Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XI.djvu/359

 MEDICINE 347 depend upon constriction or relaxation, or upon a third and mixed condition, while all remedies were divided into astringents and re- laxants. Asclepiades, it is said, was the first to divide diseases into the two great classes of acute and chronic. "While the dogmatists made the fluids the prime seat of disease, and ascribed the origin of all maladies to some alteration in them, the methodists on the other hand thought the solids were first affected, and that the derangement of the humors was hut secondary; and the dispute about the humoral pathology and solidism, thus origi- nated, has continued under various forms to our own time. For 600 years, according to Pliny, Rome had no physicians; not that no attempt was there made to cure diseases, but that these attempts consisted mainly in super- stitious observances. Thus, according to Livy, following the advice of the Sibylline books, pestilence was repeatedly stayed at Rome by erecting a temple to Apollo or to ^Esculapius, by celebrating public games, or by the dictator driving a nail into the capitol ; and Cato the Censor trusted to simples with charms and incantations. "When intercourse with Greece became common, Grecian philosophy and sci- ence were transplanted to Rome. Asclepiades was the friend of Cicero, and Caesar when he was taken by the pirates was accompanied by his physician. On attaining supreme power, Caesar decreed that all physicians at Rome should enjoy the privileges of citizenship. After the names of Asclepiades and Themison, that of Soranus occurs prominently among those practising medicine at Rome ; there were probably three physicians of this name, but the most celebrated was a Greek edu- cated at Alexandria and settled at Rome ; his writings have perished, unless, as some have supposed, those of Caelius Aurelianus are a translation of them. Caelius is said to have been a native of Numidia, and probably flour- ished in the 2d century. Of numerous works of which he was the author, that on acute and chronic diseases is alone preserved. It is written in barbarous Latin, but in its descrip- tion of disease is a great advance on earlier au- thors. Cselius, like Soranus, belonged to the methodic sect, and is its principal exponent. Of the few Latin medical authors, Celsus is the chief. He appears to have lived in the 1st century, and to have written voluminous trea- tises on architecture, rhetoric, philosophy, &c., all of which have perished. His book De Medicina is a digest of what was known to the ancients on the subject, and shows the great progress which medicine had made in consequence of the labors of the anatomists of Alexandria. Celsus treats of most of the great operations of surgery, of the operations for stone and hernia, of wounds of the intes- tines, of cataract ; he gives directions for the use of the catheter, speaks of the trephine in injuries of the brain, and of the use of the ligature in divided or lacerated blood vessels, in varices, and in haemorrhoids. The name of Andromachus, a native of Crete and phy- sician to Nero, has come down to us as the inventor of certain polypharmaceutical com- pounds, one of which, the theriac, containing the dried flesh of vipers, with 60 other ingre- dients, was retained in the pharmacopoeias of the last century ; and he is likewise the first to whom was given the title of archiater. Probably contemporary with Caelius Aurelia- nus was Aretaeus of Cappadocia; we know nothing of him but his birthplace ; he has left a treatise on diseases remarkable for accurate and spirited description, and which is one of the most valuable of the medical works of an- tiquity. Galen (born in Pergamus, A. D. 130), after Hippocrates, has had a far wider share of renown than any other physician; for more than 12 centuries his authority reigned supreme in the schools; even facts were disputed if they were against the authority of Galen. He adopted the Hippocratic theory of the four elements, the four humors, and the four quali- ties, elaborating and refining upon them at great length and with great subtlety, and ma- king them the groundwork of his doctrines. Besides the solids and the fluids, he assumed a third principle, the spirits, as entering into our composition. These spirits were of three kinds : the natural spirits, derived from the venous blood ; the vital spirits, formed in the heart by the action of the air we breathe upon the natural spirits, and which are driven through the arteries ; and the animal spirits, formed in the brain from the vital spirits. He also supposed the human soul to be com- posed of three parts : a vegetative, residing in the liver; an irascible, in the heart; and a rational, having its seat in the brain. The most valuable of the works of Galen are those in which he treats of anatomy and physiology. He appears to have dissected animals only, and he recommends students to visit Alexan- dria, where they could study from the human skeleton. Considering the narrowness of his resources, his descriptions are wonderfully correct, and they comprehend all that was known of anatomy until the time of Vesalins. Dioscorides, who lived probably in the early part of the 2d century, for many centuries shared the authority of Galen. He has left a work on the materia medica which comprises all that was known to the ancients upon the subject ; its arrangement is bad, and the de- scriptions of the articles so vague that many of them can no longer be recognized with cer- tainty ; yet imperfect as it may be, it was for 1,400 years a standard treatise. From the time of Galen medicine began to participate in the decline which had already overtaken art and literature. Dissections were no longer made ; the earlier Christians had as great a horror of profaning the dead body as the pagans, and medical writers, appearing at rare intervals, contented themselves mainly with abridging or copying the works of Galen. Oribasius in the