of the present day, that the aid of Animal magnetism was called in to contribute to the cure; but on this point the proof is not so complete as could be wished. Certain it is, however, that as the Mesmerists administer medicines which are suggested to the imagination of patients during the state of clairvoyance, the Asclepiadæ prescribed drugs as indicated in dreams. These, indeed, were generally of a very inert description; but sometimes medicines of a more dangerous nature, such as hemlock and gypsum, were used in this way, and regular reports of the effects which they produced were kept by the priests in the temples. It is also well known that the Asclepiadæ noted down with great care the symptoms and issue of every case, and that, from such observations, they became in time great adepts in the art of prognosis. The office of priesthood was hereditary in certain families, so that information thus acquired was transmitted from father to son, and went on accumulating from one generation to another. Whether the Asclepiade availed themselves of the great opportunities which they must undoubtedly have had of cultivating human and comparative anatomy, has been much disputed in modern times; but there is good reason for believing that the scholars have greatly underrated the amount of anatomical knowledge possessed by Hippocrates, and his predecessors the priestphysicians in the Temples of Health. Thus Galen holds Hippocrates to have been a very successful cultivator of anatomy. Galen further states, upon the authority of Plato, that the Asclepiadæ paid no attention to dietetics; but this opinion would require to be received with considerable modification, for, most assuredly, whoever reflects on the great amount of valuable information on this subject which is contained in the Hippocratic treatises, will not readily bring himself to believe that it could have been all collected by one man, or in the course of one generation. Moreover, Strabo affirms that Hippocrates was trained in the knowledge of dietetics. That gymnastics were not recognized as a regular branch of the healing art, until the age of Hippocrates, is indeed not improbable, and this perhaps is what Plato meant when he says that the Asclepiadæ did not make any use of the pedagogic art until it was introduced by Herodicus. But at the same time

there can be no doubt, as further stated by Galen, that exercise, and especially riding on horseback, constituted one of the measures used by the Asclepiadæ for the recovery of health, having been introduced by Esculapius himself.

Of the Asclepia we have mentioned above, it will naturally be supposed that some were in much higher repute than others, either from being possessed of peculiar advantages, or from the prevalence of fashion. In the beginning of the fifth century before the Christian era, the temples of Rhodes, Cnidos, and Cos were held in especial favor, and on the extinction of the first of these, another rose up in Italy in its stead. But the temple of Cos was destined to throw the reputation of all the others into the background, by producing among the priests of Esculapius the individual who, in all after ages, has been distinguished by the name of the GREAT HIPPOCRATES, which was given him by Aristotle.1

That Hippocrates was lineally descended from Æsculapius was generally admitted by his countrymen, and a genealogical table, professing to give a list of the names of his forefathers, up to Esculapius, has been transmitted to us from remote antiquity.

Of the circumstances connected with the life of Hippocrates little is known for certain, the only biographies which we have of him being all of comparatively recent date, and of little authority. The birth of Hippocrates is generally fixed as having occurred in the 460th year before the vulgar era. There is also much uncertainty as to the time of his death: according to one tradition he died at the age of 85, whereas others raise it to 90, 104, and even 109 years. It will readily occur to the reader, then, that our author flourished at one of the most memorable epochs in the intellectual development of the human race. He had for his contemporaries, Pericles, the famous statesman; the poets Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Pindar; the philosopher Socrates, with his distinguished disciples Plato and Xenophon; the venerable father of history, Herodotus, and his young rival, Thucydides; the

1 Galen states repeatedly that the greater part of Aristotle's physiology is derived from Hippocrates.

unrivalled statuary, Phidias, with his illustrious pupils, and many other distinguished names, which have conferred immortal honor on the age in which they lived, and exalted the dignity of human nature. Hippocrates, it thus appears, came into the world under circumstances which must have co-operated with his own remarkable powers of intellect in raising him to that extraordinary eminence which his name has attained in all ages. From his forefathers he inherited a distinguished situation in one of the most eminent hospitals, or Temples of Health, then in existence, where he must have enjoyed free access to all the treasures of observations collected during many generations, and at the same time would have an opportunity of assisting his own father in the management of the sick. Thus from his youth he must have been familiar with the principles of medicine, both in the abstract and in the concrete, the greatest advantage, I may be permitted to remark, which any tyro in the healing art can possibly enjoy. In addition to all this, he had excellent opportunities of estimating the good and bad effects resulting from the application of gymnastic exercises in the cure of diseases, under the tuition of HERODICUS, the first person who is known for certain to have cultivated this art as a branch of medicine. He was further instructed in the polite literature and philosophy of the age, by two men of classical celebrity, Gorgias and Democritus; the latter of whom is well known to have devoted much attention to the study of medicine, and its cognate sciences, comparative anatomy and physiology.

