Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/130



calamity, and heavily did it weigh on the Athenians; death raging within the city and devastation without.

(Translation of Richard Crawley; Dent & Sons, London.)

Athens Ceases to be the Centre of Medical Learning.—It is safe to assume that one by one the more prominent of the physicians who had survived the events which have just been narrated, must have left Athens and taken up their abode in the various cities of Asia Minor and the neighboring islands, in Sicily, in Italy, etc. Hippocrates, who was thirty years old at the time when the plague broke out in Athens, appears not to have witnessed it. He practiced his profession and taught medicine in his native city; then he spent a certain number of years in traveling about as a peripatetic physician; and finally settled for the remainder of his life in Thessaly. But the length of each of these periods of his professional life is not mentioned by any of the authorities. About forty years after the death of Hippocrates, Alexander the Great had already nearly completed his series of brilliant conquests, and was taking steps to found a city, or rather, a university, in which medicine was to take an organized shape as one of the great departments of human learning.

It may be well at this point, however, to interrupt this narrative of the regular course of events for the purpose of considering very briefly how far the physicians of that period had advanced toward gaining a permanent and honorable position in their respective communities.

''The Degree of Esteem in which Physicians Were Held by Their Fellow Citizens and by the Governing Authorities During the Centuries Immediately Preceding the Christian Era.''—We have at our command very little direct evidence bearing upon the question of the esteem in which physicians were held three hundred years B. C. by the communities in which they practiced their profession. We know positively that the kings and princes of that period fully appreciated the value of the services which were rendered to them by the physicians (commonly Greeks) whom they employed. In the event of war they took with them men who were skilled both in surgery and in the treatment of