Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/145

 as something quite superfluous and unprofitable. They gave no further thought to the causes of disease, and were quite satisfied simply to observe its manifestations, to investigate the factors which appeared to bring it into a state of activity, and to search for the means of effecting a cure. In carrying on work of this character, they of course derived help, not only from their own experience, but also from that of others—which latter became in time a matter of history. When they encountered new experiences and were unable to supply a satisfactory explanation they resorted to a third method—that of reasoning by analogy. Upon this triple support—one's own individual experience, the experience of others stored up in the form of history, and reasoning by analogy—rested the entire structure of empiricism.

Strange as it may at first appear, the science of medicine from this time onward made no further conspicuous progress until the middle of the seventeenth century of the present era. In certain branches of practical medicine—as, for example, pharmacology, obstetrics and general surgery, and also in certain special departments—the Empirics made a number of material additions to our knowledge; but in all essential particulars the medical science taught throughout this period of about two thousand years varied but little from that taught at Alexandria one hundred or two hundred years before the birth of Christ. This extraordinary phenomenon of almost complete arrest of development for so long a period of time should not excite surprise, for something of a similar nature has certainly occurred in other departments of human knowledge.

The further history of the medical sects which flourished under the Ptolemies and for a short time afterward, when Alexandria became a colony of the Roman Empire, need not detain us long. Daremberg furnishes a chronological chart of the physicians who played a more or less prominent part in the work of these sects, and from this it appears that they numbered thirty-four in all—ten followers of Herophilus, fourteen of Erasistratus, and ten Empirics.