their composition; hence the prescriptions as to their use; hence the 20tzà in the Orphic mysteries, which were transported from the Black and Caspian seas." (Herder.)

The Persians seem to have been especially famous for their knowledge of poisons. The Hauma-drink-a drink prepared from the plant Hauma, which, like the mandragora, was a god-increased fruitfulness, and wasprescribed by the physicians for pains in the limbs, catarrhal obstructions and urinary diseases. All very meager traditions!

The regulations of the ancient Persians with respect to medical fees and examinations are known to us more fully than their medicine. The priests alone were very bad pay, a simple benediction sufficing to satisfy their score. All other persons, however, paid well. Thus the chief of a tribe paid with a farm; a local magnate, and a boy of good family, paid one large draught-ox; a house-holder, a small draught-ox; women were to be treated more cheaply. Thus the fee for the lady of the house was oneshe-ass; for the wife of the chief of a family, one cow; for the wife of the chief of a tribe, one mare (a horse in the times of Darius was worth 50 Persian daries, which, if of gold, were equivalent to five dollars, if of silver, to fifty cents); the wife of the lord of the province paid one shecamel. Thus the famous doctors of that day were able to acquire in the end, in place of our modern stocks, a tolerably fine collection of live stock, especially as it was considered among the Persians the greatest disgrace to remain in debt (and to lie)-an idea which, as we know, is entirely exploded in the present day, at least as regards physicians. Even the veterinary surgeons were not forgotten in the Old-Persian tariff. They too were paid in cattle, receiving for the cure of a large draught-ox, one of medium size; for that of a medium sized ox, a small one, and for the cure of a small one, the value of it in feed; sick dogs (the dog was a sacred animal) must be treated like human beings. As regards examinations, (which were limited to "practical cases"), any physician who had "cut" three unbelievers, and on these occasions had "done for" them all, failed to pass; if, however, the unbelievers survived, the faithful might give him a trial.

"At his pleasure let him treat the faithful, and at his pleasure let him cure them by cutting."

These minute regulations seem to indicate a higher education, even in medicine, than we have been aware of up to the present time. Yet it is also known that their other knowledge, especially in architecture, astronomy, technics, postal matters etc., attained considerable height. It is quite possible too that the Persian medicine proper occupied a low position (for only Egyptians and Greeks are known to us as court physicians), and that these regulations as to fees were directed against extortion on the part of the lower native sacerdotal physicians only.

It is well known that the Assyrians also belonged among the most powerful and cultivated peoples of ancient times, a fact indisputably established by the recently deciphered cuneiform inscriptions and the monu

ments lately discovered. As early as B. C. 2000 such danger from the kingdom of Assur threatened the Egyptians, even then beginning to decline in power and culture, that the subject princes of the Hygschos were compelled to protect themselves against it by the foundation of border fortresses. Yet, in spite of the high position which the Assyrians held among the people, whose writings have been preserved to us, our information with regard to their medical views is very scanty, at least up to the present time. A few traces of their medicine are, however, found in the epic poem "Istar's Journey to Hell," recently deciphered by Schrader. Though identical with Astarte, this goddess among the Assyrians was divided into Istar and Baaltis, the former (the supreme god of the Accadians) resembling the heavenly Venus Urania, the latter, the animal Astarte. Istar presided over sexual fruitfulness and generation. In addition to this medico-mythological information, we find in this epic the following passage relating to the pathology of the Assyrians:

"Go forth, lead her forth to suffer her punishment; disease of the eyes, of the hips, of the feet, of the heart, shall strike her!"

a tone which harmonizes perfectly with that of the Holy Writ, and shows that the culture of all Semitic races is similar in substance as well as form, a fact which points to their common source (Accad). Here also every disease is a punishment from the gods. This explains how the Jews adopted so many things from the Assyrians (and Accadians ?), even the observance of the Sabbath, which was so strict among the Assyrians, that in the cuneiform inscription translated by George Smith it is said:

"The seventh day, feast of Marodach and Zir: Panibu, a great feast, a day of rest. The prince of the people will eat neither the flesh of birds nor cooked fruits. He will not change his clothing. He will put on no white robe. He will bring no offering. The king will not ascend into his chariot. He will not perform his duties as royal law-giver. In a garrison city the commander will permit no proclamations to his soldiers. The art of the physician will not be practised."

