Democratic and Secular Tendencies 85 Italian influence gradually made itself felt in northern universities, and the thirteenth century- saw many scientific discoveries and felt the stimu- lus of the experimental method as practised and taught by Roger Bacon, while the dissemination of knowledge was facihtated by the discovery of printing in 1450. The first chair of medicine at Oxford and Cambridge was founded in the fifteenth century, and from this time there was a steady advance. Then came the use of gunpowder in war, giving surgery an immense impetus. Ambroise Pare, the founder of modern scientific surgery, was born at Laval, France, in 151 7. One of his contempo- raries was Vesalius, the great Belgian anatomist, who was condemned to death by the Inquisition, and only saved by the interposition of Charles V. In 1578 William Harvey, the famed discoverer of the circulation of the blood, was born in England. He, after being educated in the English universities studied at Padua. The high tide of the Renaissance was now surg- ing over the northern countries. Italy had first felt its sweep, when, after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, scholars and scientists had brought back with them all the accumulated treasures of eastern art and learning. The new era called Modernism
