John Caius and the Linacre tradition

Abstract

To TALK of Thomas Linacre and John Caius together iti the same paper is almost like commending a saint and a sinner in the same sermon.Linacre is universally praised by his contemporaries and by modem scholars alike, while Caius in his writings and in his daily relationships seems petulant and domineering, with a dislike of Welshmen, whom he excluded from his refounded College along with the blind, the deaf, the halt, the lame, and sufferers from grave or incurable diseases.1 Linacre's achievement was to drag medicine in this country into the sixteenth century; the effect of Caius' example, it is alleged, was firmly to keep it there for a further two centuries.Caius was a reactionary in many ways, of that there is no doubt-his preference for the old rituals and institutions was strengthened by his experience of unruly junior fellows and boisterous undergraduates given to games and drinking, who preferred to spend their money on fashionable clothes that would soon wear out rather than on books that would endure.2Yet his attachment to the past was not just wistful yearning for a bygone age: he was aware of the positive benefits to the present to be gained by adherence to an active tradition, that of the medical humanism of Linacre, whose memory he venerated and whose tomb he repaired and, in his will, commanded his executors to clean and mend.3His medical fellowships at his college, his proud and autocratic rule of the College of Physicians, cannot be understood without Linacre's example, and Caius would assuredly have been delighted and flattered by Bullein's praise of him for "shewyng himself to be the seconde

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.