Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/65

 GREECE AND SCIENCE AND MEDICINE 59

is also love for maiu'' Hippocrates is the good physician, at the very ethical antipodes from the quack or mere dmg-prescriber. His is the large, sympathetic, wise, tactful, kindly outlook not so much towards disease as the diseased man; he is the exponent of the highest Greek culture in the realm of applied medicine. Although the schools of Cos and of Cnidos continued for a long time to exert their influence, with Hippocrates and Pericles passed away the brightest hour of Greece's glory at least in matters medical. The succeeding century was compara- tively sterile as regards contributions to practical medicine.

For although Plato wrote on certain matters belonging, as we should now think, to medical science, his influence built up the school of the Dogmatists whose chief tenet was that reflection should come before experience. In fact, philosophizing about disease rather than the ob- serving of patients became the vogue in some quarters, so that much post-Hippocratic medicine is clinically barren. It may be doubted whether Plato understood more perfectly than Hippocrates any bodily function, save perhaps the respiration. Plato's doctrine of the soul as a separate existence, residing in the "marrow'' (presumably the central nervous system, not the bone-marrow), concerns us here only in so far as we see specified one of the earliest seats of the soul and that a neural one. Chrysippus of Cnidos (bom b.c. 340) regarded the soul as being in the blood, on which account he would not employ venesection, but did use tourniquets on bleeding limbs. Both Pythagoras and the Egyptians had taught that the soul was in the blood, a view consonant with that in the Old Testament, " for the blood is the life." According to Pro- fessor Ostwald, Plato is responsible for all the diflSculty in connection with the problem of the relationship of mind to matter. His words are :

Through the age-long effect of the blunder committed by Plato in making a fundamental distinction between mental life and physical life, we experience the utmost difficulty in habituating ourselves to the thought of the regular connection between the simplest physiological and the highest intellectual acts.

Praxagoras of Cos was the teacher of Herophilus, himself one of the best known teachers of that important school of medicine or university at Alexandria which was founded by Ptolemy Soter and continued to be a source of Hellenic illumination as late as the second century of our own era.

Praxagoras it was who, first distinguishing arteries from veins, taught that in health the arteries did not contain blood, but that, as blood always flowed from them in wounds, they must have taken it up from the flesh round about.

The other famous name of the Alexandrian Museum was Erasi&- tratus, whose teacher had been Metrodorus, the son-in-law of Aristotle. By the mention of that great name, probably the greatest of antiquity, we are introduced not only to the encyclopedist of Hellenic science, but to

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