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These ideas broke like a thunderstorm over the thinking classes of France and spread rapidly to the other countries; the French Revolution cleared the atmosphere in all the different walks of life; it cast off the fetters of feudalism or at least materially loosened their hold; it greatly increased tolerance of religious beliefs and placed limits upon superstition.

At this period of time Germany was still living under deplorable conditions. The after-effects of the Thirty Years’ War still lingered. Those Germans who wished to lay some claim to culture were obliged to think, speak and write in French. The great mass of the people, however, were still bound hand and foot under the dominion of their spiritual and state tyrants. The learned classes still cultivated a barbaric Latin in their university lectures and in their writings. They considered it beneath their dignity to cultivate their own tongue. In the schools and universities the teaching had reached a decidedly low ebb. “The humanistic spirit” had vanished; the teaching was directed to the acquisition of the science of bread-winning. The Roman Catholic Church at this time was entirely in the hands of the Jesuits; the Protestant Church was no longer guided by the high ideals of its founder. A hollow dogmatism had put a stop to all further search for the truth; the one important thing was orthodoxy. There had developed a Protestant hierarchy that exerted as stupefying an influence upon the great mass of the people as did the Jesuits in the Roman Catholic Church. Superstition and charlatanry permeated the medical profession. These superstitious beliefs found lodgment in the minds of even such otherwise great physicians as Friedrich Hoffmann, Georg Ernst Stahl and Anton de Haen, one of Boerhaave’s distinguished pupils and a celebrated clinical teacher.