Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/149

 a man of general cultivation and attractive personality, and not afraid to encounter the prejudices and ill will which almost always greet a foreigner when he first establishes himself in a strange country and among a people of a different race, he soon overcame those obstacles and was eventually successful in making Rome the starting-point and centre of the best medical thought and practice of that period of the world's history. To understand clearly, however, the character of the work which Asclepiades accomplished in the city which was soon to be the capital of the world as then known, it is desirable that a brief account should be given of the condition of medical affairs in Rome at the time of his arrival.

''The Practice of Medicine at Rome During the Century Immediately Preceding the Christian Era.''—Foreigners were not encouraged to settle in Rome until toward the latter part of the second century B. C., and consequently the treatment of the sick in that city maintained its distinctly Roman character for an unusually long time. In the households of the better classes the head of the family commonly prescribed for any illness which might befall its members. In not a few instances one of the slaves—who was known as a servus medicus, and who might perfectly well have been a regularly educated Greek physician—took charge of the patient in place of the master of the house. A book of domestic remedies was the usual source of information from which the latter derived his knowledge of therapeutics. Marcus Porcius Cato, the distinguished Roman censor (234-149 B. C.), was the author of one of the most popular of these books of recipes. The text of this work has come down to our time. There were, at this period, no regularly established physicians and no such thing as a medical practice. For several hundred years the Romans were almost constantly at war with the neighboring tribes or nations, and this life of outdoor exposure and active exercise kept them free from the numerous and very varied bodily ills of the later generations. This state of society alone was quite sufficient to prevent the thoroughly trained physicians of Greece and