Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/180

 phenomena in question constituted what is generally termed a school or sect. Some of these individuals were physicians—that is, men who undertook to cure or at least to relieve those who were ill; but probably the majority were simply philosophers, mere "lovers of wisdom," who by studying problems of this nature sought to satisfy their longing for a more perfect knowledge of the truth respecting the various phenomena of life.

A few years later, Heraclitus of Ephesus, who, like Pythagoras, was both a philosopher and a practicing physician, taught the doctrine that all things owe their origin to fire. One is not at all surprised to learn that he had relatively few followers, for history tells us that he was both a misanthrope and a slanderer of the medical profession, as shown by the following saying which is attributed to him: "Next to physicians the grammarians are the biggest fools in the world."

Hippocrates attached much importance to the value of experience and to the necessity of studying disease at the bedside; at the same time he upheld what is commonly known by the name of humoral pathology—a doctrine which refers all maladies to some abnormal change in the humors or fluid portions of the body. His writings also show that he made full use of the reasoning power. The followers of this great physician did not form a sect in the ordinary sense of the term; they were his adherents simply because he was an able diagnostician, a successful teacher, an excellent therapeutist, a skilful surgeon, a man of very high moral character,—in short, a great physician. Every sect which developed in the centuries following his death contained a goodly proportion of Hippocratists.

Nearly two centuries after the active period of the professional life of Hippocrates, Erasistratus and Herophilus gathered about themselves in Alexandria (about 280 B. C.) large groups of followers, who held for their respective teachers a degree of esteem which amounted, according to Galen, almost to veneration. As there was little or no antagonism or lack of harmony between the doctrines taught by these physicians, the two groups can