aliment, exercise, repose, and the like. His precepts in respect to these are judicious. He advises mothers to nurse their own offspring; he deprecates the practice of attempting to strengthen young infants by immersing them in cold water, as sometimes advised. He was an advocate for a rigid diet, and insists that no occupation should be allowed to interfere with regular daily exercise.

In Pathology, he was aware of the importance of tracing the general symptoms of disease to the organs or parts primarily affected. This study he has illustrated in his treatise De Locis Affectis, the ablest of his pathological works. He makes health to consist in freedom from pain, and in the easy and unembarrassed exercise of all the functions; implying in this an equable intermixture of the four elements, and proper relation between the solids and fluids. Disease, on the contrary, he makes to consist in a disturbed condition of one or more of the functions. The diathesis, or predisposition to disease, he distinguishes from the disease itself. The diseases of the simple parts depend in general on disproportion in the union of their elementary constituents. The distemper itself may be either material, or independent of matter. The symptoms of disease are the result of derangement of function, or of change in the apparent qualities, or of disordered secretions. The causes of disease are external and internal. The former, or the Procatartic, are necessary to give play to the second, which are subdivided into the antecedent and the

conjoint. The most frequent of the internal causes is the superabundance or the degeneration of the humors.

The

Plethora is the result of a relative or absolute superabundance of blood. Cacochymia is from the superabundance of the other humors by which the blood becomes corrupted. Every alteration of the humors from their healthy condition is called a putridity. The heat developed by putridity gives rise to fever, by being communicated to the heart and arteries. With the exception of ephemeral fever, which depends on some particular alteration in the pneuma, all fevers arise from corruption of the humors. Among the intermittents, a quotidian arises from corruption in the phlegm; a tertian, from corruption in the bile; a quartan, from a corresponding condition of the atrabile. entrance of blood into parts which do not naturally contain it, gives rise to inflammation. If the blood thus enters simply, the inflammation becomes phlegmonous; if accompanied with pneuma, the inflammation is pneumatous; if with the pituita or phlegm, it becomes oedematous; if with the yellow bile, erysipelatous; and if with the atrabile, scirrhous. Advocating the Hippocratic doctrine of critical days, he attempts to support it on grounds purely theoretical, and drawn from the periodical changes in nature, or the influence of the stars. His fondness for subtile refinement is nowhere more clearly seen than in his numerous and, as they must now be considered, fanciful divisions of the pulse.

In Prognosis, he appears to have been remarkably skillful. In this department of pathology he enlarged considerably on the precepts of Hippocrates. He has with equal perspicuity treated of indications and contra indications; and in this study he demonstrates the superiority of the system and practice of the rationalists, over those of the empirics. The essential character of disease, where this can be discovered, furnishes the most reliable indications of treatment. But where this cannot be discovered, the indications may be taken from the season of the year, the state of the atmosphere, the temperament or mode of life of the patient, or, in rare and exceptional instances, from the symptoms. Health, he holds, is maintained by supplying similar with similars, whilst disease is overcome by opposing contraries to contraries. These two propositions furnish the key to his whole system of hygiene and therapeutics.

His regimen for the sick is in strict conformity with that of Hippocrates. But in his mode of managing many individual ailments, he diverges widely from his great model. The use of the lancet and of purgatives, he at times appears to have carried to extremes. Like most of the rationalists, he made use of cupping; but leeches, which were first introduced into practice by Themison, and freely used by the Methodic sect, he does not appear to have employed. Although not specially devoted to surgery, he evinces much skill as an operator; he introduced some new ideas while still officiating at the gymnasium of his native place, in reference to

the treatment of injuries of the nerves. He applied the trephine successfully to the sternum for evacuating the contents of an abscess behind that bone. He had on four occasions witnessed anterior luxation of the femur; twice he cured what was supposed to be spontaneous luxation of that bone; and, what speaks no little in favor of his humanity, he deprecates the use of caustics and the cautery, which were so generally employed and so much abused in ancient times.

In his several works on the Materia Medica, and on medicinal agents, simple and compound, he again differs widely from Hippocrates, whom he elsewhere affects to follow. For though he occasionally discountenances the custom of administering exotic medicines, and ridicules those who despise familiar plants, yet he is fond of heterogeneous mixtures, and quotes with approbation many of the complicated formulæ of his predecessors; but it is to be admitted that his own confections are not so complex as those which he borrows from other authors. The doctrine of primitive qualities he extends to his medicinal agents; and these qualities he deduces from the corresponding secondary properties: thus, bodies primarily hot are salt; and those primarily dry, are bitter. Again, each of the four primitive qualities may exist in the first, second, third, or fourth degree: thus, chicory is cold in the first degree, and pepper is hot in the fourth. Or the agent may owe its medicinal effect to the union of two or more primitive qualities; thus, it may be hot and dry, or cold and moist. Each viscus, in consequence of the analogy between its primitive

qualities and those of certain remedial agents, exercises upon these agents a specific or peculiar attraction. Again, the qualities of agents may be actual or potential;-fire is actually hot, pepper is potentially so. This distinction is still observed in modern times in reference to the cautery. Certain medicines, as specifics, purgatives, several of the poisons and their antidotes, act not by their primitive qualities, but by their whole substance. The art of medicine in Galen's time consisted mostly in devising or applying particular remedies to particular diseases, each ailment having, as was supposed, its own particular remedy. From the usages of his contemporaries in this respect he did not vary; and like most of them, he had his shop, in which his medicinal compounds were prepared, but only for legitimate purposes. He had a horror of charlatans of every stamp; and that branch of the apothecary's business which the moral tone of modern times no longer tolerates, the open sale of poisons, so common in former times, he condemns in the severest terms.

Galen wrote no work expressly on the practice of medicine; but he has left a complete code of medical science, the only complete code of which we read among the ancients. Possessing in its individual parts no great originality, made up of the doctrines of his predecessors of every sect, and disfigured by occasional incongruities, yet, as a whole, this code is remarkable for its general unity and consistency. But its fundamental doctrines are too often the creations of the imagination. In all his works Galen delights to display his erudition; and notwithstand