The Church is supposed by many to have hampered the progress of astronomy, but that is all due to a misunderstanding of the Galileo case. Cardinal Newman once said that the Galileo case is the exception that proves the formly practised by the Church authorities. It is the one stock argument to the contrary.' Prof. Augustus de Morgan, in his article on °The Motion of the Earth* in the (English En cyclopedia,' an authority not likely to be sus pected of Catholic sympathies, has expressed exactly this same conclusion. °The Papal power,* he says, °must upon the whole have been moderately used in matters of philosophy, if we may judge by the great stress laid on this one case of Galileo. It is the standing proof that an authority which has lasted a thousand years was all the time occupied in checking the progress of thought ! There are certainly one or two other instances, but those who make most of the outcry do not know them.* Pro fessor Huxley, writing to St. George Mivart, 12 Nov. 1885, says that, after looking into the Galileo case while he was on the ground in Italy, he had arrived at the conclusion that °the Pope and the College of Cardinals had rather the best of it.' In our own time M. Bertrand, the perpetual secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, declared that athe great lesson for those who would wish to oppose reason with violence was clearly to be read in Galileo's story, and the scandal of his condemnation was brought about without any profound sor row to Galileo himself ; and his long life, considered as a whole, must be looked upon as the most serene and enviable in the history of science" As Father Secchi, S.J., pointed out: °None of the real proofs for the earth's rotation upon its axis were known at the time of Galileo, nor were there direct conclusive arguments for the earth's moving around the sun.* Even Galileo himself confessed that he had no strict demonstration of his views. Lord Bacon re fused to accept Copernicanism in Galileo's time and science was so far from determining the question of the truth or falsity of either the Ptolemaic or the Copernican system, that shortly before 1633, the year of Galileo's con demnation, a number of savants such as Fro mond in Louvain,. Morin in Paris, Berigario in Pisa, Bartolmus in Copenhagen and Scheiner in Rome wrote against Copernicanism. It was under these circumstances that Galileo was condemned for contumaciousness in teach ing as positive science what was only theory, though he had given a solemn promise that he would not until further information was ac quired. His punishment consisted in being placed in the custody of a Cardinal friend. He was never an hour in prison. His next custodian was another dear friend in Florence. and then eventually as a matter of form his son. The principal part of Galileo's punish ment consisted to the recital of the Seven Penitential Psalms every day for three years. The expression e pur se muove °and yet it moves" was never tittered by him. It appears in history first a century after his death. The corresponding expression °the earth is a star like the other stars and moves in the heavens as they do" was used by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa nearly two centuries before, but Cardinal Nicholas advanced the expression as a theory to be discussed and studied and not to he im posed as scientific, and so he continued to be looked up to as one of the great pillars of the Church.
Anatomy.— Anatomy after astronomy is the science oftenest said to have been hampered in its development by the Church because of the prohibition of dissection. As with regard to astronomy this is entirely a misunderstand ing. The papal document which is not a bull, though often quoted as such, declared to forbid the cutting up of , human bodies for anatomical purposes, only forbade their being cut up and boiled for transportation to long distances for burial. This was an abuse that had crept in during the Crusades. The records of public dissection in Italy begin just after the issuance of that papal decree. Dissection was done at Rome at all times and a number of papal physicians are famous for discoveries made as the result of dissection. Bealdo Colombo, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood in the lungs, Cesalpinus the first to describe the circulation of the blood in the body, Eustachius after whom the tube is named, Varolius of the Pons Varolii in the Malpighi, after whom more structures in the human body are named than any other and deservedly because he was their discoverer, and Lancisi, the great anatomical teacher, were all papal physicians. Bodies were supplied freely for dissecting purposes in Italy during the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance, directly under the influence of the Church. All the great artists of the Renaissance period made many dissections. Whenever anyone anywhere in Europe before the 19th century wanted to have special opportunities for anatomical study he went down to Italy. The case of Vesalius the Belgian who, unable to secure dissecting material in the early 16th century at Louvain or Paris, went down to Italy, where he wrote his great textbook of anatomy illus trated by dissections, which is still a classic exemplifies this very well. Stensen the Dane
at ter having studied for a while in the Nether lands also went down to Italy to complete his studies and there became a Catholic and later a priest and even a bishop. In the meantime, however, he had been a professor of at Copenhagen. The prejudice against dissec tion is Puritanic and modern and reached its height in the late 18th century. In nearly every city in the United States, in the early 19th century, mobs attacked dissecting rooms, destroyed property and even put the lives of physicians and medical students in serious danger. It is only by recent legislation that English and American physicians have suc ceeded in securing the privilege of dissection and the material for that purpose as freely as they had it in Italy in the later Middle Ages.
