Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/226



we realize how impotent we all are in the presence of these forces of nature. Instead, we struggle to the utmost of our ability to obtain charge of the case; one depending for success on his powers of persuasion, a second on the strength of the arguments which he is able to bring forward, a third on his readiness to agree with everything that is said, and the fourth on his skill in contradicting the opinion of everybody else. And, as this quarrel goes on, the patient continues to lie there in a state of exhaustion. "For shame!" Nature seems to say, "you men are an ungrateful lot! You do not even permit the patient to die quietly; you simply kill him. And then, moreover, you accuse me of not furnishing sufficient means of effecting a cure. Illness is certainly a painful affair, but I have provided plenty of remedies. Poisons, I admit, are hidden in some of the plants, but the healing agents which may be extracted from them are much more numerous. Away, then, with your angry disputes and your self-glorifying chatter; for in these are not to be found the remedial agents which I have bestowed upon man, but rather in the powerful forces which reside in the seeds, fruits, plants and other objects which I have created in his interests."

Aëtius.—Aëtius was a native of Amida, in Mesopotamia, and he lived during the early part of the sixth century A. D., under the Emperor Justinian I. He studied medicine at Alexandria and then settled in Constantinople, where he was appointed to the double office of private physician to the emperor and commanding officer of his body-guard (Comes obsequii),—an arrangement which made it practicable for the emperor to have his physician near his person on all possible occasions. Almost nothing is known about the subsequent private life and professional career of Aëtius beyond the facts that he was a Christian and that he wrote a treatise on medicine in sixteen books, which together form a large volume. The work, says Le Clerc, is almost entirely a compilation from the treatises of earlier writers on medicine and surgery; the best parts of the book being those which relate to the pathology and treatment of internal diseases, to materia medica, and to ophthalmology. The Christianity of Aëtius, like that of Alexander of Tralles, and other physicians of a later period, appears to have permitted a belief in magical