The old physiology in English literature / by P. Ansell Robin.

  • Robin, P. Ansell (Percy Ansell)
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The old physiology in English literature / by P. Ansell Robin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    pressing its claims upon the mind. And so the relations between mind and body have naturally exercised human thought and stimulated human imagination from the earliest times. Every operation of the soul has been associated with some function of the bodily organs, and the soul itself has been regarded as residing in various parts of the body. It is, therefore, no matter of surprise that the physiology of the human frame provides literary material to illustrate or to explain the activities of the mind. A very cursory acquaintance with English literature of the sixteenth and earlier centuries suffices to show that the great medical authority in Western Europe was Galen. Claudius Galenus flourished in the second century of our era, and by the end of the fifth century his medical writings had been accepted as authoritative throughout the Roman Empire.1 When the barbarian invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries destroyed the political unity and paralyzed the mental activity of the Western Empire, the knowledge of Greek was practically extinguished in Western Europe. The 1 Encycl. Brit., Art. “ Medicine.” 3