[The Cloister and the Hearth by Charles Reade]@TWC D-Link bookThe Cloister and the Hearth CHAPTER XXVI 7/23
The Arabian, whose ancient oracles are Avicenna, Rhazes, Albucazis; and its revivers are Chauliac and Lanfranc; and the Greek school, whose modern champions are Bessarion, Platinus, and Marsilius Ficinus, but whose pristine doctors were medicine's very oracles, Phoebus, Chiron, Aesculapius, and his sons Podalinus and Machaon, Pythagoras, Democritus, Praxagoras, who invented the arteries, and Dioctes, 'qui primus urinae animum dedit.' All these taught orally. Then came Hippocrates, the eighteenth from Aesculapius, and of him we have manuscripts; to him we owe 'the vital principle.' He also invented the bandage, and tapped for water on the chest; and above all he dissected; yet only quadrupeds, for the brutal prejudices of the pagan vulgar withheld the human body from the knife of science.
Him followed Aristotle, who gave us the aorta, the largest blood-vessel in the human body." "Surely, sir, the Almighty gave us all that is in our bodies, and not Aristotle, nor any Grecian man," objected Gerard humbly. "Child! of course He gave us the thing; but Aristotle did more, he gave us the name of the thing.
But young men will still be talking.
The next great light was Galen; he studied at Alexandria, then the home of science.
He, justly malcontent with quadrupeds, dissected apes, as coming nearer to man, and bled like a Trojan.
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