Commemoration volume - 1915 Author:American Medical Association Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE HISTORY OF SYPHILIS TO THE END OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY THE EARLY LITERATURE OF SYPHILIS The interest excited by the epidemic of syph... more »ilis caused it to become at once the topic for many writers, and the abundant literature which grew up around the new disease is strong evidence of the importance which was given it. Indeed, one of the items which can be placed to the credit of syphilis is the great influence it exerted in arousing medicine from its medieval servitude to classical authority. Medicine, at this time, like other branches of learning, was hardly beginning to emerge from the darkness of the Middle Ages. It was controlled by speculation and superstition, and was dominated by Galen, chiefly as his dogmatism had filtered through from the Arabic school of medicine. It had not gone far enough to resurrect Hippocrates and to learn from him the importance of the study of the natural history of disease. But here was thrust on the world a disease concerning which Galen and Avicenna said nothing; a disease of vast importance on which physicians had no data in classical authority for philosophizing. Observation was therefore thrust in on them; and so abundant was the opportunity for it and so insistent the necessity, that it may be accurately said that the modern study of disease began in the study of syphilis in this great epidemic. Both the literature of syphilis in the first half of the sixteenth century, and the knowledge of the disease which it shows is of surprising extent. Proksch, in his enumeration of the most important early writers on syphilis, gives a list of forty authors whose work has come down to us. Among these the most interesting perhaps are Dias de Isla, who treated some of the first cases that returned from America; Paracelsus, who...« less