Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/170



THE FURTHER HISTORY OF METHODISM AT ROME, AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF TWO NEW SECTS, VIZ., THE PNEUMATISTS AND THE ECLECTICS.—A GENERAL SURVEY OF THE SUBJECT OF SECTS IN MEDICINE

Among the Methodists there were many physicians who attained more or less distinction during their professional career, but only two of them, beside those whose contributions to medical knowledge have already been mentioned in these pages, gained sufficient celebrity to justify me in devoting some additional space to the description of the work which they accomplished. Soranus, of Ephesus on the coast of Asia Minor, and Caelius Aurelianus, of Sicca in the north of Africa, are the physicians to whom I have reference.

It was Soranus, says Le Clerc, who gave the finishing touches to the system of the Methodists, and the work which he did was of such excellence that he may with justice be called the ablest and most skilful of all the members of that school. Caelius calls him "a chief among the leaders of our sect." He received his medical training at Alexandria and came to Rome about the year 100 A. D. His professional career covered the period corresponding to the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian (98-138 A. D.). He is known to posterity chiefly through his two treatises—one on obstetrics and gynaecology and the other on acute and chronic diseases. The first of these treatises, in the original Greek, was rediscovered in 1838 by Reinhold Dietz, Professor of Medicine in the University of Königs