the first scientist who discussed this subject, and there is even some question of whether printers and typefounders did not derive their ideas in this matter from our chemist.

Interested though he was in the transmutation of metals, he never failed to try to find and suggest some medicinal use for all of the substances that he investigated. His was no greedy search for gold and no cumulation of investigations with the idea of benefiting only himself. Mankind was always in his mind, and perhaps there is no better demonstration of his fulfilment of the character of the monk than this constant solicitude to benefit others by every bit of investigation that he carried out. For him, with medieval nobleness of spirit," the first part of every work must be the invocation of God, and the last, though no less important than the first, must be the utility and fruit for mankind that can be derived from it."

The career of the last of the Makers of Medicine in the Middle Ages may be summed up briefly in a few sentences that show how thoroughly this old Benedictine was possessed of the spirit of modern science. He believed in observation as the most important source of medical knowledge. He valued clinical experience far above book information. He insisted on personal acquaintanceship on the part of the physician with the drugs he used, and thought nothing more unworthy of a practitioner of medicine, -indeed he sets it down as almost criminal-than to give remedies of whose composition he was not well aware and whose effect he did not thoroughly understand. He thought that nature was the most

important aid to the physician, much more important than drugs, though he was the first to realize the significance of chemical affinities, and he seems to have understood rather well how individual often were the effects obtained from drugs. He was a patient student, a faithful observer, a writer who did not begrudge time and care to the composition of large books on medicine, yet withal he was no dry-as-dust scholar, but eminently human in his sympathies with ailing humanity, and a strenuous upholder of the dignity of the profession to which he belonged. Scarcely more can be said of anyone in the history of medicine, at least so far as good intentions go; though many accomplished more, none deserve more honor than the Thuringian monk whom we know as Basil Valentine.

There are many other of these old-time Makers of Medicine of whom nearly the same thing can be said. Basil Valentine is only one of a number of men who worked faithfully and did much both for medical science and professional life during the thousand years from the fall of Rome to the fall of Constantinople, when, according to what used to be commonly accepted opinion, men were not animated by the spirit of research and of fine incentive to do good to men that we are so likely to think of as belonging exclusively to more modern times. A man whom he greatly influenced, Paracelsus, took up the tradition of scientific investigation where Basil Valentine had left it. His work, though more successfully revolutionary, was not done in such a fine spirit of sympathy with humanity nor with that simplicity of life and purity of intention that char

acterized the old monk's work. Paracelsus' birth in the year of the discovery of America places him among the makers of the foundations of our modern medicine, and he will be treated of in a volume on "The Forefathers in Medicine."

APPENDIX I

ST. LUKE THE PHYSICIAN 1

In the midst of what has been called the " higher criticism" of the Bible in recent times, one of the long accepted traditions that has been most strenuously assailed and, indeed, in the minds of many scholars, seemed, for a time at least, quite discredited, was that St. Luke the Evangelist, the author of the Third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, was a physician. Distinguished authorities in early Christian apologetics have declared that the pillars of primitive Christian history are the genuine Epistles of St. Paul, the writings of St. Luke, and the history of Eusebius. It is quite easy to understand, then, that the attack upon the authenticity of the writings usually assigned to St. Luke, which in many minds seemed successful, has been considered of great importance. In the very recent time there has been a decided reaction in this matter. This has come, not so much from Roman Catholics, who have always clung to the traditional view, and whose great Biblical students have been foremost in the support of the previously accepted opinion, but from some of the most strenuous of the German higher critics, who now appreciate that destructive, socalled higher criticism went too far, and that the traditional view not only can be maintained, but is the only opinion that will adequately respond to all the new facts that have been found, and all the recently gathered information with regard to the relations of events in the olden time.

1 Paper read before the first meeting of the American Guild of St. Luke.

By far the most important contribution to the discussion in recent years came not long since from the pen of Professor Adolph Harnack, the professor of church history in the University of Berlin. Professor Harnack's name is usually cited as that of one of the most destructive of the higher critics. His recent book, however, "Luke the Physician,"1 is an entire submission to the old-fashioned viewpoint that the writer of the Third Gospel and of the Acts of the Apostles was a Greek fellow-worker of St. Paul, who had been in company for years with Mark and Philip and James, and who had previously been a physician, and was evidently well versed in all the medical lore of that time. Harnack does not merely concede the old position. As might be expected, his rediscussion of the subject clinches the arguments for the traditional view, and makes it impossible ever to call it in question again. It is easy to understand how important are such admissions when we recall how much this traditional view has been assailed, and how those who have held it have been accused of old-fogyism and lack of scholarship, and unwarranted clinging to antiquated notions just because they thought they were of faith, and how, lacking in true scholarship, seriously hampering genuine investigation, such conservatism has been declared to be.

The question of Luke's having been a physician is an extremely valuable one, and no one in our time is better fitted by early training and long years of study to elucidate it than Professor Harnack. He began his excursions into historical writing years ago, as I understand, as an historian of early Christian medicine. Some of his works on medical conditions just before and after Christ are quoted confidently by the distinguished German medical historians. From this department he graduated into the field

1Published by Putnams, New York, 1909.