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While, during the earlier part of the eighteenth century, medical affairs in Northern and Central Germany were in the condition described above, there was taking place at Vienna, the capital of Austria, the most effective revival of medical science of which we possess any record. Of this important event, however, I will say nothing further at present. A reasonably full account will be found in one of the later chapters.

Although I have spoken of the early and middle portions of the eighteenth century as constituting a barren or stagnant period in the history of medicine, I would not wish to convey to my readers the impression that it was a colorless and uneventful period. Far from it. There was nothing colorless, for example, in Hahnemann’s eventful career, and yet to all appearances he was not contributing in any way to the genuine and solid advance of the science of medicine. Then, again, Hufeland is not commonly supposed to have contributed in any material degree to the advance of medical science, and yet his “Makrobiotik,” his “Art of Prolonging Life,” is a veritable mine of useful information that the practitioner of medicine can scarcely afford to classify as trivial. Hufeland also deserves the credit of having founded one of the earliest medical journals, a periodical which still, in many of its numbers that were issued during the later years of the eighteenth century, furnishes reading matter that to-day possesses the power to entertain even a twentieth-century reader. At a somewhat later date (1779) J. Peter Frank founded the first journal or archives distinctly devoted to hygiene and medico-legal science. Farther on I will supply a few details concerning these two rather important contributions to medical knowledge.