0"T' LAERT> "! - USP

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 437
must have been drawn from life.* The great majority of
doctors sought to impose upon the public by the grandiloquence
of a Graeco-Latin phraseology; their impression
was that, as KANT says, in giving a name to their diseases
they had rendered their patients a service.f They
endeavoured to remove a disease by pills and plasters,
medicines, clysters, and repeated blood-letting; so that at
times it took a good constitution to resist these frequently
inappropriate of preposterous measures. The title of
Doctor of Medicine by no means afforded a guarantee that
the bearer of it possessed medical knowledge. Outside
the universities the right to confer this dignity was assumed
by the EMPEROR, the POPE and his plenipotentiaries, and
the Counts Palatine. At Naples, even during last century,
the D'AVELLINO-CARRACIOLO family enjoyed the privilege
of conferring the degrees of Doctor of Medicine and Doctor
•of Law; they made extensive use of this privilege,—and
.made it correspondingly profitable.
But even at some universities a disgraceful misuse was
made of the privilege of granting the degree of Doctor.
Many professors found in the fees paid a desirable increase
•of income, and sought to allure candidates by making the
least possible demands upon their knowledge. Examinations
were either omitted altogether or reduced to a
mere formality. The theses for the doctorate might be
bought at a fixed price from certain learned contractors
who made a profitable business by the preparation of such
essays.J At Greifswald acobbler in the year 1788 got the
diploma of Doctor of Medicine; on the strength, too, of a
dissertation upon the therapeutic effects of pitch. The
University of Erfurt created 97 Doctors of Medicine in a
•single year while not numbering more than 30 students in
all the Faculties put together. At other universities the
cost connected with the acquisition of the doctor's degree
* M. RAYNAUD : Les medecins au temps de Moliere, Paris 1862.
f IM. KANT : Versuch uber die Krankheiten des Kopfes in der Ausg. sammtl.
Werke von Rosenkrantz u. Schubert, Leipzig 1838, vii, 16.
X Kais. priv. Reich sanzeiger, Gotha 1802, No. 169-170.