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Osler, William, 1849-1919

"A Series of Lectures Delivered at Yale University on the Silliman Foundation in April, 1913"

One is surprised at the range of studies in certain
directions, and still more at the absence of other subjects. A list is
given of the teachers in medicine for the year 1433, twenty in all, and
there were special lectures for the morning, afternoon and evening. The
subjects are medicine, practical medicine, physics, metaphysics, logic,
astrology, surgery and rhetoric: very striking is the omission of
anatomy, which does not appear in the list even in 1467. The salaries
paid were not large, so that most of the teachers must have been in
practice: four hundred and five hundred florins was the maximum.
The dominance of the Arabians is striking. In 1467, special lectures
were given on the "Almansor" of Rhazes, and in the catalogue of
the Ferrari's library more than one half of the books are Arabian
commentaries on Greek medicine. Still more striking evidence of their
influence is found in the text-book of Ferrari, which was printed in
1471 and had been circulated earlier in MS. In it Avicenna is quoted
more than 3000 times, Rhazes and Galen 1000, Hippocrates only 140
times. Professor Ferrari was a man who played an important role in
the university, and had a large consultation practice. You will be
interested to know what sort of advice he gave in special cases.


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