Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 13.djvu/295

* MEDICINE. 267 MEDICINE. of Hil>pocTatos only the superstitious resorted to it. iiesi<les the temple inedieine there were gymnasia, older even than -Esculapius, each of whiih had its (ji/mnasiinch or director: a gym- nast, under him, who directed the treatment of the sick; and iairuliples, who anointed, gave massage, bled, and dressed wounds anil ulcers. The period prior to the dispersion of the fol- lowers of Pythagoras (q.v.) (C.500 li.c.) is some- times called the xdcred period of medicine. It «as followed by the philosoijhical period, inseparably linked with the name of Hippocrates (q.v.) (B.C. 4(iO-e.3.57), the first great apostle of rational medicine. He classified diseases into epidemic, endemic, and sporadic ; he wrote extensively on surgery (though ignorant of dissection), on ob- stetrics, hygiene, regimen, and on climatic influ- ences; and his works display an immense range of knowledge and high powers of description. From the time of Hippocrates, for several cen- , turies. we fin<l medical beliefs crystallizing about ' several schools or systems. The Dogmatic or ' rationalistic school of Hippocrates, founded by I his sons, Thessalus and Draco, and his son-in- I law, Polj'bius, based its principles of practice ' vations, and regarded maladies as units from ' their beginning to their termination ; that is, they recognized diseases as distinct entities. The Em- pirics, on the other hand, taught that remedies could only be suggested by experience. Their school was founded, according to Cclsus, by Sera- pion. a pupil of Hierophilus, mentioned later in this article. The lleilwdists occupied a position somewhere between the Empirics and Dogmatists, and the Kclectics chose, or pretended to choose, from each system what suited them, and adhered to none. The philcsophic period ended and the anatomic period began with the foundation of the Alex- andrian Library, after the death of Alexander the Great, by Ptoleun', one of his lieutenants. This was in B.C. 320, and the centre of medical thought and teaching was now shifted to Alex- andria. Here the Ptolemies gathered about them j the learned men of the day. Although Egi'ptian ! prejuilice was strong against it. Ptolemy encour- i aged dissection of the human bod.v. Among the j famous teachers of Alexandria were Hierophilus I and Erasistratus (q.v.). The former is supposed I to have been the first to dissect a human body, and between them they made many notable dis- I coveries concerning the structure of the brain,
 * on theories derived from known facts and obser-
 * eye, heart, and intestinal canal. Erasistratus
 * died about B.C. 2S0. During this period medical

I thought was practically divided into two schools, I the Dogmatist and the Empiric, j The first native Roman writer on medicine was ' Celsus (q.v.). bnrn at about the time of Christ. His work. Di' Mrdicina, gives a sketch of the his- tory of medicine up to his time, and the state in which it then existed. He followed the teachings of Hippocrates and exercised a dominant inlluence until (ialen (q.v.) (130-C.-201) totally supplanted him. (ialen wrote over a hundred works, some of them on anatomy. He described every bone in the human bodv. and the functions of the muscles; he recognized two kinds of nerves — those of sensation, which he thought came from the brain, and those of motion, which be believed to originate in the spinal marrow. He divided the body into the cranial, thoracic, and abdominal carities. whose proper envelopes he described. Vol. XIII.— 18. Galen strove to popularize the study of anatomy, with but little success, and with his death came the end of the anatomical period and the end for several centuries of medical progress. The first names of any renown that occur after the death of Galen arc those of Uribasius, Alex- ander of Tralles, -Etius. and Paulus yEgineta, who flourished between the fourth and seventh centuries. They were all zealous Galenists. With the death of Paulus the Greek .school may be said to have ended, for after bis time no works of any merit were written in this language. Arabian medicine was an offspring of the Greek, through the Xestorian monks, who settled in Persia and Arabia in the si.xth century, and establisjied many schools of learning. Fragments of the sect still remain in these countries. By the seventh centuiy Arabian physicians were in high repute. The earliest Arabic w riter on medi- cine was Ahrum, wlio was contempuraiy with Paulus, but the most celebrated pliysicians of this school were Rhazes, who lived in the ninth century and was the first to describe smallpo.x; Avieenna (q.v.), of the eleventh century, whose Canon Medicince embraced all that was then known of medicine and the collateral sciences; Albucasis, whose works on surgery were the standard for several centuries; Avenzoar; and Averroes. who lived in the twelfth century and was equally celebrated as a physician and a phi- losopher. The works of Hippocrates and Galen, which, together with those of Aristotle. Plato, and Euclid, were translated into Arabic in the ninth century, formed the basis of their medical knowl- edge; but the Arabian physicians did good ser- vice to medicine by introducing new articles from the East into the European materia medica, for example, rhuliarb. cassia, senna, and camphor, and in making known the first elements of phar- maceutical chemistry, such as distillation, and the methods of obtaining various metallic oxides and salts. During this period that part of Eu- rope not in the hands of the Saracens was sub- .jeeted to successive invasions of northern bar- barians, and medicine, as other arts, was at a standstill. There was a brief period of quiet during the reign of Charlema.sne, when medical practice seems to have again passed into ecclesiastical con- trol, and from the ninth until the thirteenth centui-y the .Jews (who acquired their learning from the Saracens) shared with the clergy the art of healin.a. I'pon the decline of the Saracenic universities of Spain, which may be dated from the death of Averroes. the best medical teaching was to be found in Italv. where the School of Salerno became celebrated. It was gradually eclipsed in its turn by the rising fame of other medical schools at Pologna. Vienna. Paris. Padua, and elsewhere. Contemporary with Jfondino lived Gil- bert, the first English medical writer of note; and the prior century gave birth to Linacre(q.v.), who studied at the Continental universities and subsequently founded the London College of Physicians. It was in the fifteenth century that the sect of chemical ph.vsicians arose, who maintained that all the phenomena of the living bodv may he explained by the same chemical laws as those which rule inorganic matter. The chemical school, with Paracelsus (q.v.) at their head, did nothing to advance medicine except to introduce into the materia medica several valu- able metallic preparations. During this period