One would have
thought that the stimulus given by Mundinus to the study of anatomy
would have borne fruit, but little was done in science during the two
and a half centuries that followed the delivery of his lectures and
still less in the art. While William of Wykeham was building Winchester
Cathedral and Chaucer was writing the Canterbury Tales, John of
Gaddesden in practice was blindly following blind leaders whose
authority no one dared question.
The truth is, from the modern standpoint the thirteenth was not the
true dawn brightening more and more unto the perfect day, but a glorious
aurora which flickered down again into the arctic night of mediaevalism.
To sum up--in medicine the Middle Ages represent a restatement from
century to century of the facts and theories of the Greeks modified here
and there by Arabian practice. There was, in Francis Bacon's phrase,
much iteration, small addition. The schools bowed in humble, slavish
submission to Galen and Hippocrates, taking everything from them but
their spirit and there was no advance in our knowledge of the structure
or function of the body. The Arabians lit a brilliant torch from Grecian
lamps and from the eighth to the eleventh centuries the profession
reached among them a position of dignity and importance to which it is
hard to find a parallel in history.
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