324 Prowe's Life of Copernicus. Oct.
Amongst the fortunate discoveries of Dr. Prowe at Upsala were some of the medical works once in constant use by Copernicus for purposes of reference and consultation. Some of them exhibit, on fly-leaf or cover, recipes copied by his hand, and, we may therefore presume, approved by his experience. We thus gain a very fair insight into his views as to the treatment of disease. They may be described as those introduced by Avicenna five hundred years previously, and followed as the ' canon ' of the "Western schools until Leonicenus in Italy, and Linacre in England (both contemporaries of the Frauenburg physician), raised the standard of revolt against the ' Sheik Reyes ' (prince of leeches), in the name of Galen and Hippocrates. In most places, however, and certainly on the banks of the Vistula, the Arab pharmacopoeia held its ground for some time longer. Very characteristic of it is a recipe to which Copernicus must have attached some importance, since he took the trouble of copying it twice — on the cover of his Euclid, as well as on the fly-leaf of a ' Chirurgia.' It exhibits the multiplicity of ingredients (some of them better placed in a witches' cauldron than in an apothecary's gallipot), and the incoherent jumble of rare or precious substances, fancifully endowed with curative efficacy, which caused the druggists' trade to flourish during the long reign of Ibn Sina. We have the gold and silver, the sandal wood and Armenian earth, the pearls and precious stones which he first introduced to the familiar acquaintance of man's internal economy ; with scraped and burnt ivory, the horn of a unicorn, the 'bone' of a stag's heart, mixed with spices and medicinal herbs, and all compounded with a quantum suff. of sugar. We can only hope that this highly recondite remedy was but sparingly employed, and that its costliness proved a bar to its destructiveness.
It may indeed be hopefully conjectured that Copernicus dealt chiefly in the less pretentious nostrums which find a modest place in the same collection ; nor should he be held responsible for the follies of a certain Regimen sanitatis to which he (rashly, as regards his credit with posterity) appended his name. He undoubtedly believed in medical astrology, but he believed in it on grounds which had at least the semblance of rationality. The influence of the stars on the course of disease recognised by him was of what we should now call a meteorological character — it was exercised, not immediately, but through changes produced in the state of the atmosphere.[1] But it is scarcely credible that he should have
- ↑ A copy of Stöfler's Ephemerides preserved at Pulkowa, which Copernicus annotated with his own hand, affords clear evidence of his views on this subject. See M. Curtze, 'Ueber eine Copernicus- Handschrift;,' 1873.
