Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/617

Rh ago need be asked for than is offered by a comparison of the average length of human life as given by Herodotus and that currently accepted until quite recently—three generations to a century. In fact most life insurance associations have not yet learned that this average is above forty years. Anatomy had made great progress and the structure of the body was minutely known, but until the germ theory of disease and antisepsis were established, therapeutics was largely a matter of tradition and routine; of empiricism and individual skill. When one reads of the incessant wars that kept a portion of the male inhabitants constantly occupied in military enterprises, directly or indirectly, one is inclined to believe that the average of human life must have been shorter than it was held to be twenty or twenty-three centuries ago. There is no room to enter upon a discussion of the problem here; suffice it to say, the loss from disease was probably no greater, and the losses in the armies probably much less relatively than in modern times. For it is well known that the killed in battle are but a small portion of those whom war deprives of life. It is probable that never before or since has any country suffered such ravages as did Germany during what is called the thirty years war. That the sanitary condition of ancient Greece must for the most part have been fairly good is attested by the rapid recuperation of most of the city-states after a disastrous war. But then there were no large cities like those of modern times, in which the population increases much faster than the adoption and enforcement of sanitary measures.

It will hardly be considered surprising that disease in any form should early have stimulated men to reflection. This is true at least of those living under conditions where there was more or less freedom of action and where affairs had not yet settled down into the lethal routine that characterized the social life of most of the people of the ancient world anterior to the appearance of the Greeks. The succession of day and night; the changes of season that follow each other regularly, and the meteorological conditions that accompany them, would be taken as a matter of course. But the vicissitudes of the human system, whether gradual, rapid or sudden, when not the result of accident or attributed to the malevolence of evil spirits, naturally led to inquiry as to their causes. The next step was in quest of prophylactics and curatives. This sort of reasoning, of philosophy, was not obnoxious to the charge that Socrates brought against the philosophy of his day, namely, that it was concerned wholly with things that were of no benefit to any one and with problems to which no answer could be found.

It will scarcely be denied by those best qualified to judge that of the three learned professions that of medicine is still the best fitted to stimulate thought and investigation. It is less hemmed in by