Andrew Borde and his medical works / by Hector A. Colwell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    have caused him to lash out. Wood states that the three women who were reported to be living in the house at Winchester were three patients. Ponet’s accusation was brought in a book printed abroad, whither he fled on the accession of Mary, so that some additional spite may have entered into it from this cause also. Here the matter remains at present. There may have been “a sad lapse at the end of a useful life,” but in estimating the matter the characters of the accusers and the method of bringing the accusation should be taken into account. Before proceeding to the examination of a few extracts from the “ Breviary ” and “ Dietary,” some notes upon the condition of the profession of medicine at the time may be of interest. The practice of physic, in common with all other learned callings, was the monopoly of the clerics, or perhaps it should be said, in many cases at least, that the doctors took orders to qualify for the benefices which were often the reward of successful practice. Dr. Gilbert Kymer, a celebrated physician of the fifteenth century, was not only beneficed, but advanced to be dean of Wimbourne Minster and treasurer of Salisbury while he was still a layman. Ecclesiastical preferments were also meted out, among others, to the celebrated Thomas Linacre and to John Chambre, both physicians to Henry VIII. Though the universities granted degrees in medicine, the opportunities for clinical study were small, and the majority of the knowledge obtained seems to have been of that type which is now commonly known as “ arm-chair” knowledge. In medicine Galen was the sole authority. The efficacy of a treatment or the demonstration of the functions of an organ depended not upon their agreement with observed fact, but with the dicta of Galen. Borde himself, in one of tLie prefaces to the “Breviary” addressed to physicians, refers with manifest approval to a quotation which is well worth repeating as indicating the kind of knowledge which was supposed to be essential to the making of a good physician :— “Avenzoar saith every physician ought to know first learning and then practise; that is to say, first to have