Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/128



THE STATE OF GREEK MEDICINE AFTER THE EVENTS OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR; THE FOUNDING OF ALEXANDRIA IN EGYPT, AT THE MOUTH OF THE NILE; AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF DIFFERENT SECTS IN MEDICINE

Up to the time when war broke out between Sparta and Athens (431 B. C.), the latter city had for many years easily held the supremacy, not merely in everything relating to the science and art of medicine, but also in all other branches of learning and especially in the arts of sculpture, painting and architecture. At the time named above came the beginning of her downfall. For a period of about twenty-one years she struggled against disasters of all sorts.

The Plague at Athens, the first Recorded in History.—Shortly after the war began—a war engendered by the bitter jealousy of Sparta over the ever increasing ascendancy of her rival—the latter city was visited by a devastating plague, the first European pestilence that has been recorded in history. Thucydides, who wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War, gives a most lucid description of this plague of Athens, from which I shall copy certain portions.

It first began, it is said, in the parts of Ethiopia above Egypt, and thence descended into Egypt and Libya and into most of the King's country. Suddenly falling upon Athens, it first attacked the population in Piraeus,—which was the occasion of their saying that the Peloponnesians had poisoned the reservoirs, there being as yet no wells there,—and afterward appeared in the upper city, when the deaths became much more frequent. All speculation