False Arts Advancing True
After the death of Galen, Medicine ceased to make progress. Amidst the Gothic invasions the medical sects “dwindled down to individuals, who achieved for medicine what the monastics effected for ancient classic literature: they maintained it in the condition of a small but continuous stream, in the midst of so much charlatanism that no man could talk nonsense so gross, or profess supernatural powers so incredible, but that the ignorance of the community would give credit to his assertions.” All through the dark and the Middle Ages astrology, alchemy, magic, and cabalistic arts predominated; all physical phenomena were ascribed to occult causes; in short, as Sir John Herschel remarks, “If the logic of that gloomy period could be justly described as ‘the art of talking unintelligibly on matters of which we are ignorant,’ its physics might, with equal truth, be summed up in a deliberate preference of ignorance to knowledge in matters of every day’s experience and use.” Sometimes, however, the false arts served indirectly to advance the true. Alchemy led the way to chemistry, and enriched medicine with new remedies, and at least one crotchet of scholastic divinity may be supposed to have done something for the progress of anatomy; for “the skeleton received, perhaps, an adventitious attention in consequence of the popular belief that, in man, some one particular bone existed of an imponderable, incombustible, and indestructible nature, around which, as a nucleus, all other tissues and organs would collect and re-assume their vital actions at the resurrection. Accordingly, every bone was tested by fire, for the purpose of discovering the hypothetical one.”—Dr. Meryon’s History of Medicine.