Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/135



all the virtues. According to the teaching of his school virtue should be practiced because it leads to happiness; whereas the Stoics taught that virtue should be cultivated for her own sake, irrespective of the happiness it will ensure. Zeno (circa 370-260 B. C.), the founder of the Stoic philosophy, taught an ethical system according to which virtue consists in absolute judgment, absolute mastery of desire, absolute control of the soul over pain, and absolute justice. The keynote of the system is duty, as that of Epicureanism is pleasure. (Sir William Smith.)

In addition to the sects named above, there was still another known as the Older Dogmatic School, which was composed of men who had been the direct followers of the great master, but who, forgetting altogether the practical teachings of Hippocrates with regard to the importance of experience, gave themselves up to all sorts of hypotheses and theories. Among the names of the earliest followers of this school one is astonished to find those of Thessalus and Draco, the sons of Hippocrates, as well as the name of Polybus, the latter's son-in-law. Diocles of Carystos and Praxagoras of Cos, two of the most distinguished men of that period, were also among the earliest members of this dogmatic school. Diocles, who was one of the Asclepiadae, owed his celebrity in part to his contributions to our knowledge of anatomy and in part to the work which he had done in other departments of medicine. Unfortunately, all of these writings have been lost with the exception of a few fragments which came to light toward the middle of the nineteenth century. Praxagoras was also one of the Asclepiadae. He was distinguished, as has already been stated on an earlier page, by the fact that he—and not Aristotle, as is sometimes stated—was first to recognize the difference between arteries and veins, and also by the further fact that he called attention to the practical value of the pulse as an indication, in certain diseases, of the tone of the patient's bodily condition or vitality.