The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity. Roy Porter
moving on to more detailed physical methods of preserving and restoring health. The non-naturals were also stressed by Andre du Laurens (1558–1609), physician to Henri IV and professor at Montpellier. In 1597 he published a book translated as Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight; of Melancholic Diseases; of Rheumes and of Old Age, which contended that the causes of ageing were mental as well as physical: ‘Nothing hastens old age more than idleness.’ Early in the seventeenth century, Sir John Harington (1561–1612) brought out a popular English translation of the Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum. Addressed to King James, The Englishman’s Doctor (1608) provided health advice to all:
Salerne Schoole doth by these lines impart
All health to England’s King, and doth advise From care his head to keepe, from wrath his heart, Drinke not much wine, sup light, and soon arise, When meate is gone, long sitting breedeth smart: And after-noone still waking keepe your eyes. When mov’d you find your selfe to Natures Needs, Forbeare them not, for that much danger breeds, Use three Physicians still; first Doctor Quiet, Next Doctor Merry-man, and Doctor Dyet.
Temperance was the message of the highly successful Discorsi della vita sobria (1558–65) [Discourses on the Temperate Life] of Luigi Cornaro (c. 1464–1566), which he wrote in his eighties. Cornaro maintained that a temperate life would enable the body’s finite supply of vital spirits to last until life ebbed peacefully away between the ages of five and six score. Practising what he preached, he attributed his longevity to moderation, exercise, keeping his mind occupied and heeding his diet. Old age aroused great interest. In 1635, William Harvey performed a postmortem on Thomas Parr (c. 1483–1635), supposedly the oldest man in England. Brought to London, he was presented to Charles I and exhibited at taverns, but the smoky London atmosphere proved too much and he expired, allegedly at the ripe age of 152.
Printing made other sorts of health literature more widely available. Obstetrics and babycare books began to appear in many languages. The earliest published midwives’ textbook written in the vernacular, Eucharius Rösslin’s (d. 1526) Der Swangern Frawen under Hebammen Rosengarten (1513) [Garden of Roses for Pregnant Women and Midwives] appeared in English as the Byrth of Mankynde (1540) and was still in use in the eighteenth century. Its frontispiece pictures the mother in labour among relatives and midwives, groaning on a birth stool, while the attendant astrologer gazes through the window to cast the baby’s horoscope.
Thanks to printing, stronger links were forged between medicine, learning and culture. Humanism’s preoccupation with recovering the learned medicine of the ancients proved, however, a mixed blessing, and scepticism towards the profession remained deep-seated: ‘Trust not the physician, his antidotes are poison,’ warns Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. During the following century medicine was to build a new scientific basis.
* Unlike syphilis, gonorrhoea is an ancient disease. An Assyrian tablet speaks of thick or cloudy urine, and the Hippocratic writers refer to ‘strangury’, that is, blockage of the urethra. There was no effective cure until sulfonamides became available in the 1930s.
* The ontological view of disease as produced by distinct entities had a few classical antecedents. In Timaeus Plato had compared diseases to creatures, and Varro (116–27 BC) had spoken of animals too small to be seen by the eye, ‘which by mouth and nose through the air enter the body and cause severe diseases’.
* The heyday of eponyms was the seventeenth century, with Aselli’s pancreas, Graafian follicles, Haversian canals, the circle of Willis, Tulp’s valve, Bartholin’s duct and glands, and many lesser ones.
* Montaigne wrote, ‘I am in the grip of one of the worst diseases – painful, dreadful, and incurable. Yet even the pain itself, I find, is not so intolerable as to plunge a man of understanding into frenzy or despair. At least I have one advantage over the stone. It will gradually reconcile me to what I have always been loath to accept – the inevitable end. The more it presses and importunes me, the less I will fear to die.’
Self-possession in the face of sickness, he believed, was crucial. Physicians were of little use: ‘no doctor takes pleasure in the health even of his friends,’ he remarked; this was a long-standing humanist jibe.
THE DREAM OF RENAISSANCE HUMANISTS was to restore medicine to its Greek purity, but a counter-view gained ground in the seventeenth century as the ‘moderns’ confronted the ‘ancients’: medicine could thrive only if the deadweight of the past were cast off. After centuries of stultifying homage to antiquity, a fresh start was needed. This was a subversive doctrine indeed, but support could be drawn from the Reformation: if Luther could break with Rome, how could it be impious to demand the reformation of medicine? Such revolutionary impulses first found expression in the work of the iconoclastic Paracelsus.
PARACELSUS
Meaning ‘surpassing Celsus’, Paracelsus was the cocksure name adopted in his early thirties by Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim (c. 1493–1542), a medical protestant if ever there was one – though, ironically, he never formally abandoned his native Catholicism. Paracelsus was born in Einsiedeln, Switzerland and educated by his physician father in botany, medicine and natural philosophy. Around the age of twenty he briefly studied medicine in Italy but subsequently led the life of a wandering student. All the while he picked up knowledge from artisans and miners (‘I have not been ashamed to learn from tramps, butchers and barbers’), observed and thought for himself, and acquired a taste for the esoteric. The writings of Trithemius (1462–1516), an occultist who aspired to the wisdom of the mythic Hermes Trismegistus, convinced him of the workings of invisible powers as spiritual intercessors between God and man in an enchanted cosmos.
Paracelsus’s off-beat education marked a drastic break with the orthodox university medical curriculum built on canonical texts; it helps explain how he repudiated Galenism and came up with new disease concepts in a twenty-year career that made him the scourge of the medical Establishment: ‘When I saw that nothing resulted from [doctors’] practice but killing and laming, I determined to abandon such a miserable art and seek truth elsewhere.’ But while there is no denying Paracelsus’s break with the past, the common portrayal of him as the founder of scientific medicine is misleading, for his creed always involved mystical and esoteric doctrines quite alien to today’s science. He thus appears a paradox. For while subscribing to popular beliefs and folk remedies, and lapping up the lore he heard from peasants about the nymphs and gnomes haunting mines and mountains, he also championed new chemical theories, dividing all substances into ‘sulphur’, ‘mercury’ and ‘salt’. Yet these must be understood not as material elements but as hidden powers.
Paracelsus’s fundamental conviction was that nature was sovereign, and the healer’s prime duty was to know and obey her. Nature was illegible to proud professors, but clear to pious adepts. His teachings on remedies thus drew on the popular doctrine of signatures to identify curative powers: the orchid looked like a testicle to show it would heal venereal maladies, the plant eyebright (Euphrasia officinalis) had been made to resemble a blue eye to show it was good for eye diseases. Paracelsus was perhaps influenced by radical Protestantism and its faith in a priesthood of all believers: truth was to be found not in musty folios but in the fields, and in one’s heart. Yet though he displayed a fiercely independent temper, kowtowing to none, unlike Servetus he cannily avoided getting ensnared in Reformation politics.
His fisticuffs mentality comes out clearly in his sublime contempt for academic pomposity: ‘I tell you, one hair on my neck knows more than all you authors, and my shoe-buckles contain more wisdom than both Galen and Avicenna.’ In 1526 he was appointed town