Linacre's influence on English medicine / by Sir George Newman.

George Newman

Date:: 1928

Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Linacre's influence on English medicine / by Sir George Newman. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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“Myself when young did eagerly frequent Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument About it and about; but evermore Came out by the same door where in I went.”* But the emergence of Aristotle’s science in Western Europe through the medium of the Arab translators was revolutionary. Until the beginning of the thirteenth century Aristotle had been known to the schoolmen only by his logic . From the ad¬ vent of his science sprang a new impulse, and the ascendancy of the schoolmen of the early scholastic¬ ism, Roscellinus, Abelard, and Peter Lombard gave wav to that of the later scholasticism of Albertns Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, the Dominicans, and of Ockham, Duns Scotns and Roger Bacon, the Franciscans. Too manv of the translators of Aristotle had an imperfect knowledge of Greek as they had of the groundwork of science. Neverthe¬ less the Toledo school of translators and many stray reporters transmitted and magnified the work of Aristotle in the Western world. Thus Roger Bacon himself was stimulated. Though a schoolman he was progressive and became a true Aristotelian, the father of the scientific method in England. His legac}^ was accuracy of method, criticism of authority, reliance on experiment. He also stood for the unitv of truth. “All the sciences are con- %/ nected,” he said; “they lend each other material aid as parts of one great whole, each doing its own work, not for itself alone, but for the other parts.” Two centuries before the Renaissance he declared that the whole course of man’s intellectual develop¬ ment was not multiple but one, not discrete or de¬ tached, but continuous and interdependent. For Roger Bacon there was no Arabic breach. The Nestorian and Mohammedan schools of science in

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