WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 191, 15 May 1928, Page 8

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

NOTES AT RANDOM

(By

T.D.H.)

British commercial-magnates, according to a news message, say good looks are no drawback to a business girl.— No opinions of commercial magnates’ wives on this point are cabled, however.

An abridged version of the Bible, with its “repellent” features Emitted, is to be produced by an eminent committee in Britain.—A lot of people will undoubtedly take more kindly to religion if the Ten Commandments are left out.

“The Constitution is dead!” says Signor Mussolini.—This is of no consequence so long as Signor Mussolini is a live: and after that whatever happens won’t worry him.

Egypt is to have hydro-electricity by letting the Mediterranean run into’ a part of the desert below sea-level.— And the engineers, no doubt, have the same old estimates to show that it is cheaper than buying coal.

The scientific world this week is to do honour, a news message tells us, to Dr. William Harvey, who founded modern medicine by discovering the circulation of the blood three hundred years ago. This discovery, announced in a book printed for Harvey in Germany—and full of misprints as a result of his bad handwriting—was not received with any great acclaim at the time. Many people thought him a crack-brained dreamer, and sections of medical men for a long time would have no more to do with him than in A.D. 1928 the headquarters of British medicine will have to do with people being cured by Sir Herbert Barker, the bone-setter, instead of being content to go about crippled for life in a respectable manner. The dear old public, too, was shy of being treated by a doctor with a fancy idea that the blood circulated inside the body, and took themselves to medical men with sounder views, so that Dr.. Harvey's practice fell away to very little.

Medical historians tell us that in the centuries before Harvey's time, the Church had for centuries had the upper hand in medicine. Prayers, exorcisms, laying on of hands, holy water, holy oil, saints living and dead, their reliquary bags and bones, and so forth, had long been regarded as highly efficacious in the combating of disease. Infirmaries, it is true, were attached to the monasteries in the Middle Ages, and Benedictine monks from time, to time tried their hands at a little primitive surgery and collected herbs in the fields for the making of medicines. This sort of thing was regarded by the orthodox as coming close to practising magic and witchcraft, and between 1131 and 1247- various edicts were issued by the Popes forbidding monks to study medicine or practise surgery. The old Greek medical knowledge, however, had filtered into Arabia, and the Arabs not having been forbidden by Mohammed to pursue scientific studies, were at this period far and away the best physicians in the world. Only when the Moors Invaded Spain did any knowledge of rational medicine revive in Europe.

People who fancy faith-healing was never tried on a large scale until the late Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy founded Christian Science are not as well posted in medical history as they, might be. for the world had many centuries of it. Nowadays, of course, the faith that cures.is faith in the efficiency of letting down blood pressure or whatever the latest medical fashion plates prescribe.

Harvey was the son of a Kentish yeoman and was born at Folkestone in 1578, when good Queen Bess was on the throne and Sir Francis Drake was away pulling Spain’s whiskers on his famous voyage around the world. By the time he was nineteen Harvey had secured his B.A. degree at Cambridge, and desiring to study medicine took himself off to the most famous medical school in the world. This was the University of Padua, and there under the great Fabricius of Aquapendente he learnt all that Europe had to teacii in his craft. Returning to London lie presently became physician to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, and by his contract had to attend once a week to treat the poor in that establishment, being strictly bound down to prescribe only such medicines as shall “doe the poore good.”

It was in April, 1616, that Harvey, in lecturing at the Royal College of Physicians, made the first public statements of his thoughts on the circulation of the blood. Twelve years later he published his book, announcing his discovery, explaining how the blood circulated, and describing experiments he made in tying the great veins in a snake some distance from the heart, and blocking the circulation of. its blood. Recognition of this fundamental physiological fact was very slow. For thirty years after Harvey’s book was out, Reid, the lecturer at the Barbel 1 Surgeons Hall, went on teaching his students/with no reference at all to the circulation of blood. Descartes admitted that the blood circulated, but rejected altogether the idea that the heart pumped it through the body. The action of the heart, he alleged, was flue to the blood being expanded by the heat on entering it from the veins, and it was this, he said, that caused the heart to dilate. Before he died, in 1657, at the age of 79, Dr. Harvey, however, had the satisfaction of knowing that medical men all through Europe had accepted his discovery.

Banker (telephoning): “Mr. Cohen, do you know your account is overdrawn £3 10s.?” Mr. Cohen: “Say, Mr. Banker, look up a month ago. How did I stand then? I’ll hold the ’phone. ♦ Banker (returning to the phone). “You had a balance of £80.” Mr. Cohen: “Veil, did I call jou up?”

“In vour paper this morning, you wrote of my speech at the public meeting last night as the ‘insane dm - clings of a played-out P Oll * 101 '™' , “What' My dear sir, I am tiui.v sorrv if it appeared that way in our paper. The word I used was mane. LIGHTS OUT. Night falls softly on song and laughter. And softly drives them hence, As Sleep begins to waft her, Enchantments o’er the sense. The fortunate unthinking. Whom bland illusions bless, Are comfortably sinking To dreamless nothingness. And you, O hearts long-cheated? —Hope’s faint and fitful spark, By evil nap defeated, Floats out into the dark. —Eric Batterhaui. in the “London Mercury.” . -