Among the older naturalists, such as Pliny and
Aristotle, and even in the older historians, whose scope included
natural as well as civil and political history, the atypic and
bizarre, and especially the aberrations of form or function of
the generative organs, caught the eye most quickly. Judging from
the records of early writers, when Medicine began to struggle
toward self-consciousness, it was again the same order of facts
that was singled out by the attention. The very names applied by
the early anatomists to many structures so widely separated from
the organs of generation as were those of the brain, give
testimony of the state of mind that led to and dominated the
practice of dissection.
In the literature of the past centuries the predominance of the
interest in the curious is exemplified in the almost ludicrously
monotonous iteration of titles, in which the conspicuous words
are curiosa, rara, monstruosa, memorabilia, prodigiosa, selecta,
exotica, miraculi, lusibus naturae, occultis naturae, etc., etc.
Even when medical science became more strict, it was largely the
curious and rare that were thought worthy of chronicling, and not
the establishment or illustration of the common, or of general
principles.
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