Page:The Hunterian Oration,1838.djvu/15

Rh vorum arterias incidit,” says Haller. But Celsus and Galen, it must be admitted, are in relation to surgery little better than epitomists of Hippocrates, the father as well of surgery as of medicine.

The style of Celsus is yet a model of perspicuity and elegance; and Galen was not only the best physician and critic of his time, but the only distinguished physiologist of the Roman era. The originality and graphic power of his description of the special anatomy and physiology of the human hand are without a parallel.

Celsus, there is every reason to believe, never practised surgery, and Galen’s surgical practice was limited to an attendance on the gladiators wounded in the games of his native city of Pergamus, before he quitted it for Rome in his twenty-eighth year. Their stores were drawn from the Greeks,—that noble nation, to whose congenial soil science, arts, and literature were alike indigenous. Nor was imperial Rome, so long the mistress of the world, distinguished throughout all her splendid history by the possession of a single surgeon whose name is worthy of record. The profession of medicine indeed was in no esteem, and its cultivation was discouraged among the Romans. Cato the Censor held it in such contempt as to in-