Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/619

Rh seized him and lie became so weak that he could hardly walk. As soon as he could get back to his medicine-chest he looked at his bottles again, when, to his great joy and greater relief, he found that he had taken just what he intended. The man declared afterwards that he believed he would have died if he had not had the means of ascertaining the facts in the case.

Though the ancients knew little of the structure of the nerves, they were well aware of the influence of the imagination as a therapeutic agency. The walls of many of their temples were covered with tablets and votive offerings in testimony of gratitude to the god by whom the sick were healed. Faith-cures and christian science are therefore by no means a new thing under the sun, but something very old under new names. Though the ancients rarely, or not at all, dissected human bodies, they had a fairly definite knowledge of anatomy derived from the inspection of brutes. The bony structure could be readily studied with the aid of the skeletons that were plentiful enough in countries dotted with battlefields. The Persian invasion alone probably left tens of thousands of corpses strewn along the retreat of the great king. The aversion to the dissection of cadavers that was felt by many of the Greeks seems to have been connected with their reverence for the human form. It was regarded as a sacrilege to mutilate even a corpse. The treatment which the dead body of Leonidas received at the hands of Xerxes was due, as Herodotus expressly informs us, to the extraordinary exasperation he felt against the Spartan king for his fierce resistance to the Persian advance. Though Achilles had dragged the dead body of Hector many times around the walls of Troy, yet Apollo preserved it uninjured. This reverence for the 'human form divine,' like many other superstitions, interfered seriously with the progress of science. The favorite gods, Zeus and Apollo, were represented as physically perfect men. The effects of this sentiment are especially evident in the manner by which those condemned to death were executed. There seems to be no other explanation of the singular custom of administering the hemlock juice than the desire to leave the body after death as nearly as possible as it appeared in its living state. That the rule was departed from under special circumstances and in times of great excitement is no valid argument against the correctness of the explanation.

According to Homer and Herodotus, the healing art was discovered or invented in Egypt. The Odyssey tells us that there every man is a physician skilled beyond human kind. Mention is also made of the many plants possessing medicinal properties. Oculists are said to have been particularly numerous, and many prescriptions for diseases of the eye have been found among the papyri. Artificial and gold-filled teeth have also been met with both in Egypt and in Etrurian