Thus on the Sabbath even the sick must dispense with the physician. The following charm may be considered a theurgic remedy against the elementary spirits, who were regarded as the carriers of internal diseases. These diseases, inasmuch as their origin was not directly cognizable by the senses, were inexplicable to the masses:

"Let the witch sit upon the right;

Let her leave the left side free!

Adisina, do thou tie the knot,

Bind up the head of the sick,

His limbs in like manner with fetters!

Seat thou thyself on his bed,

With the water of youth besprinkle him!"

The influence of the elementary spirits, of the so-called Adisina, was also regarded as a general cause of disease-those spirits who,

"In the depths of the sea as in the ether of heaven, are not male nor yet female. Order and custom they know not; prayer and supplication they heed not."

Yet they yield to the charm of the enchantress, who envelops the sick likewise with magic bands.' The pain of circumcision (an operation introduced among them, as among all Semitic races) is said to have been mitigated by the compression of the vessels of the neck until the operation was completed. It is worth remarking in the history of civilization that much of the superstition (even medical superstition) cherished by the Greeks and Romans, and descended from them to later nations, had its origin with the Babylonians and Assyrians. (The first book on astrology is that of Sargon I.)

In reviewing the medical culture of the Phoenicians it is important to remember that in the papyrus Ebers it is stated that one of its books is the work of a physician of Byblos. What we know of this book permits us to conjecture much more important medical knowledge than has been heretofore suspected in this Semitic race, distinguished for its technical, nautical and meteorological knowledge, as well as for its activity in colonization, its commerce and its luxury, and which also exercised an important influence upon the Greeks. That the Phoenicians indulged in an extremely sensual religious worship is known. In their disgusting cultus of Phallus and Astarte (Mylittacultus) they worshipped the visible instrument of male procreative power, viewed in a religious light. It is also known that their supreme deity Baal-Zebul, the Beelzebub of the Bible, was a god of medicine, and was interrogated by even the Jews as an oracle of health and disease. His priests were clad in red clothing (the earliest example of the red garments of the physician ?). Their special god of medicine, however, was Esmun, the eighth of the Cabiri (identical with the Idæan Dactyli, Corybantes, Curetes), who, in female attire reaching to the feet, with shaven heads and exhibiting an erect phallus, challenge comparison with certain modern black-clothed Cabiri, save that with the latter the distinctive phallus slinks away into privacy. The ancient Cabiri also occupied themselves with serpent charming, rather than with other arts and medicine.

The Phoenicians were, as we know, the inventors of writing, an art which, when compared with the Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Assyrian cuneiform writing, may claim for ancient and mediæval times the same importance in the history of civilization as the art of printing compared with the handwriting in vogue up to the period of its discovery. The Phoenician writing, too, was the model for the letters of all later peoples. 2

1. A very striking similarity with the first Assyrian incantation is found in the following charm coming down from the Merseburg incantations and German pagan antiquity: "Einst sassen Idise (Weiber), sassen hier und dort; einige banden Bande," etc. This probably points to prehistoric relations.

2. The ancestors of the Phoenicians, who were settled for an unknown period on the shores of the Persian Gulf, possessed antique universities as early as B. C. 2000. These were located upon the islands Tyros and Arados, two of the modern Bahrein Islands. A third island, called Dilmoun, situated on the coast of Susiana, a short distance from the mouth of the Tigris, was also devoted to sacerdotal in

Of the medical customs of the Carthagenians, who were Phoenician colonists, we know nothing more than that the same deities, even in medicine, were worshipped by them, and in a manner differing but slightly from that of the parent stock. They had certain regulations as to food (according to which e. g. when sitting to administer justice, or when in camp, they must drink plain water), a religious and hygienic institution common to all Semitic people down to the present day. We may find evidence that the connection between the mother and daughter state continued to a late period in the fact that the Carthagenian Mago (between B. C. 250 and 140) had written in the Phoenician language a book on rural economy, including veterinary medicine. This was subsequently translated into Greek by Cassius Dionysius (about B. C. 100), and still later an epitome of it was published by Diophanes.

