were misapplied. The records were therefore withdrawn from public scrutiny, and placed in the exclusive charge of the priests who ministered in the several temples. The sick now related their symptoms to the official organ, who in his turn consulted the tablets or records, and prescribed the proper remedies, and received in behalf of the presiding deity the votive offering. The priests having thus the exclusive control of all the recorded facts and observations in medicine, and having monopolized the practice of the art, endeavored to reduce their knowledge to a system. The records were carefully revised and collated, and finally formed into a medical code, which they called the Sacred Book. This book was the undeviating guide to medical practice for centuries. Whoever departed from its precepts and injunctions did so at the peril of his life. We here trace the beginning of the legal responsibilities of medical men. Under this medical code occurred the first prosecutions for malpractice, and the physician found guilty of ignoring its aphorism was condemned to death.

We can not be surprised that the ancients attached so much importance to this volume. It embodied the whole science of medicine; it contained the aggregate experience of centuries. It was the most precious legacy which the past had bequeathed to the present. It was a faithful transcript of the ever-varying phenomena of disease, and the only guide to the use of remedies

To doubt its sacred aphorisms was to cavil at the laws of nature. It was a medical book without a theory. It contained only facts. And so it was received as the great statute-book of ancient medicine. The temples where the sick congregated were the hospitals of that period, and the votive tablets were the clinical records of the diseases. These temples became in time the great centres of medical knowledge and education. Thither students flocked from distant States and foreign countries to drink at the original fountains of experience. Men of genius and cultivation here attained to a profound knowledge of the recorded wisdom of the past, and became skilled in the practical application of that knowledge to the relief or mitigation of human infirmities. As their fame spread they attracted pupils, and attaching themselves to the temples, in turn became practical teachers of the art of healing. Thus arose schools of medicine in near and remote countries, many of which attained to great eminence, and had a lasting influence upon the future history of medicine. Great as was the veneration for the Sacred Book, and binding as were its precepts upon teachers and pupils, it could not entirely restrain within the bounds of rational inquiry the free play of the human mind. A class of teachers in time appeared, who discarded observation and experience, and appealed to reason and the suggestions of the imagination. The plain, practical, and unyielding axioms of the medical code,

confirmed by long practice and supported by the authority of the greatest masters of the art, were but so many clogs and hindrances to speculation. The immutable facts of science were employed as the scaffolding to the theories which they ingeniously constructed, and when they had served that purpose were rejected as worthless material. They no longer sought to add their quota to the records of their predecessors. They forsook the temples, and betook themselves to retired and undisturbed retreats. They became pure theorists.

In the little Republic of Greece, at a period somewhat later, ancient civilization shone forth with unwonted splendor. Philosophy and the fine arts were cultivated with passionate fondness, and in their turn they quickened the intellect to an extraordinary degree. The imagination supplanted reason, and speculation was preferred to deduction. Theories were built up on foundations which crumbled to pieces even while the architect was moulding the superstructure to his taste. Not only did the philosophers of that age devise systems on subjects beyond the range of observation, but they frequently rejected the teachings of experience, and all positive knowledge, and abandoned themselves to idle dreaming. Forsaking the paths of logical induction and deduction, they began to reconstruct the infant sciences on the shallow basis of hypothesis. Medicine, still wrapped in mystery, proved

to be a most fruitful field for cultivation, by these transcendental philosophers. Nor were they long in entering it, nor scrupulous in the use of means to revolutionize both its theory and its practice. Two schools of medicine now arose in Greece, with sharply defined peculiarities. Each had its special method of studying and teaching, and both have impressed their customs upon all succeeding generations. The first adopted the Sacred Book as the safe and unerring guide to truth. It still located itself within the sacred precincts of the temples where the sick congregated, thus basing its system of teaching upon observation and experience. It accepted no asserted fact as true, and deemed it unworthy even of consideration, unless it had been subjected to rigid experimentation. Every disease was investigated in the light of the sacred record-the science of that time-and every remedy was applied with the exactest detail. The student was forbidden seclusion. He was constantly brought face to face with disease in all its forms, and compelled to make a practical application of his knowledge. Reason was allowed its full scope in the construction of theories and systems, but its premises must be fixed and indisputable facts. Every pupil was required to follow rigid, logical induction and deduction, when he departed from the axioms of the past. This was pre-eminently a practical school; it was also a clinical school; it was the basis of scientific orthodox medicine;

and from it sprang the rational system of studying and teaching. Opposed to this demonstrative method were the theorists. They withdrew from the temples, to them defiled by the presence of the sick, and betook themselves to quiet groves and secluded retreats, where nothing would divert their thoughts, or obstruct the full play of the imagination. Here their classes assembled and listened to fine-spun theories on the essences, on the prognostic value of particular numbers, on the indications of dreams, on the influence of the moon upon the sick, or on the therapeutic uses of plants according to their color. Doubtless they felt the pressure of the popularity of the clinical school, and on certain days compelled a few sick vagrants to visit their classes, when the professor explained to his distant and wondering pupils how precisely the disease had conformed to his theory. With his own finger he touched the pulse and informed the pupils how it felt; with his own hands he applied each dressing and manipulated the affected part. The pupil was left to doubt and conjecture, or in after times to repeat his lesson as an experiment upon his раtients. All was theory-nothing was practical.

The Practical or Clinical School of the greatest renown was located on the Island of Cos, in the temple of Esculapius. Its head was the Father of Rational Medicine-Divine Hippocrates. At this brilliant period in the history of Greece-the age of Pericles, of Socrates, of Plato