Abstract
IN the Linacre Lecture delivered at St. John's College, Cambridge, on May 6, 1943, Prof. Major Greenwood, after a graceful tribute to previous lecturers including Sir Thomas Watson, Sir Humphry Rolleston, Sir George Newman and Dr. W. W. C. Topley, dealt at length with the doctrine of Galen, with whom Linacre was familiar, and particularly his work on epidemiology, general hygiene and medical psychology. Prof. Greenwood regards Galen's epidemiological influence as bad because he overrated the creative power not of Nature but of his own intelligence, and never considered alternative hypotheses as was done by John Graunt fifteen hundred years later. Galen' s work on personal hygiene, which Prof. Greenwood regards as the most readable of his books, contains an admirable description of practical dietetics, physical training and the Horation philosophy of life. As regards medical psychology, according to Prof. Greenwood, Galen was in advance of any medical writers of the Renaissance. Passing on to the subject of experimental epidemiology, in which he was associated with Dr. Topley for more than fifteen years, Prof. Greenwood points out that in acute infectious diseases like typhus pure laboratory work has created an applied science of immunology which owes nearly everything to the experimental method. The lecture ends with an encomium of the late Sir Walter Fletcher, secretary of the Medical Research Council, of whom he says that “he fought for and secured a scientific freedom in state-aided medical research”.
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Authority in Medicine. Nature 152, 561 (1943). https://doi.org/10.1038/152561b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/152561b0