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The Irrelevant Rise Of Scientific Medicine
In the enlightenment of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, scientific
medicine finally struggled out from beneath the dead hand of classical
authority. Armed with the new empirical understanding of the human body and its
functions from Vesalius, Harvey, Malpighi, Hooke, Baillie, and others, respect
for medicine grew and the profession expanded, although London and Edinburgh
remained the only British medical schools. Altogether twenty-five provincial
hospitals were established in the eighteen century, usually by individual
benevolence, as in Radcliffe’s Oxford Infirmary of 1770, and several more in
London to join the medieval foundations of Bart’s and St. Thomas’s and the
specialist Bethlem and Bridewell. In view of this heightened activity it is
hardly surprising that medicine should be given credit for the decline in
mortality. But it has been long established that medical knowledge of the time
could not cure any important cause of death, could prevent only smallpox, and
with a few exceptions remained impotent until the present (20th.) century.