Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/178

168 agree, however, in the assertion that medicine was of divine origin: evidently implying its descent through the priesthood. In the introduction to Charaka's work, medical knowledge is said to have indirectly descended from Brahma to Indra, while "Bhâradvâja learned it from Indra, and imparted it to six Rishis, of whom Agnivâsa was one." The association of medical practice with priestly functions is also implied in the statement of Hunter that "the national astronomy and the national medicine of India alike derived their first impulses from the exigencies of the national worship." The same connection was shown during the ascendancy of Buddhism. "The science was studied in the chief centers of Buddhist civilization, such as the great monastic university of Nalanda, near Gayá."

Similar was the genesis of the medical profession among the Greeks. "The science [of medicine] was of divine origin, and the doctors continued, in a certain sense, to he accounted the descendants of Asklepios." As we read in Grote—

"The many families or gentes called Asklêpiads, who devoted themselves to the study and practice of medicine, and who principally dwelt near the temples of Asklêpius, whither sick and suffering men came to obtain relief all recognized the god [Asklêpius] not merely as the object of their common worship, hut also as their actual progenitor."

In later times we see the profession becoming secularized.

"The union between the priesthood and the profession was gradually becoming less and less close; and, as the latter thus separated itself, divisions or departments arose in it, both as regards subjects, such as pharmacy, surgery, etc., and also as respects the position of its cultivators."

Miscellaneous evidence shows that during early Roman times, when there existed no medical class, diseases were held to be supernaturally inflicted, and the methods of treating them were methods of propitiation. Certain maladies ascribed to certain deities prompted endeavor to pacify those deities; and hence there were sacrifices to Febris, Mephitis, Ossipaga, and Carna. An island in the Tiber, which already had a local healing god, became also the seat of the Æsculapius cult: that god having been appealed to on the occasion of an epidemic. Evidently, therefore, medical treatment at Rome, as elsewhere, was at first associated with priestly functions. Throughout subsequent stages the normal course of evolution is deranged by influences from other societies. Conquered peoples, characterized by actual or supposed medical skill, furnished the medical practitioners. For a long time these were dependents of patrician houses. Say Guhl and Koner—"Physicians and surgeons were mostly slaves or freedmen." And the medical profession, when it began to develop, was of foreign origin. Mommsen writes:—