President White suggested that the reason why surgery was neglected in the Middle Ages and the ignorant•barber surgeon the only resource of afflicted humanity suffer ing from surgical disease was that the Church had forbidden clergymen to practise surgery because it was not proper for them to shed blood, and as the only educated people of the time were clerics, hence surgery fell into the unworthy hands of the barber surgeons. Re cent developments in the history of surgery contradict this idea completely. Really great surgery began to develop at the University of Salerno before the end of the 12th century, The surgical textbooks of Roger and Roland and of the Four Masters were written down there and then surgical development continued in North Italy. These wonderful Italian sur geons of the later Middle Ages anticipated most of our modern surgery. We have their textbooks which were fortunately printed in the Renaissance time and have now been re printed in modern editions. They were operat ing on the skull for tumor and for abscess, on the thorax for pus and other fluids and on the abdomen for conditions. They insisted on sewing up intestines when wounded or the patient would surely die. They used various devices, tubes of metal, of bone, and the trachea of animals to help them in these intes tinal anastomosis operations and seem to have gotten very good results. They could not have done such extensive operations without anesthesia, but we know now that for two centuries all important operations were done under an anesthetic and we know the mode and means by which they produced anesthesia. Their death rate would have been very high without antisepsis, but they employed strong wine as a dressing, insisted on utter cleanliness and got union by first intention,— the very ex pression is medieval Latin — and were proud of their °pretty linear cicatrices .° So far from there being any Church opposi tion to the development of surgery one of the greatest of these surgeons of the 13th century, Theodoric, who left an important textbook which has attracted a great deal of attention in our time, was actually a bishop. He depre cated strongly the idea that the development of pus was necessary in the healing of wounds; he discusses fracture of the skull and of the vertebra quite thoroughly, gives rather elabo rate directions for intestinal anastomosis over a metal tube; insisted that abdominal wounds should be closed and not left open and depre cated the use of the probe and of manipulations in fractures of the skull, in compound fractures or in wounds of the abdomen. Theodoric was made a special confessor (penitentiarius). by Pope Innocent IV and later was made a canon and then a bishop. He had a lucrative practice in surgery but left the money he made for charity. So far from surgery being neglected in the Middle Ages this is one of the most im portant periods in its history. Among the great Italian surgeons are William of Salicet and Lanfranc, who afterward taught at Paris, and Guy de Chauliac who is usually spoken of as the Father of French surgery. Chauliac studied in Italy and became the papal physician of the popes at Avignon, where he wrote his (Chirurgia Magna,) a great textbook in which many supposedly modern developments of surgery are anticipated. Chauliac was a cleric, probably a priest, a great personal friend of the Avignon popes, one of the most respected men of his own time and high in the estima tion of modern historians of surgery. He de clared that a surgeon who did not know anatomy was like a blind carpenter sawing wood. Chauliac told of his own studies in anatomy in Italy and his expressions demon strate that there was not the slightest opposi tion to dissection or anatomical study by the ecclesiastics. The great Italian and French surgeons of the later Middle Ages worked out the laws for the proper administration of mercury, which is one of the greatest triumphs in the history of therapeutics.