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ing an epitome of medical science less voluminous than the cyclopediac compilations of that writer, and more useful to the physician than the imperfect synopsis which Oribasius had left of his own collections. But in the execution of this task, Paulus exceeds his original intention. He draws from many. sources, and much from his own experience; and in all that relates to surgery, he is more full and circumstantial than any other of the ancient authors, not even excepting Celsus. His work is divided into seven books, In the first, he treats of hygiene and the rules of health, as applied to different ages, seasons, temperaments, and to the use of different articles of diet. In the second, he treats of fevers, excrementitious discharges, critical days, complicating symptoms and appearances. In the third, of local affections, from head to foot. In the fourth, of external maladies limited to no particular part of. the surface, including cutaneous and verminous diseases. In book fifth, he treats of wounds and the bites of venomous animals, of poisons and their anti-. dotes. In book sixth, he describes all the diseases calling for surgical manipulations; and in the last, he treats on the properties of medicines simple as well as compound, and particularly of such as he had mentioned in the former portions of his work; also on the modes of preparing these medicines, and on such articles as may be substituted for one another. Paulus is also said to have written on the diseases peculiar to women; and for his skill in this department, he was sometimes called by the Arabians, Paul the Obstetrician. By the moderns he is chiefly

esteemed for his able exposition of surgical diseases and operations. He had the honor of being almost wholly appropriated by Fabricius ab Aquapendente, one of the ablest surgical writers after the first revival of learning in Italy. Paulus is the first to speak of rhubarb as a cathartic,

The only other writer among the Greeks, after the time of Paulus, and worthy of rank among the ancient classics of the profession, is Actuarius. He flourished at Constantinople long after the fall of Alexandria; and is, therefore, to be reckoned among the luminaries of the middle ages.

Before closing this hurried sketch of the medical writers of antiquity, it is worthy of remark that Galen, whose authority was paramount to all others, from the close of the second to the middle of the

seventeenth century, occupies the middle space in the thousand years which intervened between the founding of the Alexandrian school, and its ultimate overthrow by the Saracens. It has been customary to speak of the deterioration of medical science during the latter half of this period. But the decline must be taken in connection with the retrograde movement of general civilization during the same period, and attributed to the same causes. With the progressive decay of the Roman empire both of the East and West, the different communities of which it was composed were gradually sinking deeper and deeper into barbarism; and it is not

wonderful that the medical profession should have felt the general influence. Yet, when we consult such writers of this period as have reached us, and compare those of the first with those of the second part of it, as Cassius, Celsus, Aretæus, Dioscorides, Ruffus and Cælius Aurelianus, all prior to the time of Galen; with Oribasius of the fourth century, Aëtius and Trallianus of the sixth, and finally, with Paulus Ægineta, the last and among the best of them; we are struck with the general uniformity of their views and modes of reasoning, as well as with their course of practice. There is nearly as much originality, if not as much acumen, in proportion to their number, in the one group as in the other. Paulus and Trallianus in this respect, are the ablest offsets against Celsus and Aretæus. Of the later group, with the two exceptions just mentioned, few ventured much beyond the business of commentators or compilers. But in this they were not corrupters of the art. With the earlier masters still before them, they have advanced opinions of their own sufficient to show that if medicine had not been revolutionized by them, it had never been entirely neglected. The principles and practices established in better times were still maintained. The profession of those days, conscious of their own position, were content to reverence what they had neither the skill to equal, nor the temerity to set aside.

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CHAPTER XIII..

LAWS AND CUSTOMS OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE IN RELÀTION TO THE PROFESSION.

PRIOR to the consolidation of the empire, there were probably no well-established laws among the Romans in regard to medical education, the term of study, or the qualifications of physicians. The system of training previously in use among the Greeks, appears in course of time to have been universally adopted. The liberally educated, whether of the profession or not, were all more or less initiated in what was then the philosophy of medicine; and some of the uses to which such information was applied by them, may be learnt from Varro in his directions for the building of villas;* or from Vitruvius, a writer of the Augustan era, whose authority in all that relates to the locality of dwellings, to public works, and to the planning of new cities, might with advantage be consulted in questions of hygiene as applied to architecture, at the present day. The hygienic arrangements in the rural economy of Palladius, must also have been derived from the same source.

*M. Terentii Varronis De Re Rustica lib. i. cap. xi. and xii.

t Marci Vitruvii Pollionis De Architectura libri decem. Lipsiæ, 1836. Palladii Rutilii De Re Rustica lib. i.

The well-educated physician, in common with his medical knowledge, was presumed to be familiar with the grammatical structure of his own language, with rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry dialectics, moral philosophy, astronomy, and even architecture. Galen refers to these several branches. of general education, as proper means for sharp-. ening the intellect of the student preparatory to assuming the difficult and responsible duties of the profession.* And his contemporary, Apuleius Madaurensis, who styles himself the "not unknown priest nor recent worshiper, nor unfavored minister, of Esculapius," addressing the people of Carthage in his figurative manner, says of the Goblet of the Muses, "The oftener it is drained and the more unmixed it is, the more it conduces to soundness of mind. The first cup, that of the reading-master, takes away ignorance; the second, of the grammarian, instructs in science; the third, the rhetorician's, arms with eloquence. Thus far most people drink. But I have drunk other cups at Athens, the cup of poetry, the inventive; of geometry, the limpid; of music, the sweet; of dialectics, the roughish; and of universal philosophy, the never-satiating nectarious cup." +

The time usually devoted to the study of medicine, beyond that spent in the literary course, as may be inferred from Galen and others, was not short of

* De Cognoscendis Curandisque Animi Morbis lib. viii. cap. 1. Kuhn's edition, vol. v. p. 42. See also Administrationes Anatomicæ, lib. i. c. ii. Kuhn's edition, vol. ii. and numerous other parts of his writings.

Florida, chap. xx.

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