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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    medicine other than Arabic must be established, a new spirit such as had awakened Italy must be sought and found. Though a generation had passed since Linacre returned from Florence and Padua, he had not forgotten the energising effect of the close personal contact with great minds, nor could he ever escape from his own profound conversion of mind and heart, a transformation which had been steadily confirmed by the passage of events. The world itself was larger. Since Linacre was in Italy, Columbus had discovered America, Vasco da Gama had rounded the Cape, Ferdinand had driven the Arabs from Granada and the Moorish Kingdom in Spain was extinct, Luther had nailed his theses to the church door at Wittenberg, Thomas More had published his ‘‘Utopia” and Erasmus his re¬ volutionary New Testament. We must not think of Linacre only as grammarian and humanist; he was like his friends, a man of affairs, and his busi¬ ness was to reform English medicine. He knew of its plight and chaos; he knew it was not a distinct profession and that medical practice was little better than an empirical, illiterate, and mechanical art; having by his translations of Galen given it the means of the new learning, he set to work to devise a method for its organisation. We do not know what share, if any, Linacre had in the passage of the Medical Act of 1511, but it is certain that it stirred him to action. That Act was the second great step to medical reform after the Charter of the Barber Surgeons in 1461. It provided that no one should practise as physician or surgeon in London or within seven miles of its walls except he be examined and licensed by the Bishop of London or the Dean of St. Paul’s with the aid of competent doctors of physic as assessors, and that in the provinces the duty of licensing medical prac¬ titioners should rest similarly with the Bishop of