Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 79.djvu/225

Rh 3. Medieval medicine; about 500 to 1825. Monastic medicine; 500 to 1200. Scholastic medicine; 1200 to 1600. Systematic medicine; 1600-1825.

4. Modern medicine; since about 1825.

Greek Medicine.—The early medicine of the Greeks, as of other peoples, had mythologic and theologic characteristics. The god of medicine among them was Asclepios, or (Latinized) Æsculapius, who perhaps was a real physician flourishing prior to 1000 B.C. The temples devoted to his cult, called Asclepieia, were located in salubrious situations, or at mineral springs; invalids resorted to these institutions in large numbers, and were ministered to by the physician-priests. Famous Asclepieia were situated at Cnidos, Cos, Epidaurus, Pergamus, Tricca, Mycenæ and Sicyon. Gradually there developed in connection with these institutions associations or guilds of physicians called Asclepiadas, who devoted their entire time to medical practise and instruction and had no priestly functions. The separation and differentiation of the functions of the physicians from the priesthood marked an important step in the evolution of medicine, as it left medicine and the medical profession free to develop along independent lines, entirely dissociated from priestcraft. These associations of Asclepiadæ formed schools for medical instruction and were centers of medical thought and influence. Such schools or guilds were located in Cnidos (Asia Minor), Cos (one of the Ægaean Islands), Rhodes, Cyrene (north Africa), and Crotona (Italy). The two most noted were those of Cnidos and Cos. Literary remains from the school of Cnidos have probably survived in the Hippocratic writings; while the school of Cos, which was flourishing prior to 500 B.C., produced the illustrious Hippocrates.

Hippocrates lived from about 460 to 377 B.C., a period when Greek culture and civilization were at their zenith. Originally trained in the temple and school of Cos, he traveled extensively and resided and practised in various places. His fame is derived from his writings. Of the works attributed to him, about sixty in number, only some ten to seventeen are regarded by the critics as being indisputably his production, the rest having been written by others before and afterward.

The Hippocratic writings constitute a systematic and comprehensive presentation of medical and surgical observations, doctrines and practise. Especial attention was given to prognosis, dietetics and meteorological conditions as causes 'of disease; and the beginning was presented of the humoral pathology, which for ages dominated medicine. All this mass of knowledge and doctrine could hardly have been discovered or elaborated by Hippocrates himself, but was probably mainly the accumulated knowledge of his predecessors first placed in literary form by him, and illuminated by his own keen observation, criticism and individuality.