III. JEWISH MEDICINE.

If views are divided as to the route by which the Egyptians immigrated into their country, it is well established with regard to the Jews, that, wandering as nomads from the regions bordering upon the middle Euphrates and Tigris, they came at a very early period by way of Palestine into Egypt; that, after a short sojourn here, they returned to Palestine, and that they subsequently (B. C. 1900) revisited Egypt for a long period. From Egypt (upon whose monuments their name has been re-discovered in our own day under the title Aperu, Aperiu, i. e. Hebrews) they were again, after the lapse of four hundred years, and after they had become a numerous people, led back by Moses (Egyptian Mesu, B. C. 1560 ?-1480, or 1531–1450), their great and terrible lawgiver, a pupil of the Egyptian priests, whose doctrines he partly and almost literally adopted. This man, the elder of the two world-renowned founders of religion among the Jews, as a statesman looked at medicine from the purely political standpoint only. After completing his education in the golden age of Egyptian culture, he did not, as we know, lead the Israelites to the completion of the conquest of Canaan, and did not survive to see the political independence of his race. Yet this very fact rendered his laws only the more secure from change, and more indisputably binding—a statement applicable not only in religious matters but also in medicine.

The medicine of the most enduring and most persistent, as well as the most pliant race of all the people of history, a people scattered throughout the whole world and adapting itself to all circumstances, yet always preserving its exclusiveness, its ancient God and his commandments — the medicine of this people, I say, was far different in its character during the complete independence of the Hebrew kingdom, from what it appeared

struction. In these ancient universities astronomy was diligently cultivated, and we owe to them the invention of the zodiac, with its division into signs, degrees and minutes, the division of the day into twelve equal hours etc. (Maspero. (H.)

after this period had gone by, and when an intermixture of this obstinately faithful nation with its neighbors of a more highly cultivated stock could be no longer avoided. Such was the result first of the Assyrian captivity (about B. C. 722), and subsequently of the Babylonish captivity (about B. C. 604). But Jewish medicine was never a science of indigenous growth. The most eminent representative of the Semitic race, like all its other branches, lacked any conspicuous and independent scientific creativeness. In the period after the complete dispersion of the Jews the influence of Greek science predominated in its teachings.

The first of these two periods furnishes us the medicine of the Old Testament; the last, the medicine of the Talmud. The former manifests plainly its origin in the priestly schools of Egypt, and just as clearly its conformity to Assyrian ideas. It displays pre-eminently the purest character of priestly (theurgic) medicine, and in this respect surpasses even the Assyrio-Babylonian and the Egyptian, its models.

The Semitic race, especially the Jews, exercised, as is well known, a controlling influence not only upon the faith, but also upon the superstition of the West, and thus the greatest portion of the mystic ingredients of all medical art is to be referred to the Semites, in the same degree as its scientific and artistic elements are referable to the Greeks.

Old Jewish medicine too was almost exclusively a medicine of the State, not a private profession. Talmudic medicine, on the other hand, gave undeniable precedence to Greek methods and Greek science, and excluded what we may call Jewish medicine from further development.

As the old Jewish medicine, originally borrowed in all probability from peoples already highly cultivated (Egyptians, Assyrians and Babylonians), lacked a mythical phase, so also, in consequence of its strong and allpervading monotheism (characteristic of the Semitic race in general, as well as of the Egyptians, who were in this respect the teachers of the Jews), it lacked mythical representatives. Accordingly Jehovah (the god of light, Ra, according to Lauth), of whom it is written "I, Jehovah, am thy physician," is alone to be regarded as such a representative. Among his people, too, who originally lacked a belief in immortality, He was regarded as a general cause of disease. He punished with diseases the transgressions of his commandments, and thus it comes that Christian etiology down to Luther, and even later, considered diseases a punishment for sins. This irascible Deity,' as a punishment for violation of his commands, utters, by the mouth of Moses, the following threats :

“The Lord shall make the pestilence cleave unto thee, until he have consumed thee from off the land whither thou goest in to possess it. The Lord shall smite thee

1. The translator, while recognizing the truthfulness and justice of the author's frequent and bitter arraignment of the folly, wickedness and bigotry of the mediæval Church, feels called upon to disclaim, once for all, any sympathy with the agnosticism which mars, in his judgment, this and a few other passages of an otherwise excellent work. (H.)