Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/12

 such examples as the woman "bound by Satan," the rebuke of the fever, the casting out of the devil which was dumb, the healing of the person whom "the devil ofttimes casteth into the fire"—of which case one of the greatest modern physicians remarks that never was there a truer description of epilepsy and various other examples, show this same inevitable mode of thought as a refracting medium through which the teachings and doings of the Great Physician were revealed to future generations.

The civilization of Greece alone appears to have been wholly or nearly free from this idea of the agency of demons in producing bodily ills; hence, Greece was the first of the ancient nations, and indeed the only one, so far as we know, in which a scientific idea of medicine was evolved. Five hundred years before Christ, in the great bloom period of thought, the period of Æschylus, Phidias, Pericles, Socrates, and Plato, Hippocrates appeared, and his is one of the greatest names in all history. Quietly but thoroughly he broke away from the old tradition, developed scientific thought, and laid the foundations of medical science upon experience, observation, and reason so deeply and broadly that his teaching remains to this hour among the most precious possessions of our race.

His thought was passed on to the School of Alexandria, and there medical science was developed yet further, especially by such men as Herophilus and Erasistratus. Under their lead studies in human anatomy began by dissection; the old prejudice which had weighed so long upon the human race, preventing that method of anatomical investigation without which there can be no real results, was cast aside apparently forever.

But with the coming in of Christianity a great new chain of events was set in motion which modified most profoundly the further evolution of medical science. The influence of