Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Life and Times of Gerhardt Van Swieten
The reason of the neglect of philosophical and medical studies is to be sought in the fact that these imply free in quiry, the questioning of authority, and the exercise of free judgment. These conditions are the soul of all true science, and because they are subversive to the habit of submission to dogma and authority, they were consciously discouraged.
This was the state of public-more especially of medical instruction in Austria at the time of Maria Theresa's acces smn to the throne in 1740. She was then twenty-three years old, and it is well known what obstacles and dangers she had to contend with during the war of the Austrian Succession and the two Silesian wars, which filled the first years of her reign. The time of the accession of Maria Theresa and of Frederick the Great, marks the beginning of a struggle between the houses of Hapsburg and Hohenzollern, that was to last over one hundred and twenty years, and was not to end before the final defeat of Austria at Koniggratz in 1866.
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