Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/181

 *not properly be classified among the sects. In fact, it would be more correct to say that Erasistratus and Herophilus contributed facts of permanent value to our stock of knowledge rather than doctrines which might prove highly popular for a few scores of years, but which would probably in due course of time be set aside as no longer of value.

The four most characteristic types of sects in medicine were the following: the Dogmatists—or Rationalists, as Daremberg calls them in one place; their great rivals, the Empirics; the Methodists; and the Eclectics. The oldest sect, the Dogmatists, did not come into prominence until after the medical schools at Alexandria had already been in operation for a long time. The development of the rival sect of the Empirics at this late period brought with it endless discussions regarding the merits of their respective teachings, and thus both of them gained a degree of prominence which seems to us moderns to have been out of all proportion to the importance of the subject-matters discussed. The Dogmatists, says one writer, insisted that it is just as necessary to be acquainted with the "hidden causes" of disease as with those which are plainly recognizable, and that it is only by aid of the reasoning power that we gain some knowledge of this class of causes. They claimed that, while a knowledge of anatomy is of very great service to the surgeon, it usually renders this service through the aid of the reasoning power; as when, in the performance of a lithotomy, the operator selects the fleshy (i.e., vascular) neck of the bladder as the spot in which to make the opening with the knife, in preference to the base of the organ, which is chiefly membranous in structure and therefore less likely to heal solidly.

The plausible but rather shallow response made by the Empirics to the arguments advanced by their rivals consisted in quoting certain maxims, as, for example: "The farmer and the helmsman do not acquire knowledge of their respective occupations from discussions, but from actual practice"; "It is not of vital importance to know what are the causes of the different diseases, but what