of Homeric heroes there was honor for those who healed the wounded. A little later one learns of Esculapian families (Asclepiada) settled, and of their establishing medical schools, or systems of healing, in various parts of the Greek world; whether or not they were descendants of Esculapius matters nothing now; but, mark you, these men were physicians and surgeons, not priests; though priests of the temples of Esculapius did come to occupy an important place in the thoughts of the people. So the profession of medicine became hereditary in certain families. The practitioners lived together in little communities, to which patients went for treatment. In these communities schools grew up and records were kept; experience accumulated; knowledge was transmitted from generation to generation. The young men were educated carefully and broadly; they were general practitioners as well as specialists; now and again a promising lad was sent abroad to complete his studies. He went to Athens, to Rhodes, to Cyrene, to Cnidos, to Cos; through Syria, Persia, Egypt. He traveled on foot or by ship, studying the peoples and the languages, visiting famous men and famous places. He inspected clinics, he followed special forms of treatment; often he tarried long. Such a man might spend years, or a lifetime even, in acquiring special knowledge or in broadening his general culture. Betimes he was tempted by a handsome offer from some foreign ruler or great man to stay with him and practice. Great surgeons of those days were known to pass their lives in such profes sional adventures; in settling and studying and practicing and moving on, consumed always by a restless craving for new knowledge. There must have been a fascination about it, and in those days when your neighbor-city was a month's journey distant, when language changed with every hamlet, when information traveled at a footpace, and news was news still for a decade, one may fancy the delight of moving on and on, leisurely learning things and doing things. The knowledge thus gained was brought back to the home schools, in greater or less amount, and those schools became depots for the learning of the day. So it is probable that before Hippocrates a good part of the surgical acquirements of earlier times had been collected in his family school in Cos. The fifty years preceding his birth were active years with men. There had come a sudden rush of expansion among the Greeks to the west; and the Persians to the east were extending their boundaries and rolling forward to the Mediterranean those vast armies and armadas which the Greeks crushed at Platæa, Salamis, and Mycalé. There was extensive experience of military surgery, and the surgeons of Cos doubtless saw their share. Records of such things, fragmentary, unsystematized, but abundant, were accumulating. It was into this world and to such a life that Hippocrates was born. He was the prophet needed to give articulate expression to that formless learning, to show the meaning of what other men had seen, and out of his own wide experience to add the master word of a lie the great teacher. Fain would one know more of his life. We glean scattered fragments from the old writers; there are letters and gossip and tradition, but no connected tale. He grew up and studied his profession in Cos; then he set out on his travels. There is an old lie about his reason for leaving home, often refuted; his detractors used to say that he owed a great part of his knowledge to the famous library in Cnidos, a promontory of the mainland about twelve miles south of Cos; that after he had extracted from the library all he could, he burned it down so as to balk all future students; and that then he ran away. At any rate, he traveled in many lands, returning at times to his native place for rest and further teaching. How far his wanderings took him does not appear, but mostly he lived and practiced in sundry places on the Greek mainland, as well as in that country latterly called Turkey in Europe; we hear of him in Athens, Delos, Thessaly, and Thrace. During his journeyings he married and had several children. Two sons, Thessalus and Draco, are known to us, and each of them had a son Hippocrates. All were physicians, calling Cos their home. A daughter of our Hippocrates married Polybus, in his turn a celebrated physician. Hippocrates spent many of his best years, youth and age, in Thessaly and Macedonia. Thessaly was his first abiding place after he left home, and he became widely known while living at Larissa there. They tell a story about him in this period: Perdicas was a young king of the neighboring country of Macedonia. For many months he had been thought to have consump tion; at last, taking counsel with wise men, he sent to Larissa for Hippocrates to cure him. That shrewd physician quickly convinced himself that the king was a timid lad, hopelessly in love; "Nor in this was he mistaken," as the chronicler says,1 "for Perdicas, after his father Alexander's death, had become passionately enamored with his father's concubine, Phila; who, when the matter was communicated to her by Hippocrates, so accommodated her behavior toward the king that his health was in a short time completely restored." The later history of this accommodating lady we know not. Various scattered anecdotes of Hippocrates and other people are told, and he himself writes of many places. Shortly after prescribing for Perdicas he was urged to go to Abdera, on the southern coast of Thrace, to combat the plague. That distemper was then ravaging the northern shores of the Ægean Sea, and distant peoples were clamoring for Hippocrates. It was the Plague of Athens, described centuries later by a brilliant young American.' The scourge lasted many years, moving slowly up and down the coast, and Hippocrates fought it here and there. Pericles died of it in 429 B.C., when it raged at Athens, and that year or in later years Hippocrates did what little he could for his beloved Athenians. In such scenes and so occupied he passed his long and active life. Artaxerxes, in distant Persia, heard wonderful tales of the famous Greek, and sent him a great fee to come to his court; but 'John Moffat, M.D., "Life of Hippocrates," London, 1788. Hippocrates refused to listen. He was growing old then, the devastating Peloponnesian wars were wrecking his Greece, and he seems to have felt that his place was among his own people. Hippocrates was a contemporary of Socrates, but he was a better practical philosopher. During his life men heaped honors upon him, and after his death they deified him. Among his own Coans even nothing was held too good for him. Indeed, he had helped those brethren of his in many ways which they could appreciate, and they marked him by an initiation in the sacred Eleusinian rites after a manner which no mortal since Hercules had enjoyed. A public entertainment was instituted in honor of him and his posterity. In his old age, the length of which is disputed, Hippocrates went back to his favorite Thessaly. There he lived until nearly a hundred, some say he was 109 years old,' — and there he died in that Larissa whence he had gone to the rescue of love-sick Perdicas more than half a century before. The Father of Medicine taught the "humoral theory" of disease; that the body contains four humors. blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile, a right proportion or mixing of which constitutes health; improper proportion or irregular distribution constitutes disease. That is a concise statement of the humoral theory, interesting to surgeons even. Most moderns, when they hear of Hippocrates, recall 'The commonly given dates of Hippocrates are 460 to 361 B.C.; but there is no certainty. |