Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/162

 to the rank of a noble (about the year 10 A. D.), erected a statue in his honor in the temple of Aesculapius, and at the same time issued a decree that from that time forward the physicians who practiced in Rome should be exempted from taxation and from certain other civic burdens. These privileges, which were afterward confirmed by Vespasian (70-79 A. D.) and also by Antoninus Pius (138-161 A. D.), were of great advantage to the medical profession as a whole. Julius Caesar (100-44 B. C.), it will be remembered, had already (about half a century earlier) bestowed Roman Citizenship upon the physicians who practiced their profession in that city. Thus, at the time of which we are now speaking, the medical men of Rome occupied the enviable position of being on an equality with their fellow citizens of the better class, a position which made it attractive for young men of ability and of good social standing to enter the profession.

Among the numerous followers of Asclepiades the most distinguished was undoubtedly Themison of Laodicea, a city of Phrygia, Asia Minor, who flourished about the middle of the first century B. C. When he was well advanced in years he wrote a medical treatise in which he developed a system of pathology and therapeutics that was accepted as the professional creed of the sect known as "Methodists." Starting from the doctrine of pores and primitive atoms taught by Asclepiades, he laid great stress upon the idea that in disease all the alterations which take place in the tissues may be classed in one or the other of these two categories—a relaxation (laxum) or a contraction (strictum) of the parts. To these two categories, which the Methodists termed "communities," and which were the only ones at first accepted as a part of their creed, a third was soon added, viz., that condition in which both relaxed and contracted states appear side by side, although not necessarily both of them developed to the same degree;