Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/174



From the definition which he gives of the word "pulse" one is justified in drawing the conclusion that he considered the spirit to be an actual substance, capable of undergoing, to a greater or less degree, such changes as expansion and contraction. The same obscurity of meaning is encountered when one endeavors to discover how the new doctrine affected the practice of medicine. (Le Clerc.)

In view of all these circumstances it is not at all surprising that Pneumatism was not very popular with the physicians of Rome, and that, after a brief period had elapsed, many of the adherents of this doctrine abandoned it and gave their preference to the more practical teachings of the Methodists. Meyer-Steineg goes so far as to remark that, to all intents and purposes, such a thing as a sect of Pneumatists did not exist.

The most prominent of the disciples of Athenaeus were Theodorus, Agathinus, Herodotus, Magnus and Archigenes.

Haller speaks of Theodorus as the inventor of a remedy which, as he claimed, cures all cases of poisoning.

The Eclectics.—Agathinus, a native of Sparta, was the teacher of Herodotus and Archigenes. His chief distinction is to be found in the fact that he gave to the offshoot from the school of the Pneumatists the name of "Eclectics," his object being, as we are assured by Neuburger, to bring the three sects (Pneumatists, Empirics and Methodists) into closer union.

Herodotus—who, it is perhaps desirable to state, is a different person from the famous historical writer of the same name—lived during the latter part of the first century A. D., and was more closely allied to the Methodists than to the Pneumatists. It appears from the text of a fragment of one of his treatises that he wrote a description of the disease now called small-pox and directed attention to its contagious character.

Magnus, a native of Ephesus in Asia Minor, is reported