Twelve Catholic men of science / edited by Sir Bertram Windle.

  • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Twelve Catholic men of science / edited by Sir Bertram Windle. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    medical writers is not known—possibly the practical bent of the English mind to bring out something useful. He studied medicine at Padua and Vicenza. Some of the teachers were, like himself, students of medicine and Humanistic scholars. It was the custom (still surviving) to proceed to a degree by “ disputation,’' and there is a record of the brilliant performance when Linacre defended his “ thesis ” against the senior professors at Padua. He obtained his degree of M.D., and soon after returned home. Travelling was slower work then than now. One would like to have the impressions of the graduate of Oxford and Padua on Italy and England, and the life of the time, but Linacre has left us little as to this. We only know that he returned by Geneva, Paris, Calais ; and of what befell him by the way, nothing except the charming story of his last look on Italy. This he had from the top of the mountain boundary, probably the Great St. Bernard, and there he raised a rough cairn of stones—an altar to his “ sancta mater studiorum.” We have since changed the term to alma mater ” when we speak of a university, as we have changed many other academic practices of the past. What was Italy, then, to move her student to such feeling ? Long before, her own children had addressed her in similar language. Virgil’s impassioned address to “ the generous land, the great mother of heroes,” was probably in Linacre’s mind. But it would be a mistake to suppose that the Middle Ages, before Humanism be- came dominant, were unproductive. Scholasticism pre- ceded Humanism, and, as to the literary influence of Scholasticism, one has but to point to its poet, Dante. In Scholasticism organization was carried to extremes, but it must be judged by its time. When feudalism pre- vailed, when printing was unknown, when might was right, not alone in the great states, but in every little baronial jurisdiction, there was authority to which appeal 6
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