Hilaire Belloc
speaker
109 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 30 Jul
Hilaire Belloc’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
no wonder that the editors of the cambridge modern history emphatically insist that the honest student finds himself continually deserted retarded misled by the classics of historical literature if that is true for the classics what must be his wanderings consequent on dependence upon chance contributors to history who had theses to prove and collected only the material they thought would prove them
i picked up a boston paper the other day and found that brisbane was still reading and recommending others to read such works as the intellectual development of europe by dr john w draper and dr andrew d white's a history of the warfare of science with theology in christendom
the amusing thing for me about professor draper's book is that while he was teaching and acting as attending physician at bellevue hospital that hospital was a veritable disgrace to civilization its death-rate was woefully high it was almost unbelievably dirty and its nurses as stephen smith tells us and he is still alive were the ten-day women
a ten-day woman is a person who having been drunk and disorderly or been arrested as a common scold is sentenced by the magistrate to ten days or ten dollars and not having the ten dollars has to serve her ten days in the workhouse in lieu of this she was at one time paroled as it were and allowed to serve thirty days in bellevue as a nurse provided she had any experience in family nursing
no wonder the poor of new york dreaded hospitals and that that dread still lives among them to some extent professor draper was teaching at bellevue writing his book on the intellectual development of europe telling how unspeakably low the people were in the middle ages yet he had no inkling at all that the mediaeval people had beautiful hospitals
some of the finest ever built and magnificently trained nursing and that they were doing surgery far ahead of any in his time they were doing mighty little surgery at bellevue in dr draper's time practically only emergency surgery because the death-rate was so high from septic complications that they dared not
in the medieval hospitals they were doing operations for tumor and for abscess within the skull and for all sorts of conditions within the abdomen no surgeon at bellevue in draper's time would have dared to do such operations they were wise because their patients would have died we have the text-books of the middle ages describing these operations and draper knew nothing about them he knew nothing about the intellectual development of europe in his own profession
what possible worth can his opinions have with regard to the intellectual development of europe in other departments if he a physician and a professor of medicine was utterly ignorant even about the intellectual course of his own dearest interests in the olden times
i venture to say that if draper had read some of these medival surgical text-books any one who wants to know anything about the subject can readily get hold of them and if he had found details of descriptions of beautiful hospitals in the medival times he either would not have understood what they meant or he would not have believed what they said
our hospitals and surgery were so bad between eighteen sixty and eighteen seventy that to have heard that the medieval surgeons in medieval hospitals were getting union by first intention in wounds the most favorable possible mode of healing would have raised a laugh it would have been literally incomprehensible that very expression union by first intention would have seemed a myth in draper's time they knew almost nothing about it
they were deep in the delusion of laudable pus lord lyster brought us round to union by first intention again and now when we read the accounts of the mediaeval surgeons we know that they were anticipating our best work
i recently wrote for the osler memorial volume which was prepared for sir william osler's seventieth birthday an account of some of the surgery of the crusades old hugo of lucca who was on the fourth crusade was one of the greatest surgeons of all times
he had the immense problem on his hands of caring for the hosts of wounded crusaders and his heart was so deeply stirred that he succeeded in accomplishing results far ahead of his own time in saving life and securing the healing of wounds his experience was written out by his son who was a bishop and came to be the foundation on which the great surgery of the great mediaeval universities was built up
we have the text-books of roger and roland of salerno of bruno of longo burgo of theodoric the son of hugo of lucca of william of salicet of lanfranc of paris of henri de mondeville of guy de chauliac of montpellier of whom malgaden in his history of surgery said
with the simple exception of hippocrates there is no treatise on surgery greek latin or arabic which i place above or even on the same level with chauliac's magnificent work it is a masterpiece he adds of learned and luminous writing of all this dr john draper knew nothing but dr andrew white knew almost if it were possible less
dr white was the first president of a university in this country who was not a clergyman his appointment in the nonsectarian policy of cornell aroused great opposition among the protestant clergymen of this country president white got back at them by having his secretary gather together all the references that could be found anywhere in historical writing of any kind that could possibly be made to signify opposition between clergymen and scientists
he made a wonderful hodge-podge with some sense and a lot of nonsense in it he suggested that the church forbade dissection just at the time when all the universities though they were all under clerical control began to practise dissection publicly
he said that the popes were very much opposed to the progress of medicine though the list of the papal physicians that is the men who were chosen by the popes to be their personal attending physicians represent the greatest list of names connected by any bond in the history of medicine
the papal physicians for instance are greater as a body than the list of any faculty of any medical school in the world this was of course because the popes choose their physicians from the greatest men of each generation some of them come from bologna some from padua some from naples some from montpellier and as a consequence their names represent a list unsurpassed in the original contributions made to medicine
when i pointed out some of these facts president white wrote me and confessed that there had been a mistake made with regard to anatomy and medicine but that he was now too old a man to go into the subject again and that he hoped that the progress of the history of medicine would gradually set the whole subject right and here is prisbane quoting draper and white
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