Note 101 — LETTER I.

Galen, the great physician, who flourished in the second century of our era. Busbecq’s allusion to him is quite in accordance with the fashion of his day. See Ranke’s Civil Wars and Monarchy in France, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, chap. xix. ‘Peter de la Ramée wished to forsake in all things the path hitherto trodden, to alter the entire system of doctors and professors in the university, and to make the works of the ancients the immediate text-books of the different branches of study,—the codex of the civil law in jurisprudence, Galen and Hippocrates in medicine, and in theology the Old and New Testaments.... Physicians arose who brought into practice once more the deserted rules of Hippocrates; and it soon went so far, as Ambrose Paré, the reformer of surgery, said, that people were not content with what they found in the ancients, but began to regard their writings as watch-towers, from which more might be discovered.’ For Busbecq’s application of these principles see the Life.