MEDIEVAL MEDICINE.

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 242, 13 October 1925, Page 15

MEDIEVAL MEDICINE.

LECTURE BY MR. K. MACKENZIE.

Queer ideas about the human body and the healing of the ills to which flesh has been heir since the days of Adam were interestingly detailed in a paper by Mr. Kenneth Mackenzie, read hist night before members of the Auckland Institute by Professor J. 0. Sperrin-Johnson, in the absence from town of the writer. Well illustrated by lantern slides showing strange operations and- diagrams of the human body, the lecture gave a very vivid idea of the amazing changes through which medical science.- hag pro? greased during the ages. ['} •; Mr. Mackenzie traced the decline of Roman medicine and surgery to their final submergence by the waves of barbarian hordes which 'swept over the Empire in the fifth century, and later. He next showed how, with the rise of the Moslem power in the eighth; century, there was a revival of medical learning in Bagdad and later throughout the East, Jewish physicians, including Rabbi Ben Ezra, being among the most notable. This development followed the lines laid down to Galen, and wag not paralleled in Europe owing to the ban of the Church, until knowledge filtered in : through Palestine and Spain. Later the era of monastic medicine opened, but the free ' inquiry method of Hippocrates remained under the ban, and the loss of his By stems of observation and teaching was largely instrumental in plunging medieval medicine into darkness for several -hundred years. •■'■. A rapid but illuminating, survey- was given of the growth of religious orders that devoted attention to healing and medicine in the Middle Ages".generally, up to the appearance of university training and medical guilds from which in England the Royal Colleges of Phys eicians and Surgeons were"descended.