ABSTRACT
Progress in medicine has not been monotonic. There have been periods of great insight and originality followed by regressive and primitive intervals lasting centuries. If the first clear steps toward modernity admit of dating, the Italian Renaissance is a defensible point of departure, but one for which the preceding decades had cut a path. Progress is often at the expense of prevailing authority and in medicine the authority of Galen and of the Church was largely unchallenged. Of the major developments in medicine in the fifteenth century, a special debt is owed to the painters and sculptors of the period. Prior to their pioneering efforts, human anatomy was limited to grossly simplified and idealized renditions often based on crude and often highly symbolic woodcuts from the Medieval period. Added to these developments was a growing interest in the chemical basis of life. There was now progress beyond what for centuries had been little more than herbal medicine.
