Page:Leechdoms wortcunning and starcraft of early England volume 1.djvu/28

 and the like. He taught that holding anethum, that is dill, in the hand, is good against epilepsy. Pythagoras was the founder of the healing art among the Hellenic peoples.

Pythagoras taught that water would freeze with the herbs coracesia and calycia, also the flower of the aquifolia or holly. Chrysippus, that an animal, nobody knew anything about, the phryganium, was a good amulet for quartan fevers. Cato, that a man would go comfortably to sleep after eating hare; and says Plinius, there must be something in the general persuasion that after hare a man is good looking for nine days.

Serapion of Alexandria flourished (B.C. 278) forty years after the death of Alexander the Great, and was one of the chiefs of the Empiric school, who relied upon observation and experiment in preference to speculation and thoughtful reasoning; yet he in epilepsy prescribed the warty excrescences on the forelegs of animals, camels brain and gall, rennet of seal, dung of crocodile, heart of hare, blood of turtle, stones of boar, ram, or cock.

Soranos, an early writer of the methodic school, while he refused incantations as cures for diseases, testifies in so doing to their prevalence:—"Alii cantilenas adhibendas probaverunt, ut etiam Philistionis frater idem memorat libro xxii. de adiutoriis, scribens quendam fistulatorem loca dolentia decantasse, quæ cum saltum sumerent palpitando, discusso dolore mitescerent. Alii denique hoc adiutorii genus Pythagoram