ignorant edicts: whereof numbers do escape with less difficulty than they did in the Roman proscriptions."" Yet the reproach brought against the Asclepiades that they "resigned themselves to visionary speculations, and obeyed the instincts of their understandings rather in crude meditations on the essence of things, the origin of the world, the nature of God and the soul of man, than in developing a practical and useful system of medicine" often repeated against the medieval physicians, has little justice in it. Like all knowledge depending upon physical investigation, that of the human body lay under the ban of ecclesiastical control. Ceremonies and relics and consecrated specifics, amulets, miracle-working images, and a celestial faculty recruited from the ranks of the saintssuch were the means too often relied upon to meet the fearful diseases which flourished under conditions which favored every form of contagion and infection. "Afflictions sent by Providence" and "demoniac possessions" were terms which readily veiled the density of the existing ignorance. Man, it was insisted, must not investigate the structure of his own frame with the scalpel, since this argued contempt for the doctrine of final resurrection. Medical practice must be first of all orthodox. Supernaturalism must prevail, and the struggling lunatic dealt with through book and holy water, rather than through remedies ministering to the mind diseased. Progress in any department of the healing art could hardly be expected in such circumstances.

Hence, while extended allusion to the therapeutic employment of both the magnet and the amber in the Middle Ages has been made in the preceding pages, it would be incorrect to infer that the advancement of magnetic or electrical knowledge was materially accelerated by such In fact, so long as the principal value of the lodestone lay in its utility as "a means of expelling gross 1 Bacon: De Augmentis, ii., x, 5.

use.

2 Meryon: The History of Medicine, London, 1861.

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humors," as Dioscorides and Galen averred, the world was none the better for the attention bestowed upon it by these fathers in medicine. It was when the physicians ceased to deal with it, however, as physicians, and began to deal with it as physicists, that real advances began. It was the leaven of the inductive method of Hippocrates which worked for good in them-Hippocrates, who had asserted demoniac possession to be "no wise more divine, no wise more infernal, than any other disease," and the sturdy common sense of whose precepts had refused to be destroyed by the magic of the Persians, or the dreams of the Asclepiades, or the numbers of Pythagoras, or the atoms of Democritus, and which even asserted itself free of the entangling meshes of the Aristotelian Matter and Form.

The priests of Samothrace sold magnet rings to cure rheumatism and gout. A thousand years later the fact was so far forgotten that when Aetius, in the fifth century, compiled all the medical knowledge of his predecessors, and announced that "those who are afflicted with gout in their hands or feet or with convulsions are relieved by holding a magnet in their hands," the discovery was regarded as wholly new, despite the writer's cautious prefix of "they say" to his asseverations. How the magnet in the hands of the arch impostor Paracelsus became the foundation of speculations as wild and as fantastic as ever man conceived, has already been told, and some reference has been made to the vagaries of Raymond Lully concerning it. The knowledge of the embryo science did not advance because of the visionary theories of these people, but despite of them-just as it grew in the works of Cardan and Porta, where the statements of great discoveries in it are jostled by the descriptions of alleged phenomena as false and as absurd as anything which the veriest charlatan could devise.

Nevertheless it is to be remembered, that there was hardly a medical writer of any eminence, from the time of Ori

basius onward, who did not refer to the magnet in some way often writing utter nonsense about it, sometimes interspersing his rumors and vagaries with truths frequently the more forceful for the re-telling in a new manner. If in a multitude of counselors there is wisdom, if the truth resides in numbers of witnesses, surely we may ascribe some of the progress effected to the mutual cancellation of the mistakes and misstatements repeated and reiterated in the works of the old medical writers. The subject was sifted through the books of the Arabs and by their greatest leeches, Hali Abbas, Avicenna and Serapion the Moor; while in Europe, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, physicians of commanding eminence hasten to contribute their observations or speculations concerning it, to the general fund of knowledge. Fernel and Dupuis in France, Amatus in Portugal, Thomas Lieber (or Erastus) in Germany, Fallopius, Fracastorio, Costaeus and Cardan in Italy-such were the men who, with an abundant crop of tares, cultivated the harvest which, meagre as it was, increased a thousandfold within the next hundred years.

At the end of the sixteenth century, the Italians were far in advance of all other nations in their medical attainments, and the English well in the rear. I have encountered no writings by English physicians of that century which entitle them to any credit for either preserving or advancing electrical or magnetic knowledge. The practice of physic did not pass from the active control of the priesthood and become an independent profession in Britain until Henry VIII., in 1518, granted its charter to the Royal College of Physicians in London. The names of Dr. Linacre and Dr. Kaye (Shakespeare's Dr. Caius) then come into prominence, but chiefly as leaders in the struggle of the college to put down quackery, and to impose qualifications upon the medical practitioner, to maintain itself against the pretensions of the clergy, who still arrogated to themselves the right to license, and to assert its own1 privileges and dignity.

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If it had been known that the reduction of the electrical and magnetic knowledge of the time to a science, coupled moreover with new discoveries of extreme importance and brilliancy, was predestined to come from a medical faculty, common consent, as well as the evidence to be derived from all written records, would infallibly have pointed to that existing in Italy; perhaps in Milan or Padua or Bologna. But no one could have foreseen that so startling an event could have originated in England, could have been the unaided work of an English doctor; and, perhaps least of all, of the particular physician who, at the time of its appearance, presided over the destinies and troubles of the much-vexed and hard-fighting college in London.

The rise in electricity had slowly taken place throughout all Europe, indeed, all the world, and therein many nationalities had taken part. It was now destined to move with a new and marvelous vigor, through the transcendent genius of an Englishman and on English soil.

CHAPTER X.

WILLIAM GILBERD (or Gilbert, as the name is more commonly written) was born in the year 1540, in Holy Trinity Parish in the town of Colchester, England.' He came of excellent family, and was the eldest of the five sons of Jerome Gilbert, at one time town recorder. Of his individual history there is but scant record. He was a physician, but the great work which has insured his immortality has no necessary relation to the healing art. No important discovery in medicine is known to be his, and he appears therein only as a teacher and an expounder. And this is the more remarkable, since, in dealing with a different branch of science, he displays not only a marvelous originality of thought, but intolerance of accepted opinion to a degree which ordinarily leads most men to revolutionary extremes in any field of action in which they may be placed.

Something of the difficulty which is encountered in reconciling the dual intellectual lives of Shakespeare the poet and Shakespeare the player, of Bacon the philosopher and Bacon the advocate, is again met when those of Gilbert the physician and Gilbert the discoverer are contrasted. We find, on the one hand, the hard-working London doctor, renouncing matrimony through simple devotion to his art, and year in and year out teaching a little band of students at his house hard by St. Paul's, until the

1Cooper: Athenæ Cantabrigiensis, Cambridge, 1858. This contains a very full list of works in which reference to Gilbert is made. Of the older biographies of him, that which is especially full appears in Biographica Britannia, London, 1757. Among later memoirs may be noted one by Prof. S. P. Thompson, London, 1891, and another by Mr. Conrad W. Cooke, London, 1890.