SECOND: PERIOD OF HIPPOCRATES

CHAPTER II

THE RISE OF GREEK MEDICINE

IPPOCRATES, a man more conspicuous as a physician than any which the annals of history disclose, had no sudden inception in Greece. Preparation had been made for his coming by the general advance of culture and the labors of other men of ability and genius almost equal to his. Of the almost incomparable Pythagoras we have already made mention. But closely following in the wake of that great sage were Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Leucippus, Metrodorus, Anaxarchus, Herodotus, Heraclitus, and others too numerous to mention here. Not all of these distinguished personages were devoted to medicine, it is to be observed, but they were thinkers, philosophers, and lovers of wisdom. There was never a great philosopher who was not a great physician; hence, they must have been physicians. Naturally the long array of great men who immediately preceded Hippocrates would be classed among such men as Huyghens, Young, Newton, Darwin, Haeckel, Tyndall, Huxley, and Sir Henry Thompson, etc. of modern times. The former were the fore

Physic" and brother of Machaon, whose memory was immortalized in the Homeric poems.

As we have observed, it will thus be seen that the great Hippocrates had a distinguished lineage, reaching back about eighteen generations—to Esculapius direct, the genius of which he was the possessor and exponent being accentuated with almost each successive generation. Not only was he a great physician; he was greater as a surgeon than a physician.

Of the early life of Hippocrates but little is known. His grandfather belonged to the priesthood and probably was a physician, since he had charge of the Asclepion at Cos, on the little island off the southeastern coast of Asia Minor, when the grandson was born, about 450 years B.C. The sacred temple referred to was one of the many erected to the memory of Esculapius and bore his name. As already intimated, they were hospitals, or sanatoria, in which the rites and ceremonies of religion, together with hygienic treatment, were administered to the sick and infirm. It appears that Hippocrates when a boy was sent away to school to Selimbria, in Thrace, where he came under the tuition of Herodotus, a great celebrity in his day as a teacher of youth, whose system of training embraced alike the development of both mind and body. It is probable that here, under the stern and inflexible discipline of Herodotus, Hippocrates received principles in physical culture, and a knowledge

of the laws of hygiene which laid the foundation for the career in which he became so justly celebrated. It is known also that he had the advantages of travel, as did Pythagoras, and visited Egypt, Athens, Assyria, and Persia for the purpose of study and observation of institutions, manners and customs of people the more advanced in the arts of civilization. In these travels he is said to have visited the famous temples dedicated to his great sire, Æsculapius, in various points of Greece, and to have studied the records kept therein of diseases and their treatment. This is only supposition however. It is also supposed that he gained his introduction to medicine in these institutions, a supposition which receives strong support from the fact that Hippocrates' first treatise on the subject of medicine embraces clinical records which could have been obtained nowhere else. His ideas of diet and regimen, which form so great a part of his method of caring for the sick, which he formulated later in life, and which may be found in his medical treatises, were such as were instituted by Esculapius in the temples erected to that sage, and which in fact were a prominent part of the system of physical training throughout all Greece in the days of her greatest heroism.

Hippocrates did not have the advantages of a college course to fit him for the practice of medicine. No faculty conferred upon him the degree of Doctor in Medicine, nor gave him

license to practise medicine and surgery. It is as unlikely that he ever saw the inside of a college as of a human body, for it did not exist, or that he had accurate knowledge of the brain and nervous system. His knowledge was of the experimental sort and gained by observation and induction. He was a close student of natureof phenomena, normal and abnormal, and the conclusions at which he arrived were based, not on demonstration, but on a series of observed facts, and inductions therefrom. His knowledge was, therefore, experimental, and his method of treating disease empirical. But even so, his powers of observation were so keen, and his skill in arranging and classifying data so patient and tireless, as to lead him to conclusions for the most part reliable and indisputable. He could not by such a method of investigation ascertain the nature of the specific cause of a malady, such, for example, as an epidemic of fever or of a plague; the specific cause of tuberculosis, anthrax, or cancer; but he could determine their natural history, so to say, and declare what means and methods had been found the most successful for their treatment. These powers were possessed by Hippocrates to a greater degree than by any other physician in all history; and it was the possession of them that made him the great character he was, and that enabled him to wield so great an influence over his contemporaries and the generations that followed. He did not