Initiated in the theory and first principles of medicine, as now described, Hippocrates no doubt commenced the practice of his art in the Asclepion of Cos, as his forefathers had done before him. Why he afterwards left the place of his nativity, and visited distant regions of the earth, whither the duties of his profession and the calls of humanity invited him, cannot now be satisfactorily determined. The respect paid to him in his lifetime by the good and wise in all the countries which he visited, and the veneration in which his memory has been held by all subsequent generations, are more than sufficient to confute the base calumny, invented, no doubt, by some envious rival, that he was obliged to flee from the land of his nativity

in consequence of his having set fire to the library attached to the Temple of Health, at Cnidos, in order that he might enjoy a monopoly of the knowledge which he had extracted from the records which it had contained. Certain it is, that he afterwards visited Thrace, Delos, Thessaly, Athens, and many other regions, and that he practised, and probably taught, his profession in all these places. There are many traditions of what he did during his long life, but with regard to the truth of them, the greatest diversity of opinion has prevailed in modern times. Thus he is said to have cured Perdiccas, the Macedonian king, of love-sickness; and although there are circumstances connected with this story which give it an air of improbability, it is by no means unlikely that he may have devoted his professional services to the court of Macedonia, since very many of the places mentioned in his works as having been visited by him, such as Pella and Acanthus, are situated in that country; and further, in confirmation of the narrative, it deserves to be mentioned, that there is more satisfactory evidence of his son THESSALUS having been court physician to Archelaus, king of Macedonia; and that it is well ascertained that another of his descendants, the FOURTH HIPPOCRATES, attended Roxane, the queen of Alexander the Great.

Our author's name is also connected with the great plague of Athens, the contagion of which he is reported to have extinguished there and in other places, by kindling fires. The only serious objection to the truth of this story is the want of proper contemporary evidence in support of it. It is no sufficient objection, however, that Thucydides, in his description of the circumstances attending the outbreak of the pestilence in Attica [see Vol. V. p. 261], makes no mention of any services having been rendered to the community by Hippocrates; while, on the contrary, he states decidedly that the skill of the physicians could do nothing to mitigate the severity of this malady. It is highly probable, that, if Hippocrates was actually called upon to administer professional assistance in this way, it must have been during one of the subsequent attacks or exacerbations of the disease which occurred some years afterwards. We know that this plague did not expend its fury in Greece during one season, and then was no more heard of; but

on the contrary, we learn that it continued to lurk about in Athens and elsewhere, and sometimes broke out anew with all its original severity. Thucydides briefly mentions a second attack of the plague at Athens about two years after the first, attended with a frightful degree of mortality; nor is it at all improbable that this was not the last visitation of the malady. Though the name of Hippocrates, then may not have been heard of at its first invasion, it is not at all unlikely that, after he had risen to the head of his profession in Greece, as we know that he subsequently did, he should have been publicly consulted regarding the treatment of the most formidable disease which was prevailing at the time. What adds an appearance of truth to the tale is, that several of the genuine works of Hippocrates, which were probably published in its lifetime, relate to the causes and treatment of epidemic and endemic diseases.

Another circumstance in the life of Hippocrates, for the truth of which a host of ancient authorities concur in vouching, is that he refused a formal invitation to pay a professional visit to the court of Persia. He spent the latter part of his life in Thessaly, and died at Larissa, when far advanced in years.

The opinions which Hippocrates held as to the origin of medicine, and the necessities in human life which gave rise to it, are such as bespeak the soundness of his views, and the eminently practical bent of his genius. It was the necessity, he says, which men in the first stages of society must have felt of ascertaining the properties of vegetable productions as articles of food that gave rise to the science of Dietetics; and the discovery having been made that the same system of regimen does not apply in a disordered as in a healthy condition of the body, men felt themselves compelled to study what changes of the aliment are proper in disease; and it was the accumulation of facts bearing on this subject which gave rise to the art of Medicine. Looking upon the animal system as one whole, every part of which conspires and sympathizes with all the other parts, he would appear to have regarded disease also as one, and to have referred all its modifications to peculiarities of situation. Whatever may now be thought of his general views on Pathology, all must admit that his mode of prosecuting the cultivation of medicine is in the true spirit